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Thought Leadership Science: Sampling, measuring, and optimizing your industry conversation relevance

Thought Leadership Times Blog (Dec 9 2009)

  1. Thought Leadership Science: Sampling, measuring, and optimizing your industry conversation relevance


    How relevant is any of the content your B2B marketing team publishes in any outbound brand marketing channel?  Sure, you may know a few of the keywords that define your products or your industry.  You may also be able to look at Google Adwords or Google Suggest to measure keyword popularity.  However, is your marketing voice optimally aligned with as much of the industry conversation as possible?  Do you speak as a leader?  If yes, how do you know?  How would you measure such alignment?  What is the scientific process your team employs to validate its Thought Leadership strategy?  If you don’t have one, are you still throwing money and time resources up against the wall to see what sticks?  Why aren’t you maximizing the ROI opportunity of your published content?

    At HiveFire, we’ve started asking a new question of our prospects and our customers.  “Is the industry talking about you or are you talking about the industry?”  In many industries, the main conversations within each community are dominated by a few of the most visible B2B brands.  These companies achieved leading visibility by starting the conversation or purchasing a seat at the table.  Analysts, customers, competitors, and bloggers speak of these brands in most of their published articles.  However, for a majority of brands, there is barely any mention.  These companies are lucky if they’re able to get a seat at a table of industry’s authority.

    Thus, these other, less known brands must publish their own perspectives.  Lesser known brands use the common tools of brand marketing such as White Papers, Press Releases, Email Newsletters, LinkedIn Groups and keyword marketing to add their voice to the discussion.  You can see the results of our recent HiveFire Brand awareness survey that appears to confirm commonly used brand marketing channels.

    However, do any of the brands actually understand how relevant are their content measures to the prominent conversation in their industry?  It’s our view that most marketing executives are aware of a few buzzwords, but may not have any measurable way to determine whether their content is optimally relevant, before publishing in these branding and conversations channels.

    According to a 2008 ComScore report, online brand marketing in 2008 made up $6.2 Billion of the $16 Billion of online advertising dollars.  How much of the brand marketing spend was optimized to reflect the dominate conversation themes of the industries covered?  How much was wasted or ineffective?

    B2B marketers need to sample the content of their industry conversations.  Wherever the conversation is happening, marketers should be able to collect a large sample of conversations and measure the relevance and weight of terms and combinations of words that make up the conversation.  Marketers can sample channels such as Google or Bing search results, LinkedIn group postings, tweets, tweet links and website content of industry leaders, partners, and competitors.  The more data collected around industry content, the more complete the conversation picture.

    Before publishing their voice into the conversation, each marketing executive should then ask: “Do we know how relevant our content will be to the main conversation topic we target?”  If they are less relevant than industry leaders, executives can adjust their conversation to target the leaders as a leading voice.  Improved relevance will lead to improved visibility to industry participants who are seeking to understand or participate in the exact conversation.  Search Engine visibility should also improve as improved content-relevance delivers higher rankings, but without search engine or keyword gaming.

    Brands that want to quickly establish themselves as industry leaders must first capture the same voice of the leaders as best as possible.  Whether leaders are competitors, partners, or prospects, companies must be able to scientifically sample and then match their sample against their own content.  Companies that can successfully measure will be able to adjust their brand marketing for optimal relevance and thus optimal thought leadership.

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