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Why Marketing Thought Leadership Is Failing

Date published: July 30, 2013
Last updated: July 30, 2013

Conversations about modern marketing tend to travel in a continuous loop. Differing camps of thought, ranging from old-school marketing tactics to newer inbound content marketing concepts, are constantly at odds with each other. These conflicts contribute to the revolving discussion but aren’t the cause.

When it comes to the marketing discussion, the majority of speakers confuse concepts with mechanics, and inadvertently ignore the question being screamed from the listening crowd: How do you attract and keep customers?

The problem with marketing thought leadership is that there’s very little new thought circulating. And although inbound marketing tactics are becoming the center of digital marketing, the industry’s leaders run the risk of preaching to the choir—and not attracting new converts.

Conference fatigue

Each time I walk into a conference workshop, or breakout, I look around the room and consider everyone’s motivation for attending. During the presentation, I am rarely surprised to hear the same concepts turned into a new way, both sounding original and innovative. “Make your message personal,” “be yourself,” “be a service,” “serve your audience,” “make engagements count,” make your content viral,” it goes on and on. Create something fantastic? Unique? Viral? Thanks. I’d never thought of that.

During the Q&A portion, the questions follow a theme rarely represented within the presentation, each word in a new way in order to keep the speaker from making the connection that they didn’t get their point across. Each time, I wish the speaker would start with a series of real questions for the audience. “How many of you believe that content marketing works?” or “How many of you believe that personal engagement leads to conversion?”

In my experience, most of the attendees believe both. But if that’s the case, my question to the room is, “If you believe everything the speakers are about to tell you, what the hell are you doing here?”

A (genuinely) new look at the content

Content is NOT just the blog post. It is NOT just the ebook. It is NOT just the social share. It’s all of these and none of these. Content is dependent on your audience analysis, buying behaviors, personas, mosaic data, and other marketing reports. It’s grouped, tailored, and individualized. Content is the medium used to lead your customer to engagement, and eventually, conversion. It is never one thing; there is no silver bullet.

Unfortunately, “content” is often grouped solely within the blog post category and, as such, the mountains of posts talking about the same concepts trumps anything you might see at a conference. How many posts are there about blog titles? How many are about the message within the body of the post? How many tell you how to make your content viral? Does this sound like the conferences? Yes. It is the same, and with each post that comes out, the marketer is left enlightened by the concept, but frustrated by the mechanics. Therein lies the rub—and my point.

With both conferences and content, marketers are patient with the recurring loop because they hope it will not conclude with more elaborate ideas that are, in the end, concepts heard years before. They are hoping to hear how to scale those ideas. How do you become personal with 30 million fans? How do you personally engage with 200,000 Twitter followers? How do you write content repeatedly and serve the audience? How? How? How?

As marketers, we need to start answering that question.

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