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Use Target Audience Research To Market Like A Thought Leader

To attract high-paying clients, market like a thought leader. If you are an agency owner, solopreneur, consultant or business coach, you should be offering valuable content that is based on original research, not rehash.

“You can’t lead by repackaging the same old information that everyone else has,” says Susan Baier of Audience Audit in a recent phone interview. “That’s thought regurgitation—not thought leadership. And it won’t get you noticed or set you apart from your competitors.”

Baier has more than 30 years of experience in audience-based marketing strategy, including in product and brand management, market research, and strategic planning, both agency-side and client-side. She earned an MBA in entrepreneurship and marketing and has served in senior positions at Fortune 500 companies in addition to marketing agencies.

“You don’t have to wait until you can pull off a major new research study to start building your thought leadership with research,” says Baier. “Even small, simple approaches can be a great start.”

Start with the data you already have.

“If you collect information from your customers, you can probably build thought leadership content from data you already have,” says Baier. “Many of our agency clients working on thought leadership research worry that they don’t have a strong niche. Many do—they’re just not thinking about niche the way I think they should.”

You can build a dependable pipeline of potential new clients with thought leadership research, a strategy I typically call proprietary client research, which I learned from the writings of David Maister.

“Clients today are bombarded with articles, speeches, and seminars that contain generalities and do not distinguish the author or presenter from any of his or her competent competitors,” wrote former Harvard Business School professor Maister, now a retired consultant.

In his classic 1997 book Managing the Professional Service Firm Maister explained how to prove that you have something to offer that your competitors do not.

By conducting proprietary research, you obtain specific information that prospective clients can’t find elsewhere. Typically, this is about how they compare to their peers. Next, take that info about the peers and turn it into instructive content.

The foundation of selling as a thought leader is to give away cornerstone content through talking and typing, which demonstrates to the specific client niche you target that you have the expertise to help them.

Baier collaborated with her agency partner, Predictive ROI, to uncover how business professionals think about thought leaders, and what they’re looking for when they research, follow, and engage with experts.

The study, The ROI of Thought Leadership, revealed that prospects overwhelmingly want three types of ideas from thought leaders. These are ideas that change how they approach their work, ideas they haven’t heard before, and ideas from someone who seems genuine.

There are many ways to gather information that I have used, including focus groups, depth interviews, and surveys. Baier advocates surveying prospects around their attitudes on a variety of appropriate topics.

“Custom attitudinal segmentation research is uniquely capable of providing an attention-getting, credibility-enhancing platform for your thought leadership—and revealing you as someone that genuinely cares and invests in understanding your ideal clients,” concluded Baier.

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