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Crafting a budget for a thought leadership program is complex and spans multiple parts of your organization. Thought leadership initiatives are premium programs with high long-term impact and must be budgeted accordingly.

What is new: Build thought leadership budgets across seven concrete value drivers.

Why it matters: It is hard to convince customers to trust something that is, or come across, as cheap for their most important decisions. It is also hard to secure adequate funds internally.

🏆 Return on investment: Recent research by the Institute for Business Value at IBM unveiled three important findings.

• CEOs spend 3 hours per week on consuming Thought leadership
• The average CEO trusts five thought leadership sources
• Thought leadership delivers a 153% return on investment, compared to 9% for a regular marketing program.

These three facts set the bar high for both the returns to target and the investment levels required.

📊 Data acquisition: Data is a foundational pillar for your thought leadership program, and your budget covers:

• Your unique data you capture about customers and field use of your offerings.
• Data acquired from third parties, with better data, or data at lower cost than you can capture by yourself.

The budget should include cleaning and structuring the data to be used and trusted in thought leadership initiatives. What you capture is strategic, aiming for a structure that allows you to track changes and shifts and use fresh data over time.

🔦 Primary research: You conduct research to generate unique insights through analysis in areas where you have expertise. Primary research allows you to deliver value by:

• addressing unique questions
• turning data into insights
• providing new perspectives and angles

This budget element covers the cost of refining the questions to address and the analysis that generates insights. Both are research-intensive and require an excellent understanding of the market.

🤝 Thought leadership co-creation: Co-creating thought leadership together with a partner is a powerful option when

• the required scope is bigger than your own expertise
• you lack brand recognition in the area you want to cover
• you want to address new audiences beyond the ones you know well

The budget for a co-creation initiative typically covers data acquisition and the generation of insights with options on report creation and distribution channels.

🎬 Content production: The quality ambition for thought leadership content must be high. As a producer, you want to find a few content formats you can use across initiatives in your program

• visuals for face-to-face or digital deliveries
• written thought leadership reports
• high-quality video productions

The impact of your program depends on multiple content elements, where you gradually build credibility and trust in your insights. Set a clear ambition for content that represents an investment level you can sustain and is attractive to your audience.

🩻 Exciting proof points: Seeing makes believing easier when you can present working prototypes, show-cases, demos, or proof points of a new solution. The value you deliver comes from:

• clarity on what problem you solve and the business values you unlock
• a working solution, including vital components from the broader ecosystem  
• early guesstimates on market size and business gains customers can expect

Own, industry, and partner events are all suitable for displaying proof points. The news/first angle of proof points open up for PR opportunities. Replicating successful proof points opens the door to global marketing your new innovations. Plan to make your proof points mobile from the start.

🎙️ Activation channels: Thought leadership can use multiple channels where budgets cover a mix of three different channels:

• owned – digital properties and face-to-face channels
• earned – platforms serving your industry or your partners
• paid – digital media platforms and speaking opportunities

The movie industry’s rule of thumb is to invest a dollar in promotion for every dollar spent in production, which is a suitable starting point. Lock in the activation budget when you sign off on the content creation initiative. The optimal mix of channels varies with your brand recognition for the thought leadership area.

⏲️ time invested across your organization: The final element of the budget covers the cost of time invested by different contributors in your own company. All required contributors are rarely in a single unit and encompass

• thought leaders – developing insights and storylines
• researchers/ data scientists – capturing and making sense of all data
• prototypers – practical solution innovation to generate proof points
• speakers – leather shoes bringing your stories onto vital stages
• program management – keeping it all together

Bottom line: Not all seven budget building blocks must be in play for all thought leadership initiatives. However, a crisp budget structure for all initiatives/programs forces your team to consider the whole approach before sign-off. Thought leadership is never cheap, and shortcuts expose you to the risk of coming across as cheap.

Additional reading suggestions

• The anatomy of successful thought leadership [ARTICLE] – by Forbes
• Unlocking the essence of true thought leadership [BLOGPOST] – by Gini Dietrich, Spinsucks
• Thought leadership strategy: a step-by-step guide with examples for growth [BLOGPOST] – by Sproutworth
• 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report [PRIMARY RESEARCH REPORT] – by Edelmann