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The return on investment is a crucial question when the goal of your thought leadership program is to drive revenues. This reality represents an opportunity to proactively suggest measures that make thought leadership a central part of your company’s growth agenda.

What is new: Expect to be scrutinized harder on the metrics and outcomes used to define ROI for your thought leadership programs.

Why it matters: Business owners need to justify thought leadership programs based on the return of investment calculations stretching beyond the current financial year, and what to measure is non-trivial.

When to expect high returns: The return side of investments for thought leadership varies with the maturity of your industry and the nature of the competition. You can expect the most significant returns when:

💰 You operate in advanced industries, competing with services and experiences rather than commodities or products.

💰 You or your customers face one or several large disruptive forces.

💰 Customers face complex business challenges and actively seek advice from their partners.

💰 The navigation of ecosystems is crucial to success, and boundaries between them are in flux.

💰 You are the market leader or one of the few major players, with much at stake in each deal.

These qualitative factors can support you in prioritizing thought leadership initiatives where you expect the highest returns.

What to invest in: The investment side of the equation is equally important. You can increase the value you deliver to customers when your investments are:

🔭 Based on your primary research or insights gained from customer collaborations.

🔬 Anchored in a validated understanding of the business problems or opportunities you address.

🥇 Have high-quality thinking and clarity of writing, with appealing facts and graphics in your content.

⏳ Support customers in taking action and reduce the risk and time to decision.

👩‍🦰👱‍♂️ Growing thought leaders that can drive fact-to-face and digital outreach activities.

An essential part of growing ROI is scaling the created thought leadership insights across your customer base. The investments are always moderate to high to reach the required quality levels. Low cost and thought leadership are two conflicting ideas that always will come across as cheap.

Future returns on current investments: The early stages of thought leadership initiatives create a foundation for future returns.

Metrics at this stage deal with increasing probability for your thought leadership initiatives to drive revenues in future years, such as:

📕 A clear research agenda outlining prioritized thought leadership themes to drive proactively, measured as the number of themes you pursue.

⁉️ Strategic opportunities and problems validated that will shape buying decisions tomorrow, measured as the number of top-5 topics you have validated for importance.

🧑‍🎓👨‍🎓 Thought leaders, individuals already recognized as authorities in the themes you pursue or on a fast track to become recognized. 2-3 required per initiative.  

Picking themes and validating the right opportunities and problems are vital early-stage metrics. Without named and recognized thought leaders at this stage, you limit the chance to reach the target audience.

Lead measures to quantify returns: The execution of thought leadership involves three big buckets of execution activities to choose from:

📝 Written assets are articulating your points of view for distribution in digital channels.

🎙️ Speeches and one-to-one interactions with customers and ecosystem stakeholders.

📱 Digital promotions extend the reach of your thought leadership assets and further reinforce each thought leader’s brand.

# There are multiple metrics for these thought leadership impacts you can consider:

• Written assets – number of published papers, talk tracks, or master decks. Total or average engagement per asset, number of follow-up requests driven from published assets, number of high-quality backlinks.
• Speeches – number of face-to-face or virtual deliveries, number of customers/partners reached in the audience, number of vice presidents or higher in audiences, and number of earned articles.
• Digital promotions – LinkedIn SSI score, LinkedIn audience size, Total number of LinkedIn engagements for your Thought Leaders.

🎯 It is vital to Setting up your metrics to get all three cogs to support each other is vital. Both writing, talking, and sharing are essential to maximize the impact. Select a few in each area that best support your unique situation.

💡This stage involves the bulk of your investments, and the returns are highly correlated to the productivity of your thought leaders and your marketing and research teams.

Bringing home the revenue numbers: The final stage is about measuring conversion and quantitative returns:

💰 Pipeline of customers representing the scaling potential for specific themes or opportunities.

💰 Orders booked for opportunities tagged with themes where you have driven proactive thought leadership initiatives.

💰 Net revenues as orders booked get converted.

The cost of doing nothing: The metrics for measuring the cost of doing nothing are more challenging to pinpoint but are in a few broad buckets:

🪣 Reactively responding to opportunities rather than proactive pursuits

🪣 Selling on offering capabilities rather than toward customer opportunities and problems.

🪣 Low to no synergies across strategic opportunities increase overall pursuit costs

🪣 Selling towards competitors’ agendas in mega-deals.

🪣 Low to no impact in digital channels for thought leaders lacking required personal digital networks and cred.

Bottom line: Understanding how to measure return on investment for thought leadership is not hard, as outlined here, but there is a challenge in managing for returns beyond the current financial year

You can summarize the reasoning here as:

1 The returns materialize in three stages: qualitative returns in stage one, lead measures in stage two, and lag measures in stage three.

2 Maximizing the number of opportunities beyond the light-house customer opportunities that benefit from a thought leadership theme is vital to de-risk revenue uncertainties.

3 Expect the bulk of investments in the middle stage of the program, where focusing on doing the right things is vital to managing cost.

Additional reading suggestions

• Before you build a thought leadership strategy: What you need to know [ARTICLE] – by Newsweek  
• Measuring success: a new approach to gauging your thought leadership impact [ARTICLE] – by Rob Mitchel, FT Longitude
• Earning ROI through thought leadership – BLOGPOST] – by The Harris Poll
• 7 steps to determine ROI from Executive Thought Leadership [BLOGPOST] – by Social Factor
• 22 powerful thought leadership statistics leaders should know in 2024 [BLOGPOST] – by NYT licensing
• 8 ways to measure thought leadership goals for impact and influence [BLOGPOST] – by Newsweek Expert Forum
• The dos and don’ts of thought leadership measurement [ARTICLE] – by Rob Mitchel, FT Longitude   
• A 6-point guide for setting thought leadership marketing objectives [BLOGPOST] – by Jason Mlicki, Rattleback