Introduction
“Ever wondered how to juggle thought leadership and product marketing? Spoiler: they can’t operate in isolation!
In this episode, Miklas Vogt, the powerhouse CEO of Montanans, exposes a trap most B2B marketers in science and engineering fall into: mixing thought leadership with product promotion.
He’s got the insights from working with top-notch companies, revealing how blending these strategies can confuse your messaging and spike credibility issues.
Why is isolating thought leadership crucial? It positions your brand as an industry leader. And don’t forget: targeted product promotions are what drive revenue!
With AI shaking things up, now’s the time to step up as a go-to expert—something only solid thought leadership can achieve.
Tune in as Miklas explores how to measure success with the right metrics. One wrong move, and your strategy could veer off course!
Are you ready to rethink your approach? Keep thought leadership and product marketing separate yet essential for unstoppable success. Let’s dive in!”
What You’ll Learn
1. Differences between thought leadership and product marketing content.
2. Importance of keeping thought leadership and product promotion separate.
3. Positioning benefits of investing in thought leadership content.
4. How AI influences the necessity for thought leadership.
5. Measuring performance: thought leadership vs. product marketing.
6. Effective strategies to maintain trust and brand credibility.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Hello and welcome to today’s content universe. Today I want to talk about something that is on our mind at Montana’s very, very often. It is the difference and the different roles of thought leadership content and product product marketing. Now I’m Miklas Vogt and I have the the Content Agency. I’m the CEO and founder of the Content Agency Montanans. And at Montanans we do produce thought leadership content for large, typically business-to-business companies mainly operating in the high knowledge sphere. So that could be you know if they invented something really cool they want to promote that, or if they just sell knowledge like like many advisors would do. So those are our typical clients and you new kind of people. Now when you look at thought leadership versus product promotion I think there’s one thing to really nail down first. The two cannot live on their own. So if you are a business-to-business company, and if you want to position yourself high in the market, which I think is a pretty crucial little detail, if you want to position yourself as a thought leader, as a leading expert in whatever industry, whatever field you’re working in, if you are that kind of company, you need both. Thought leadership will help position you, product promotion will help drive revenue and it’s very rarely that you would see thought leadership pieces drive revenue and equally, it is not really possible to use, well, it’s possible to use the products or the services but it’s not possible to use the product promotion for positioning yourself as the top expert in the market. Now, what do I see of different errors out there? One typical error or failure, I would say, in the two different categories of marketing that I see quite often is that they get mixed together and I I do feel why because when you say, okay we want to have a thought leadership approach, we want to be thought leaders in our market, we want to be experts, we want to be perceived at this top level, you know, top-shelf people, it’s always very very tempting to end off your say, your blog post, your LinkedIn posts, whatever you are selling. It’s very easy to end it off with some sort of product promotion. So you may be writing a, you know, an industry trend report and then you end off that report by concluding that people should buy your product and what happens here is that you get a piece of product promotion that’s actually pretty bad. It doesn’t really serve the purpose instead you could have just used a regular advert, a regular post on social media about whatever product that you’re selling. You could just use a pretty simple one. Straightforward piece of ad. Now instead of doing that, you’re putting it into a thought leadership piece and by doing so you actually ruined that piece as well because you also ruined the thought leadership part of it because what happens is that people read through whatever you wrote down, read through your white paper read through your report or whatever and then when they get to the end they suddenly realize that �hey, they’re just trying to sell me shen and when they realize that, all of the above will lose credibility, they will lose the trust in what they’ve read because they would see that the only reason for you putting it out there is to sell your own product. Now people are not stupid of course they know that the reason for creating thought leadership content for creating universes with knowledge in them is because you want to grow your business? People are not dumb, they they know that, but by concluding that your product will serve whatever purpose, it’s just not going to cut it it’s just it’s just gonna ruin that thought leader piece. What you could do instead is have a universe that is basically say it could be a blog on your website with all kinds of different knowledge things so you would consider yourself more like a media or a media company where you you know you just pour out really interesting articles about industry trends about all kinds of different things and by doing so you attract people to your company website and then when they are ready they will now know your brand so well that when they so the first thing is that is really important when you talk product promotion and third leadership is that none of them can stand alone and the second thing is you should not mix the two in one piece of content of course they can live on the same web page separately they can also live you know next door to each other on the same social media platform but you can’t mix them up together in one piece of content and I think that is very very interesting now one thing I want to say also is why you should invest at all in thought leadership and I think one of the main reasons especially in this day age one of the main reasons for investing and thought leadership and an expert you know learning and all these kinds of universes you know them you’ve seen them all over one of the main reasons to do so is because of the positioning part now with AI coming in and writing tons and tons of of articles of different kinds of posts etc you still kind of need something that promotes you that promotes your company and promotes the people that are in your company and thought leadership will help you do that it is a way of separating yourself from the product and it’s also a way of separating yourself from distancing yourself from the competition. Why is it interesting to separate yourself from the product well what happens if you rely solely on the product is that that product will eventually become either obsolete or you’ll have another version that is better your competitor will have a version that is better than yours and that means you’re very reliant on always being the technical forerunner in your product your product should always be the best and it can’t miss a step in that, you can’t miss a beat whereas if you are a thought leader if you’ve positioned yourself as a thought leader as the go-to place you will have some brand credibility you will have people who trusts that your brand or your product will keep up no matter whether you actually do keep up at the very moment or not so that is one thing you’ll simply get more stable clients all right and I think the last thing that I want to address considering this thought leadership content versus product promotion is one thing that I meet all the time and it’s the measurement of performance and don’t mistake me because I am NOT a perfect expert I’m not an expert at all actually into the field of measuring the performance of different kinds of content but what I do see and what I do think you should be really worried about is the fact that you should measure those two different kinds of content in two different ways. So product promotion kind of posts and kind of content you should probably measure on either if you can you should measure it directly on revenue generation or you should measure it on some of the more I’d say known metrics that we have in marketing in online marketing whereas when you talk about thought leadership pieces if you compare that directly into say product promotion stuff or even into like social stuff, you know we have cake at the office kind of posts on social media they will more or less always lose if you only count like engagement, views, reach, all of that, at least in an organic when you look at organic numbers and those two comparisons are just really not fair because what happens on social media is it’s a social platform so people will tend to react more on say social events for instance something that is easy to engage with because it’s a social thing so it’s very easy to say congratulations on your new position so that kind of post will really accelerate whereas if you have a more professionally minded posts something that positions you it may have your estate and it may have your take on industry affairs that sort of post is a little bit more high stake for people to engage with which again means that it won’t have the same reach and it won’t get the same numbers but nonetheless it still position you and that is the key bit it will position you because say a social post will not position you and the same goes with a promotional or a product promotion post, it will not position you in the market it will just show whatever it is that you’re selling so you should also be very aware of what metrics you are using when you look at content for thought leadership versus content that is more socially minded and content that is promotional all right so that is my thoughts on thought leadership content versus product promotion or product marketing content keep them separate you need both be aware of the way that you measure them and yeah look out for for what comes in the future remember that thought leadership is about positioning product promotion is about revenue so those are two very different things and there should be very very aware of that all right that is the content universe for today I hope that kind of made sense it was a little bit of a hard topic for me to talk about because there’s so much going on with these two but hope it somehow made sense anyway let me know in the in the comments if you can let me know at least on the email and it’s you can find me at podcast at Montana’s dot co that was podcast at montanez dot to see oh and of course if you liked the episode do share it with some of your friends and family friends and family I always say that friends and family who shares like a content podcast with friends and family you should share probably with your maybe friends and colleagues anyway you know what I mean share it with someone who would like to listen to it and give us a review that really Helps promoting the podcast and getting the word out ok I appreciate you listening and thank you so much cheers
