In the new customer experience, prospective customers progress as much as 60 percent of the way through the buying process before engaging with someone from your company. This new self-propelled customer reality has become the norm — not the exception — and is inspiring companies of all sizes to rethink how they communicate and engage prospects through all stages of the buying journey.

To meet the needs of the self-educated consumer, companies must develop and socially share volumes of high-quality thought leadership content that is strategically designed to educate and build relationships — a stark contrast from the product-hocking content marketers have traditionally produced. Of course, thought leadership content should ultimately lead a prospective customer to engage your services or purchase your products, but the goal of the content should be aimed at educating and expanding your readers’ thinking on the subject matter and to elevate your business as a leader in the industry.

Strategically designed thought leadership that consistently pulls your corporate message forward is a powerful tool for transforming your customer experience and developing a strong social media following that creates a pool of advocates for your brand.

These three tips can help you develop high-performing thought leadership content:

  1. Develop highly targeted content. When it comes to thought leadership content, quality and quantity are of equal value. With more than 92,000 articles posted to the Web every day, you must produce a significant amount of content to elevate your voice above the masses. This content must be responsive to the needs of your specific audience while indirectly meeting your own business objectives.
  2. Bring value to the social conversation. Thought leadership content brings a differentiated perspective to your customers’ pain points and challenges and must generate meaningful and quick results for customers. Content that brings value and a new perspective to your customers is the content they will engage with and share socially, growing your reach.
  3. Stay the course. Unlike other marketing initiatives such as brochure and marketing collateral, thought leadership is not a “one and done” initiative. To be effective, thought leadership requires consistency on all fronts: content development, topic selection, publishing and social sharing. It requires commitment and staying power.

Developing thought leadership is a strategic and intentional process — a process that includes clearly defined thought leadership positions, persona profiles that define your customers’ challenges and pain points, as well as macro storylines that your strategically sequenced content must ladder up to. To be truly effective, a thought leadership strategy must be documented to ensure it is implemented as planned, and that it is measurable, scalable and repeatable.