The key to growing a B2B company is Thought Leadership. Because it builds awareness, credibility, and trust with your audience.

How can YOU become a Thought Leader?

1. Start speaking at conferences.

Not attending them. Sure, you can make some connections that way, but it’s not scalable and way too time-consuming.  Now speaking at them – as part of a panel or whatever, just make sure you’re on stage somehow – that’s powerful. Attendees immediately see you as an expert, and you can leverage one event to speak at others.

But what if you WANT to speak, and the conferences you’re targeting aren’t interested?  That probably means that you overshot, you went to them too soon. Think big, but start small.  

Instead of the big conference with thousands of people at the audience, why not reach out to some local meetups?  They’re usually starving for experts to come talk to their audience.

OR, maybe it’s a good fit to reach out to local co-working spaces like WeWork, and offer to host a lunch & learn.  Free food and education can go a long way to get your foot in the door.

Yes, these venues are much smaller and lower-profile, but you’ll be surprised how many quality prospects you can find.  And as you practice your presentation, make more connections, and put yourself out there… soon you’ll be ready for the big leagues.

Every time you give a speech, leverage it to a bigger venue and a bigger audience.

2. Get on the podcasting trend.

Over 73 million Americans are listening to podcasts every month, and that number is growing FAST!

So what’s the smart way to access some of those people?

1. Create a short series of 10-15 evergreen episodes, meaning that it’s not going to be an ongoing commitment to maintain your podcast.

2. Find 10-15 industry experts that you’d love to interview for your audience. And do all the interviews before launching the podcast, so you have all the material ready.

3. Create a launch team – a group of people in your network who will support your effort by downloading your podcast episodes right after you push them out. iTunes will notice and bump you on their podcast charts, leading to much more awareness than you could possibly get otherwise.

4. Launch your podcast and ask your launch team to binge-listen to your episodes.

With this strategy, you stand a decent chance to create a podcast that remains at the top of lists for quite some time and you keep getting engagement for 1 or even more years.

3. Write a Book.

A book is an incredible marketing tool: you can mail it out to potential clients, get interviews on podcasts as the de facto expert on a topic, and get emails on your website in exchange for a free chapter or a download of the entire book.

But first, you have to put your ideas on paper, and that’s a lot of work. Recently, a bunch of services have come up to help you with that, effectively ghost-writing your book, without costing an arm and a leg necessarily.  Check out: Ghost Booksters, Thought Leader Books, and Scribe Writing.

4. Do Video Content Marketing

Start educating your audience with 1-5 minute videos that you post regularly on your YouTube channel and repurpose on LinkedIn and your company’s blog.  You can jumpstart getting traction by paying for some cheap video ads on YouTube and Facebook, both of which can give you tremendous flexibility with targeting.

The point is to reach your audience, give them value, and show yourself.  They will connect with you and start seeing you as THE expert who can guide them to success.

And this is what our videos are all about.  We’re showing you how to do it the right way: which topics to discuss, how long should your videos be, how to produce and distribute them… how to get traction, and ultimately how to convert your new-found traffic into clients.  So subscribe, and stay tuned…