How to Drive Revenue Using Thought Leadership Content
Marketing experts are learning that in a highly competitive digital marketing space where most companies are starving for consistent growth, expertise within a niche drives revenue. Thought leaders can turn a post on social media into a change in consumer behavior that benefits the brand. In this way, they offer the unique guidance that corporations lack when trying to persuade their listeners to become customers.
The knowledgeable perspective now drives revenue based on its following, industry expertise, and the monetizable strategies that thought leaders put into action. Using this knowledge to create interactive assessments puts a business ahead of the pack by going beyond conventional marketing materials like studies and whitepapers. These may be informative, but they lack actionable answers to the question of how to use the information to drive revenue. Interactive assessments provide these answers.
In this article, we break down:
What it means to be a thought leader
How to use thought leadership to promote a brand
How to drive revenue using interactive assessments
What is a Thought Leader?
Thought leaders possess the unique perspective or expertise to influence people within an industry or niche. Their recommendations are taken by their listeners as guidance. They can motivate and “influence” their followers to take certain actions. This means that they represent a golden opportunity for companies that want to customize their marketing campaigns to drive revenue.
To become a thought leader, people build their reputations on a subject and their experience within it. They have a certain personality that makes them leaders, which includes passion and relatability. Some give seminars on subjects while others vlog about their preferences. No matter how they communicate with their following, the most important thing about thought leaders is that they have one. Their thoughts and actions influence how their followers react to the industry they work in and how a brand can use them to its advantage.
What this means for businesses is that thought leaders represent a new strategy to turn impressions into conversions. Consider the difference between an ad on Twitter for a brand and a thought influencer recommending the brand based on their expertise. In a decade driven by value and the unique user experience, the expertise of an influencer is key to convincing listeners to act on your marketing strategy.
One of the best ways to utilize thought leadership in a business setting is with interactive assessments. These assessments drive revenue by personalizing business content for the intended audience. Businesses that know how effective they are can use them in both their marketing and sales strategies to better inform their thought leaders’ campaigns. Here’s how.
What is an Interactive Assessment?
Interactive assessments allow businesses to gather valuable insight into their audience’s preferences. This allows them to find the holes in their marketing strategies that can be improved with campaigns customized to their consumers’ needs. Compelling marketing materials rely on these assessments to generate leads and beat the competition.
Consider the case of The Pedowitz Group, whose marketing used interactive assessments to increase their sales by 62%. They allowed consumers to take an embedded assessment online and used the results as insights into their marketing effectiveness.
There are several ways to create interactive assessments using online tools. These include finding a specialized platform like 9Lenses that allows a business to create polls and questionnaires while tracking the analytics of the results. Using real-time assessments, businesses obtain valuable consumer information and rout the results to their website or other integrated marketing tools.
Many interactive assessments support different types of content, integrating videos, images, and GIFs into their questionnaire templates. They provide highly specific output data concerning the effectiveness of a business’s leads, call-to-action-buttons, and more.
Assessments may also integrate with social media to gather more accurate results. Even with basic quizzes, the main intent of interactive assessments is to focus on user-driven test accuracy across many specific areas of interest for a business’s marketing and sales departments.
How Thought Leaders Use the Results
Once a business begins using interactive assessments to gather valuable data from their customers, they must know how to use it. The most effective way to drive revenue from thought leadership content is to personalize their campaigns with the results of these assessments. This accomplishes a few key goals that will help brands stay competitive in the modern market.
1. Increase Brand Engagement
The personalized feedback provided by interactive assessments builds trust between consumers and the brand. At the same time the questions are being answered by prospective customers, they are also indirectly informing these customers about the brand’s services. This tells prospects that your brand offers something they want. And it helps thought leaders customize their material.
2. Personalize Marketing Plans
Interactive content gathers the information that can personalize the marketing campaigns of your brand’s thought leaders. Once you know your audience’s needs, as well as the gaps in their knowledge, marketing campaigns can focus on filling these gaps and meeting these needs. This leads to more effective connections with customers and more conversions as a result.
3. Drive Sales with Better Lead Generation
With so many websites in competition for a consumer’s attention, a business’s lead generation strategy makes the crucial difference in how they perform. By informing users about your brand, interactive assessments can proactively influence their decision to convert. Interactive content drives revenue due to how much more consumers retain when a brand engages with them first. Their response? More engagement.
All this amounts to one keyword:feedback. A brand’s audience provides feedback that drives a business’s marketing strategy. It allows its thought leaders to target their audience more efficiently and drive revenue higher as a result. Remember the example of The Pedowitz Group as one business using these assessments to increase revenue by 62%, just by evaluating feedback through embedded interactive webpages. Or that of thought leader Pat Flynn and the way his website is informed by user analytics:
Source:smartpassiveincome.com
The Takeaway for Marketers
Interested in thought leadership? Interactive assessments arm a business’s thought leaders with the analytics that tell them what customers know, what they need to know, and what they want to hear. Customized marketing campaigns based on the results of prospective users’ engagement with these assessments generate more revenue than conventional marketing methods. Businesses should look no further than interactive assessments to optimize their thought leaders’ content and remain competitive in the modern digital marketplace.