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Strategic Thought Leadership Content Marketing with the Thaut Process
Your web content is not there just to "fill the space" in a nice design: that's what we call content pollution.
The Thaut Process of content marketing has impact: it leads your prospects and customers to a distinctively elevated experience of what you sell.
You are past the stage of thinking you can use filler content, right? Well, some aren't. We might ask them, if content quality doesn't matter, "why not just copy/paste cereal ingredients for your web content then?" Do you really think filler content will work? ...
Know ... what you want is to elevate...
...like mPower6 who learned to stand out through a Thought Leadership Position of supporting the personal growth of youth athletes. They create charity partnerships in their sports fundraising campaigns, adding to their exposure and aligning with an unmet market value.
When we started with founder David Beckley and mPower6, we noticed that youth sports fundraising apps were selling making fundraising easier than the "old way" of bake sales and car washes. Great, right?
Well, no. Though multiple level audience listening* we discovered parents and coaches saying things like:
"What's that teaching them?"
"They just push a button and get money? We used to have to work to raise our funds!"
The parents and coaches, who made the decision, cared more about the growth for the youth than the ease the other apps promised.
So, while their app is just as easy, mPower6 stands completely apart from the competition by fulfilling that value of growth for our youth. They share a percentage of funds raised with or volunteer for as part of the campaign.
So, mPower6's content elevates by pointing the way to leading the next generation to being better people by helping those in need, while those other apps are perceived as breeding entitlement.
mPower6 changed the game: It's not about ease - all such apps have that - it's about growth.
... or, like Ross Printing, who is leading marketers and businesspeople to creatively use print marketing combined in synergy with digital to cut through the clutter since everyone and their brother is on digital now ... since it's so "easy".
And, yes, it's easier than ever to be on digital now. Web media (like "get your free, "beautiful" website on ..." )*** is more accessible than ever. Everyone and their brother is on the web. And because it's easy to be there, it is even harder to stand out now, isn't it?
With the media easier for everyone, and making for an overcrowded internet, what about the message? That's where the opportunity to stand out is.
It isn't about just having "enough" of a web presence, it's about cutting through the clutter to the customers' minds. Your message has to inspire. It had to lead. If you aren't the lead dog on the sled, your view never changes.
Want to be the lead dog? Doesn't it show stronger competitiveness to be the company that stands out with clear leadership with its content?
Maybe content leadership isn't for you and your organization, though. If you are satisfied with filler content, if you are ok being reduced to a commodity and likely having to lower prices and profits to compete, then read no more and have a nice day. There's a "back" (backwards?) button on your browser somewhere.
If you haven't gone backwards, though, and, instead you want to bring your business (or your clients' businesses) to a leadership position in market share (= higher profits) by leading the mind of the marketplace, then please stay with us here.
Because this isn't the "normal" approach. This is what we call...
The Thaut Process
The Thaut Process is not just the antidote to space and time-wasting "filler content". The Thaut Process is creating content that leads your audience to a distinctively elevated experience of what you sell.
It also offers a respect-based alternative to invasive, targeted, annoying online ads. There is no waste. Every piece of content - every web page, blog post, podcast, video, and social post - has a clear and helpful purpose that is centered on the end user*.
We call it "Strategic Thought Leadership". Let us explain further:
What most people call thought leadership is just demonstrating the expertise of the "thought leader". However, we are more concerned with your marketplace's thinking than with showing off your thinking or ours.
So, to us, thought leadership is just what it says: it is leading thought. More exactly, it is leading your marketplace to a new way of thinking about how to buy or use what you sell. Because ...
It's how your marketplace thinks about what you sell that matters.
We call it Strategic Thought Leadership to separate it from the "expertise demonstration" definition of thought leadership. There is a structure to thought leadership when it is done this way. And there are specific building blocks that assemble to make a good structure.
Strategic Thought Leadership is discovering how your audience thinks about what you sell, and leading them from there to a new and wondrous way of thinking that helps them
- Make a smarter buying decision when they purchase,
- Get more value out of using what you sell,
- Think about how to use it with greater understanding and clarity, or even
- Elevate its purpose to something entirely new and different.
through creating and outputting what we call a Thought Leadership Model. A well-formed Thought Leadership Model includes an ever-growing library of talking points AKA "support points"* to move thinking. These fuel an easy flow of content that is high-impact, in part because they are linguistically formulated to subliminally lead marketplace thinking from the "old way" to the "new way" of thinking. Your "new way".
And, just in case a friend or associate asks you, "isn't that manipulative?"... You can tell them:
When coming from a position of empathy and positive intent, showing people new choices isn't manipulative, its empowering.
Isn't it actually helpful to expand customer choices instead of leaving people trapped in limiting choices dictated by suboptimal thinking?
After all, this new thinking helps your prospects and customers get more value. And Thaut taps into creativity- not just your creativity but the creativity of your audience as well, by expanding their choices to new ways of thinking they didn't know before. And people who associate influence with manipulative could miss out on the lessons of great leaders. Instead, by embracing how positive influence expands choice, your life is enriched as are the lives of those you influence.
And, by embracing the "new way", if you do it right, they also embrace your company as the one to do business with: above and separate from all others.
You can create and own your niche.
Where to start: Your Market Leadership Playbook
back to topThe Market Leadership Playbook we create specifically for each client we serve guides their structure-based thought leadership with a role similar to that of a brand guide.
However, it is far more than a "brand guide". It includes the building blocks of a structure of audience-centered thought leadership. It guides your organization to benefit the marketplace with the fresh thinking that sets your company apart from all others.
Your Market Leadership Playbook will include
- Audience Attunement Report- Knowing your market better gives comfort and clarity. And you can feel good about the privacy-respecting way we do multiple level audience listening and analysis that discovers what your marketplace would love that they (and your competitors) likely don't even realize yet. Your competitors likely miss these opportunities because they are trapped in the top-down customer data paradigm. However, considering the whole of the relationship between a customer and a company: should it not start with respectful listening instead of studying their private "data" like they are inanimate targets? Doesn't it also shows more confidence as a brand to act from respect for customer privacy?
- Market Landscape Report- Gain confidence by knowing where your (or your clients') organization fits in the mind of the marketplace versus the competition ... in terms that matter: what your market truly values. Values are one of the most important higher thinking levels discovered in the Audience Attunement Report. And we can help you "redesign" that landscape to your advantage. You can, in that sense, be a landscape architect.
- Thought Leadership Position- We empower you and your organization by helping you design an aligned, multiple-level thought leadership model that declares your position as the market leader. It sounds complicated but we make it easy. It's worth articulating the higher levels because that's where the leverage for market leadership is and where your competition is likely blank.
- Thought Leadership Path(s)- The comfort and confidence of knowing your direction comes from 1 or more well-defined shifts for your prospects from "old thinking" to "new thinking". A company will usually have 1-3 core Thought Leadership Paths (TLPs) and potentially multiple supporting TLPs. Clearly defining new thinking for the marketplace this way - thinking that both serves the prospects and establishes your company as the "go-to" - gives your web content purpose, clarity and impact.
- The Idea-Library of Support Points - These persuasion-optimized talking points** fuel an enthusiastic content program with a never-ending flow of ideas. Support Points are designed to move market thinking along various Thought Leadership Paths from old (origin) to new (destination) thinking. The Support Point Library speeds up content production as well as adding impact. With it, content planning and production are much easier and faster.
- Strategic Content Calendar gives the confidence and clarity of knowing how to output these ideas into various forms of web media - like your website, blog, YouTube videos, PR outreach, and podcast- promote them well, and lead a market segment.
Can you see how having this at hand relieves the frustration of the question "what content"? The Playbook can set an effective marketing direction well into the future and it can be renewed regularly so there's always an abundance of fresh, high-impact content flowing from it.
Thaut can create your Playbook as a short-term project for your company to use internally or with your web provider as a content guide and calendar.
Or, we can also implement your Playbook and manage your web presence end-to-end as a turnkey program.
Use the form below to get a free sample Market Leadership Playbook that illustrates the highlights of using the Thaut Process of Strategic Thought Leadership to positively influence an audience.
*Via our ever-developing magic black box of applied NLP, systems thinking, and extended intelligence- delivered as an app-supported managed service. We make it easy and fun for you.
**This page is full of them. Can you pick them out?
***What these DIY webkits don't mention is how bloated their code is, which makes it very difficult to get them to perform for things like load speed and search engine optimization.
