MAY 23, 2024
Thought leadership does much more than merely creating a favorable impression of your brand. Carefully crafted thought leadership content encourages business leaders to rethink their challenges, acts as a powerful marketing tool that makes people more willing to seek you out, and can even help a business retain existing customers.
In a survey of 4,000 global business leaders, iResearch found that 94% think thought leadership either leads or helps inform their decision-making. That’s a significant finding, especially in these times of economic uncertainty and longer deal times when 90% of global buyers say their purchase process was stalled last year.
Here’s what business decision-makers say after engaging with thought leadership, according to the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report:
75% researched a product or service they were not previously considering.
70% thought more positively about organizations that consistently produced high-quality thought leadership.
3 Ways Thought Leadership is Effective
Evanta can be a key partner in helping your organization offer the kind of high-quality thought leadership that resonates with business leaders – here’s why that’s effective.
1. Thought leadership can stimulate demand for your products and services.
Thought leadership that spurs business leaders to rethink their challenges is a powerful tool for stimulating demand for your business’s products and services, according to the Edelman-LinkedIn Report.
54% of C-level executives and 52% of decision-makers spend an hour or more reading thought leadership content each week. Thought leadership content not only puts your organization in front of key influencers, it also increases brand awareness, establishes credibility, and creates demand—even for a solution to a problem executives didn't realize they had.
Evanta helps sponsors stimulate demand by providing timely, relevant content to executives at our events. The results of our proprietary Leadership Perspective Survey of thousands of C-level members enables you to align your thought leadership with executives’ critical priorities and initiatives. Our research also ensures that sponsors interact with executives in the most effective ways – for instance, 70% of our members indicate that it is valuable or very valuable to offer a case study-style presentation.
2. Effective thought leadership can strongly influence the likelihood of engaging with you.
The Edelman study says thought leadership can be a more powerful marketing tool than traditional methods and make people more willing to seek you out — and even pay extra for your expertise.
Nine out of 10 decision-makers and C-suite executives are moderately or very likely to be more receptive to marketing or sales outreach from a company consistently producing high-quality thought leadership.
Evanta sponsorship means an opportunity to provide that thought leadership – while you establish relationships at the highest levels of your target organizations. In addition, listening to the perspectives of Evanta’s influential group of C-level executives helps you validate your thinking and position your solution for better sales and marketing outcomes.
3. Thought leadership can protect your existing customers.
“Offense is your best defense,” according to the Edelman report. If you’re not helping your customers consider their challenges in new ways, it says, someone else will. Thought leadership is a strong tool that can help you protect your company against competitors who are pursuing your customers.
Competitors are already using this insight to lure away customers, according to the study. A full 70% of C-suite respondents say they had questioned whether to continue working with an existing supplier after reading a piece of thought leadership. 54% say it made them realize other suppliers might have a better understanding of their organization’s challenges. 51% say the piece of thought leadership made them see there were other suppliers that were smarter or more visionary.
One of our key differentiators in what we offer is our team’s expertise in curating thought leadership content for C-level executives. The Evanta team advises clients based on our understanding of C-level priorities and challenges, real-world examples, best practices and feedback from thousands of executives.
What Evanta offers to sponsors that you won’t find elsewhere:
- The ability to connect in person with the hardest-to-reach C-level executives, who are highly invested in the Evanta community and our ‘by, for’ model.
- Small gatherings that let you establish and strengthen relationships with prospects and customers and have a seat at the table for high-value conversations.
- Multiple opportunities to meet customers and prospects face-to-face each year in environments where executives are actively seeking new ideas and peer-validated solutions.
Evanta, a Gartner company, has more than 14,000 C-level executives participating from 7,400 organizations in 107 unique communities around the world. There are 420 C-level events each year that offer you the ability to provide valuable thought leadership on behalf of your organization.
Contact us to learn more about how our approach can help your thought leadership engagement succeed.
