So, we founded Hassard Fay in order to support that, in order to help consulting firms and, later, law firms and other companies, actually produce thought leadership. We help them in three different ways. Number one is with setting their thought leadership strategy, so how thought leadership can support their overall organizational goals, and also what kind of themes they need to tackle in order to do so.
Number two, we help design the thought leadership programs themselves, who’s going to run them, how are they going to govern them, how are they going to fund them, who’s going to write the content or develop the content, and what the editorial calendar might look like. We help run those programs if needed.
Finally, we actually develop much of the thought leadership ourselves. So, we can help them with the ideation, the research itself, but also the writing, editing, and designing of the pieces.
Interviewer: You’re not a fan of the term content marketing, I know. Why is that, and what is it that distinguishes the type of work that you do from content marketing?
Ian: I would absolutely not say that I’m not a fan of the term. We just don’t use it for ourselves. In fact, in all of our presentation decks for talking to prospective clients we always say that content marketing is certainly a very powerful and very prevalent mode of marketing nowadays. And, it definitely has a huge role to play, especially in business to consumer sectors.
But, in the business to business sector it has a lesser role to play. It’s not a zero role. It’s still there, and it’s still important, but a lesser.
We focus on thought leadership in part because we find it personally very appealing and very exciting to work with tackling the very large complicated issues that take a lot of research to figure out, and to help a company like a consulting firm or a law firm figure out what their point of view should be on that, and what is true, and how can they convince their clients that they’re right. We have never felt like building what we call, and what many people call, a newsroom is really up our alley. So, we partner with content marketing firms to help our clients, but we are not one ourselves.
Interviewer: What do you think long form content can do that shorter form can’t?
Ian: I think that shorter form content certainly plays a role in asserting things that are simple and powerful or conveying certain emotions. Obviously, 30-second advertising spots have done that incredibly well over the last 50 years or so.
But, when you need to help a large client, if a professional services firm is working with a big client and they need to solve a tough problem or to figure out an industry trend and what all the implications might be and so on, simply tackling that and expressing it requires long form. There’s simply no way to escape the fact that you have to get a lot of information across, certainly in a compelling way, hopefully with a good story line and so on. But, the length of it ends up being longer than a 30 second spot, or a one pager, or a blog post.
Interviewer: You mentioned story telling. I’d love to know how you integrate story telling into your thought leadership pieces.
Ian: We approach story, I think, a little bit differently from many firms that come at this same challenge from a more journalistic bent in the sense that we respect story. We certainly think that any given piece needs to have a narrative flow and some sort of problem-solution directionality to it.
But, it’s interesting, though. I was pondering today that many business clients, or business readers I should say, or professional readers, often expect different things out of their thought leadership than a consumer would. For a consumer a story can appeal to them very directly. Consumers, of course, enjoy movies. They enjoy reading novels and so on.
So do professionals. But, professionals in their day to day lives being very busy, having 5 or ten minutes to actually look at any given piece of thought leadership before deciding on whether it’s going to be useful, whether they’re going to pop it in the briefcase or move it out of their email and into a folder that they’re going to read later, that decision point, you need to be able to scan it very quickly and say, is it getting to the point really fast, do I see what the solution is, do I believe it and find it credible.
So, story for us is certainly one of the elements, but it’s not always the biggest. Sometimes, a certain terseness and straightforwardness is often more important in some ways than a kind of classic journalist or entertainment type story.
Interviewer: That’s interesting, because we have actually found with some of our B2B clients that some of our more successful pieces have been story driven. So, it’s finding the right balance and mix.
Because the one thing that we’ve really been working with is the concept that people buy from people. When you are trying to build those points of trust between you and another entity, sometimes it’s a great thing to remind somebody of the humanity and remind somebody of the points of connection between us as humans. I think both approaches have real value, and it’s just finding that mix of when what piece is what.
Ian: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. Because there are certain cases where, if you’re producing a piece of thought leadership for existing clients. For example, you may be a bit more [interpretive] of the fact that the piece may be more utilitarian, more straight to the point, more directly useful.
Whereas if you’re trying to influence prospective clients or people, perhaps, beyond your standard client category, so influencers out there, or the media for example, you may need to be much more story oriented in order to capture their attention and keep their attention all the way through the narrative. So, you’re putting less emphasis on being terse and to the point. You’re actually trying to seduce them a little bit.
Interviewer: Yeah, I like that, the seduction, the seduction of content.
Ian: That’s right.
Interviewer: As a provider of trans media thought leadership strategies and assets, and particularly with your background as a journalist, and particularly in the written word, how has visual storytelling, or how have visuals themselves, changed your approach to the written word in the content that you deliver?
Ian: That’s a very interesting question. By visuals, would you say that, are you driving at the kind of arrival of things like YouTube and their use by corporations? Or, are you talking about, in fact, the pervasiveness of TV and film as sort of narrative metaphors?
Interviewer: No, I was thinking more of business tools, so YouTube would be one. I know that your content strategies employ, or at least I understood that your content strategies employ, video and visuals. I was just wondering if they had influenced at all your strategic approach to the content you deliver.
Ian: Yeah. Certainly at the strategy level visuals, whether they’re interviews or documentaries, or as simple as motion graphics, infographics that change over time and you can see a trend line and so on, or see something evolving, those are definitely part of the strategy and part of any given program in a much larger way than they were even five years ago.
I feel that most of the time they’re still supplemental to perhaps the main or the initial piece. So, the initial piece may be still, for many firms, a white paper. A lot of research goes into it, and a lot of thinking and crafting of that narrative. But, then interviews, or webinars, or animations, or follow on documentary and so on can certainly complement and extend and, in fact, increase the audience for many of the insights in that original piece.
A firm may elect to try and draw readers, or viewers in this case, back to the main piece, back to the original piece of thought leadership. Or, simply to say, good, we’ve gotten our insights across to a much wider audience because we expressed them in this interesting interview, or in this ten-minute documentary, or something like that, and that’s sufficient. That we have a core aim of reaching existing clients and prospective clients with the piece itself, and then a secondary aim or follow on aim of reaching a much wider set of influencers with the video or the animation which is much easier to digest and to share over social media.
Interviewer: I think you’re bang on there. I’m sure you look around the space a lot. Who do you think is doing a really great job of delivering? What company, whether it’s B2B or B2C, has really integrated longer form thought leadership pieces extremely well into their content marketing delivery?
Ian: Certainly in the consulting firm space the one we always think of is McKinsey. They have been the benchmark for probably 20 years on how to do thought leadership systematically as a program and across many, many different kinds of formats whether it ranges from the “McKinsey Quarterly” itself through individual white papers, through videos, and interviews and events, too.
Come to think of it, IBM is also extremely good at that. One of the programs I often point to is their smarter planet program. They do something very interesting as well. The scale of their events can be huge. They have the smarter cities forum which brings together in a different city every year 500 of the top NGO leaders, municipal leaders, and business leaders that deal with urban affairs around the world. Of course, everything is facilitated by IBM partners and so on. But, thought leadership pieces spin out of that. Interviews spin out of that.
The event itself is essentially a piece of thought leadership. They integrate the smarter planet theme into their advertising as we all well know, into their direct business pitches, and into their recruiting. It’s really a very sophisticated program.
Interviewer: It is. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Very immersive. When you’re designing a program, how do you approach ROI? How do you measure ROI against your thought leadership pieces and against the strategy you’ve put forward?
Ian: Number one, we’re very cautious about talking about ROI. Let me say it’s a work in progress, I think, for every firm that deals with it. Because, of course, we’re dealing with, first of all, on the Internet side, a lot of complexity in terms of taking anonymous readers and somehow linking them to real people and real actions and so on.
There are various ways of doing that. Not all of them are terrific. Some of them are workable it seems. Clients and service providers are all at different points of the spectrum of using that effectively.
As in communications in general, PR firms, communications firms, and anyone who produces non-quantifiable output let’s say, the written word for example, has often used balanced score cards or a variety of metrics to be able to say, is this working. Is this at least moving things in the right direction? Whether it’s because the press mentions things, or leads are getting generated. And, at the end of those leads people are mentioning, hey, I read this white paper. Or, the paper’s getting downloaded. Obviously, that’s a pretty easy metric to follow.
But ROI itself, how you put all those things together to say, therefore it’s eight percent, can be a pretty challenging thing. The advantage I think we have in the way we think of the thought leadership strategy itself is that we come from the inside out in terms of strategy. We actually start with the corporate strategy, or I want to say the firm strategy…
Interviewer: Yeah…
Ian: …and see how thought leadership can support that. So, as we’re developing content themes and objectives in terms of what we need clients to believe about us or about our client, we have directly tied that already to major corporate goals.
So, in a sense the thought leadership program is self-specifying, at least logically. Delivering it is another challenge all together. Proving that it’s really happening that way is another challenge. But, at least we can see and the client can show to their bosses the thought leadership program is meant to be and designed to be directly supporting the overall corporate strategy.
Interviewer: Yeah. We operate very much the same way, the concept of tying it to very real business goals and then finding what you can within those goals that might be measurable and tying them back to your piece of content. But, it’s not easy. It is, as the saying goes, an art and a science, and it’s very much evolutionary.
Ian: Right.
Interviewer: I wanted to ask you about some of the mistakes you see in longer form content marketing pieces. You don’t have to name specific examples although you’re welcome to. What do you see the worst of practices in longer form thought pieces?
Ian: I think one of the worst practices is the tendency for the firms that are creating thought leadership to produce what they think is important, genuinely so. It’s a genuine attempt to say, hey clients, these are the ten most important things on your radar right now. But without realizing or without running them through the filter of are these genuinely important from the client’s point of view. And, have they been prioritized in such a way that moves the value of the piece away from being an utterly comprehensive and rigorous coverage of a certain issue, which is what many professional services firms prefer to do instinctively.
Because they’re trying to be right. So, they [can’t], being a less complicated, less rigorous, less comprehensive, but much more digestible, much more interesting, and much more provocative piece that causes a prospective client or an actual client to sit up and say, oh, I see what you’re saying. This is tremendously important. This one thing perhaps is tremendously important. I want to act on that and I’m going to call you to find out how.
But, many firms, when they produce thought leadership, have a tendency to cover the zone with what they think they should say. It just becomes noise to potential clients, and they just delete it out of email inboxes immediately.
Interviewer: It’s not just about generating content. It’s really about finding something that hasn’t been done before or done in the way that their end users needed. It’s really about inspiration. It’s very easy to put out content. It’s about putting out inspirational content or content that is extremely helpful, extremely useful, and very engaging, whatever that means to the end user.
Ian: Right. That’s a good summary.
Interviewer: Do you find that there’s an inherent understanding of the value of thought leadership within the verticals you target? Or, is a big part of your journey about educating people as to how thought leadership can help them?
Ian: I’ve been amazed over the last two years that I’ve had to educate no one. Perhaps this is because of the verticals, because we’ve focused on consulting firms and law firms and industry associations as well. All of whom, when we bring up the subject of thought leadership, say something along these lines, which is, “Yes, absolutely, we have to be thought leaders.” We knew that. That’s how we move the conversations away from price and offer our unique value. We know we have to do this. We’ve had a tough time doing it, so glad that you came by and you’re offering this service.
Now, the question of whether they will actually buy that service immediately, or they will defer it and other competing demands will come in and move the ball down the road, absolutely all that happens all the time. Because a [marketer’s] job is incredibly complex and there are a lot of fires to deal with…
Interviewer: …Yeah…
Ian: …and a lot of goals on the plate to focus on. The trick with thought leadership, of course, is that it’s often seen as being both strategic and also long term. Yes it is, and both of those attributes are true.
But, many clients forget that it can also be quite short term in terms of its impact. You can feed thought leadership directly to your sales team and give them something to go talk with their clients about when they haven’t spoken with them for three months. So, you can actually achieve sales boosts quite quickly with thought leadership. But, the perception out there, I would say that is something we do have to educate people on. It is the tactical value of thought leadership not just its strategic value.
Interviewer: And the internal value.
Ian: Right, absolutely. That, in fact, thought leadership can be used where it can be useful. Not just from a sales marketing perspective but, first of all, from a recruiting perspective in terms of letting candidates know that you’re different as a firm, and that you’ve got a different vision and a different way of dealing with clients.
Also, in terms of your own internal service or product development teams, and your strategy team, thought leadership can sometimes be used as a kind of strategic spotlight that shines a light ahead and forces you as a company to ask tough questions about where might we be going, what’s down this road versus what’s down that road, both for our clients and for ourselves. So, creating thought leadership can actually force a conversation within your firm about what the right way to go is and can also illuminate different opportunities that your product team hadn’t realized were there. Yes, it’s the 360 effect. It’s quite amazing.
Interviewer: It is. Particularly for firms that have been around a long time, sometimes there is a reluctance to do those deeper dives and challenge themselves. I think that’s what leads to real trouble. So, I think what you’re doing and the whole ideation of creating content that stimulates, well, obviously discourse, but almost dissent. Are we doing the right thing, measuring up to not what you’ve always done but what is the best way of moving forward.
If you can create content that is constantly challenging people internally to be asking that of themselves, I think you have a better shot at avoiding the road of complacency and real trouble down the line.
Ian: You’re absolutely right. In fact, we’ve often said that bringing other parties into that process can help a lot. So, you’re not simply using thought leadership as what do we think as a firm. You’re creating kinds of thought leadership, whether it’s panel discussions, or whether it’s a mini magazine with multiple experts bringing their opinions in, or a roundtable that you’ve captured somehow. You’re linking up to the academics, or the NGO leaders, or the analysts that are covering your industry and bringing their voices into the conversation as well.
That can, again, refresh it, open up new doors, force you to think more broadly about how are we defining our market and have we covered all of our opportunities, or are we just kind of focusing on something that out of tradition, and out of habit, and out immediate results looks good right now.
Interviewer: We’ve even had some real success using theater games and really extraordinary recognizable actors leading sessions that just get to people who think one way doing things in extremely different ways. We’ve had them say to us, wow, we’ve had a real breakthrough on something because we had to do it this way and that had never occurred to us. Just getting people to think with different parts of their brain, their bodies, and all kinds of things. That can be very helpful.
Ian: Right, fascinating.
Interviewer: Yeah. Where do you see your kind of thought leadership going in the future?
Ian: I think as we’ve discussed it’s certainly going to spawn or spread itself over more and more formats as they become available and as various audiences grow more and more used to digesting content and thought leadership over those formats. I think hopefully it will become much more a standard part of more and more companies’ marketing routines, and, frankly, their strategy routines as well. As we talked about, using it as a stereo exercise and a thought provoking exercise internally.
I hope that certainly in the next five years as the economy continues to mend companies find that this sort of thing is a very smart thing to integrate into their standard planning going forward, and across as many silos as possible and involving as many people as possible.
Interviewer: I think you’re right. I think firms that do well are the ones who remember that they need vision in tough times, not just good ones.
Ian: Right, exactly.
Interviewer: Ian Mason of Hassard Fay, thank you very much.
Ian: Thank you very much. It’s been fun.