Over the past three years, Edelman and LinkedIn have collaborated to investigate the impact of thought leadership on business generation. This year’s survey results reaffirm that companies with the best ability to produce timely, thought-provoking thought leadership content are much more adept than their competitors at capturing their customers’ attention and turning that attention into positive results.
This year’s study features expanded insights from 3,275 global business decision-makers in the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom.
B2B decision-makers and CXOs told us that strong thought leadership content not only strengthens a company’s reputation but also positively impacts RFP invitations, wins, pricing and cross-selling that occurs post-sale. Poorly executed thought leadership, however, can have an equal and opposite effect, leading decision-makers to remove a potential vendor or partner from consideration altogether. Further, 74 percent of B2B marketers globally do not have a way to attribute thought leadership efforts to sales impact.
This disconnect becomes all the more important with the finding that 88 percent of decision-makers surveyed believe that thought leadership is effective in enhancing their perceptions of an organization—yet only 17 percent of them rate the quality of most of the thought leadership they read as very good or excellent.