Beyond the Media Hit: Toward Measuring the Value of Thought Leadership
How do you measure the value of thought leadership content to your organization?
Most marketing and communications leaders still say “media hits” — and leave it at that.
Don’t accept that answer.
It’s lazy. It’s a vanity metric that says nothing about the growth of your business or your career. And it’s dependent on an industry (the media) that’s crumbling faster than Antarctica’s ice sheets.
Of course publishing an op-ed in the Times often leads to other good things. But in itself, that op-ed is only an intermediate step to thought leadership success.
Thought leadership helps subject matter experts (SMEs) and their organizations make the connections they need to make the positive change they want to make in the world — change for sales, fundraising, talent acquisition and retention, strategic partnerships, in policy, and more.
And that’s what you should be measuring: all the ways it is or isn’t helping you make those connections and that change.
Under this definition, that op-ed your organization’s SME gets in The New York Times counts…
- if it also generates leads that benefit your organization’s growth — say, with some funders or customers
- or it prompts an offer for a book contract that jump starts your speaking career, both of which extend the reach of the SME’s research and ideas and expose your organization to potential partners and collaborators you otherwise wouldn’t have met.
But under this definition, strategic thought leadership could also mean
- Landing a guest slot on a highly respected, sector-specific podcast listened to by the right 500 people for your idea.
- Giving a speech that gets you invited afterwards to speak privately to a foundation roundtable that leads to a big grant.
- Or a simple email linking to your latest blog post that excites a prospective donor and eventually results in a durable funding relationship.
In essence, thought leadership content is about generating quality leads. And you should be measuring how well it’s doing that for your organization.
Of course publishing an op-ed in the Times often leads to other good things. But in itself, that op-ed is only an intermediate step to thought leadership success.
Even worse: continuing to frame thought leadership exclusively in terms of media hits limits your content strategy in two fatal ways:
1. It chains you to the false notion that wide distribution of your content = effectiveness. For why and how thought-leading organizations should be approaching their content movement-first, not distribution-first, read Jimmy Daly’s excellent essay.
2. That false notion distracts you from the real business of audience acquisition and retention — and what kinds of content those audiences need in which doses to become excited about your ideas and insights.
For the kinds of research-driven organizations with which I work — think tanks, research institutes, NGOs and for-profits — thought leadership content should be generating gains at all the points of strategic relationship development, or what marketers call their “lead funnels.”
And those organizations should be tracking those increases over a range of KPIs (key performance indicators).
If your organization still defaults to media hits as its KPI of success, it’s a sign it’s lagging the market — in systems and in sophistication.
Some of the KPI increases will be directly traceable to the content — you can see the bump in email newsletter signups or strategic conversations after a new piece of thought leadership is published, for example.
Other KPIs will be indirect — attribution of the lift to thought leadership content is fuzzier: for instance, when you’ve increased our thought leadership activity across five owned channels by 50% over the past year, and you’ve seen an increase in research and corporate partnership and collaboration inquiries by X% over the past year.
In the above example, other marketing and comms activities might have also contributed to the increase in inquiries.
But if your organization is doing more and better thought leadership, it’s going to contribute to increases across a range of these kinds of KPIs. You’ll be able to see the lift across that range.
Below is my working list of KPIs for thought leadership. Your lists may vary, so please let me know what you think of these — what’s missing, what you’d add, what you’d argue with. (If you’re already tracking leads and campaigns in Salesforce, read this great overview from Jason Mlicki of Rattleback on how to measure thought leadership ROI.)
The larger point: there is a wealth of metrics that organizations should be using to measure the impact of their thought leadership content.
If your organization still defaults to media hits as its KPI of success, it’s a sign it’s lagging the market — in systems and in sophistication.
Upper Funnel: Increases in
- New conversations w/prospective donors catalyzed by thought leadership content[i];
- New conversations with sector SMEs, influencers and potential collaborators catalyzed by thought leadership content.
- Positive responses from donor prospects from thought leadership content shared with those prospects;
- Requests from external SMEs and decision makers for deeper dives into research behind thought leadership content;
- Media requests for the SME, after a thought leadership piece is published and quarter over quarter increases;
- Email subscriptions attributable to thought leadership content engagement;
- Downloads of white papers and other gated thought leadership content;
- Engagement with key content by top lead score prospects[ii];
- Google SERP for thought leader content pages and key campaign long-tail queries;
- Podcasting guesting inquiries to SMEs.
Lower Funnel: Increases in
- Accepted invites to org events from sector SMEs and influencers;
- Number of proposal conversations with prospective partners/research collaborators;
- New speaking engagement invitations for SMEs, especially keynotes at major academic and sector conferences;
- Positive responses from existing donors/funders from thought leadership content shares with them;
- Requests for informal or formal policy briefings or testimonial based on thought leadership content;
- Requests for briefings or roundtables with foundations;
- Requests to testify before federal or state authorities on matters of SME or organizational expertise;
- Invitations to staff SMEs to join technical advisory boards;
- Inquiries about research collaboration opportunities;
- Quality of new hire applications;
- Quality of graduate applications (for research institutes and academic departments).
[i]Some of these KPIs require manual tracking of inbound conversations, which means SMEs and various strategic functions (comms, marketing, sales, development, HR) have to be in regular communication about inbound leads after a thought leadership piece is published.
[ii]This KPI requires having a CRM/marketing automation combination in place that can actually track and progressively profile whom is interacting with precisely which pieces of content. Chances are your CRM or email platform vendor has already been pushing your marketing team in this direction. If not, you should be exploring it on their own.
