Did someone forward this to you? Click here to subscribe and have more editorial thinking delivered to your own inbox.

Dear reader,

One of the things I hear most as a B2B consultant? That B2B doesn’t have the luxuries of B2C. Neither the creative freedom nor industry attraction, nor media acknowledgment, nothing.

“No one knows who we are, or how important our work is for their daily lives,” they say.

Public sentiment, for example, is more important to them than you might expect. You’d think that all these brand leaders want is to increase sales–that the only recognition they're interested in is found within their buyer group–but it’s not true. They’re also looking to invest in communication strategies that place their brands inside today’s culture and society, and they come to me because they’ve found that educating their wider audiences is the best way to play a significant role.

If you’re not one already, put yourself in the shoes of a modern B2B brand leader for a moment. Sure, successfully following a TikTok trend can bring your brand front and center, but it’s short-lived and difficult to get right. It’s also not sustainable if that behavior isn’t naturally part of your brand’s style and flow.

But educating? That’s something your people are doing all the time. They educate their prospects, their buyers, their friends and families, each other. They’re in this “stale” industry space out of choice and, more often than not, a strong passion for the subject at hand.

So, while I’m not here to discuss all angles of the B2B vs. B2C debacle, I would like to home in on one: that B2B doesn’t have the influencers necessary to influence. (Rest assured, the following exploration is just as useful for a B2C leader if you effectively extrapolate the thought processes.)

Turn your gaze inwards

I know B2B organizations feel encumbered in many regards, what with regulations up the wazoo and whatnot. I also know, however, that they have a huge advantage when it comes to thought leadership. They’re just too busy comparing themselves to others to notice. And the general media (across all channels from social to TV) aren’t helping. There’s little to no air time being given to brands that the average person doesn’t ride, wear, eat, drink, or buy. Well, know they buy…

The thing is that while B2B leaders are busy wishing they had the popularity and social media impressions of a Tesla or Bobbi Brown, their immediate potential remains overlooked. They have all the influencers they could possibly want within their organizations.

What’s holding B2B brand leaders back, then? A few myths regularly come up:

• We’re already doing PR for our top executives, which is who everyone wants to hear from anyways.

• Supporting the personal brands of internal folks requires more resources than paying their external counterparts.

• Not all of our internal folks make good writers or speakers, so we wouldn’t be able to sustain a more authentic strategy.

At this point, my role becomes clarifying how none of the above are true. And here’s how I do it.

All for one, and one for all

Most organizations think they’re already doing editorial marketing because they do PR. They equate the “editorial coverage” they receive from PR with an editorial mindset. Simply reading that sentence shows you that the two are not the same–just because one part of your strategy accomplishes something editorial doesn’t mean you live consistently by editorial values. In fact, it’s often a journalist’s editorial principles that are at work there, not yours. But I digress…

PR is known for being expensive, which is not necessarily a bad thing (I’m a big fan of top quality, high-ticket offerings), but it does mean that brand leaders feel limited in the number of thought leaders they can promote. Combine that with believing the public mostly wants to hear from thinkers atop a company’s hierarchy, and PR efforts–both paid and earned–tend to remain focused on only a handful of executives.

There’s an interesting shift that’s now garnering attention though. It’s been going on for much longer than media channels make it seem, but it’s a shift nonetheless.

This brings us to some key questions for the modern B2B leader: What happens now that readers can sniff a paid placement? Now that they trust people more than platforms or even brands? Now that they’re cherry picking opinion leaders to follow, oftentimes putting their money where their choices are?

B2B companies are now tasked with building their organizational brands via the individual brands of their thought leaders. It’s difficult to portray authenticity any other way. You do something big for the greater good, and people question it. You do something small for a local community, and people say it’s not enough. You flaunt your economics with brand marketing during the Super Bowl or in Times Square, and you’re seen as a villain.

The best way to communicate authentically is to strike the right balance between collective guidelines and individual personalities. To ensure your people are so confident in their shared values and messaging that they’re able to interact naturally–perhaps even with a bit more of themselves sprinkled on top. That way, they attract their own admirers, building relationships based on sharing what they know in a way that feels conducive to who they are and want to be. It’s less fabricated and, bonus, it has audience targeting and network effects built in.

The nuances of these individual brands (things like topics thought leaders focus on, the manner in which they express themselves, their backgrounds and experiences) allows your organization to consistently tap into specific target audiences in a more spontaneous way. Less pushy than your average LinkedIn campaign, that’s for sure. And the word of mouth that occurs is unparalleled. It might not be the spike you see from some large ad campaign, but the relationships it spawns definitely last longer.

From editorial coverage to editorial thinking

The last thing you want to do as a brand leader is add to your company’s stable, monthly costs. The best thing you can do is validate a single investment that brings returns on a consistent basis. So, while doing PR for all of your thought leaders would incur significant costs month-on-month, architecting a content ecosystem that empowers those thought leaders to build their personal brands is something you can pay for once and profit from indefinitely.

Architect a system, practice, and behaviors that align content creation to the point where it’s no longer “more expensive” to bring in more of your brightest minds.

By defining the threads that tie your overarching brand narrative to the individual premises and intentions of your thought leaders, you remain confident that these folks are delivering messaging that both they believe in and that propels your organization’s positioning. You’ll also educate them (and other employees involved in the process) on:

• The ins and outs of editorial thinking

• How to manage all the moving parts of a content ecosystem

• How to learn from each other (e.g., sales and marketing) and stay aligned

• What quality thought leadership looks like and how to create it

• What they need to work on to improve their editorial output

• How to create, promote, and distribute premium content

• What it means to be a thought leader

• How to build personal brands

• And much more.

It’s a complete upgrade for your entire communications strategy, all stemming from a content ecosystem built to flow. An ecosystem whose purpose it is to avoid disjointed execution and redundant spend. And while we’re on the topic of spend, let’s not forget that it’s less expensive to teach your current employees to do better than it is to hire anew–and we’ve all seen the data to prove it.

I haven’t done the calculations myself, but my common sense tells me that the same applies to influencer marketing. It’s more valuable to support internal thought leadership and a people-led mentality than it is to go looking externally for well-known people to promote your brand. There’s space for that in the occasional campaign, but it’s not a sustainable strategy by any means if durability is your goal. Why? Because (a) there’s more loyalty and responsibility where employees are involved, and (b) you can’t craft the right content partnership with an external creator if you don’t know what being a creator entails. You’ll simply revert to tasking them with pushing your products or services, rather than collaborating on a more authentic editorial approach.

I would even venture to say (breathe deep) that investing in editorial thinking is better than solely depending on your marketing team to create content. They strive to produce materials that feel genuine when they’re not the ones doing the actual activities, building the actual products, or servicing the actual clients. Empowering the ones that ARE doing all of those things–with marketing and communications specialists there to implement the best strategies and offer specialized support–can be a real game-changer.

You’d be surprised…

One of the beauties of this process is that some of your thought leaders will begin to evolve on their own. In fact, my experience shows that a good percentage of doers who learn to think editorial embrace the opportunity to claim a space or a channel, divulge their knowledge, and build a community.

Which actually leads to debunking the third myth about not all internal folks being good writers or speakers. Whoever is building your editorial content ecosystem and subsequent training has the responsibility of pairing specific thought leaders with not only the subject matter most conducive to them, but also the formats and channels they’re most likely to succeed in. Combine this with the ghostwriting, design, and production capabilities of your (now) less-burdened content and marketing teams, and you have yourself a scalable framework.

Remember that while knowledge might be easily accessible, wisdom is becoming sexier by the day. And wisdom stems from experience. If you find a way to make your thought leaders known and beloved by people both within and outside your industry–package their valuable insights well, deliver them even better–you’re pretty much set no matter what palpitating trends or life-altering technologies come our way. Not to mention you’ll be ahead of your B2C counterparts in something they’ll end up adopting, as well, in the end.

Stay human,

Flavia Barbat