In my many years working in the thought leadership profession, the question I was asked more often than any other was how companies should measure the effectiveness and impact of their campaigns.
Proving the value of thought leadership has always been a notoriously difficult area, for several reasons.
First, B2B sales cycles are long, lasting six months on average but often much longer than that. Isolating the impact that thought leadership has on winning an opportunity is very difficult when there are so many other factors that could influence the sale.
Second, B2B buying is a team sport, with buyer groups comprising on average between six to ten people, according to Gartner. You can, as many companies do, survey individual buyers about the effect that thought leadership has on their purchasing behaviour, but unless you are able to ask the entire buyer group, you will only be getting partial data. This is a big problem and I’ll come back to it later in this article.
Third, thought leadership is by nature a fairly oblique form of marketing. Its ultimate goal is to generate commercial outcomes but it does this indirectly by building trust and influence. This hopefully leads to customer preference at some future point but the cause and effect relationship is not as obvious as it is in, say, B2C advertising for consumer products. As a result, the more traditional advertising metrics, such as conversion rates and ROI, are not as easily applicable with thought leadership projects.
Companies that I have worked with over the years have typically responded to these challenges in one of two ways. Some, especially in the professional services sector, have taken the value of thought leadership almost as an article of faith. They may not always know how it works, but they have an inherent belief that it does, based on years of experience, and that is often more important to them than slavishly tracking specific marketing KPIs.
The second group faces more challenges because their business stakeholders lack this innate faith. As a result, they are constantly under pressure to provide evidence that thought leadership is working, despite the challenges in doing so. They often end up focusing on things that they can measure, rather than what matters, and these are typically not the best indicators of effectiveness. For example, they focus on metrics such as downloads, page views and open rates. These will tell them that people are engaging with their content, but they say little about the extent to which it is influencing their thinking or steering them towards a future buying situation. In other words, they don’t really help to demonstrate value.
Thought leadership agencies and producers also face similar pressure to justify the expense of investing with them. They have often tackled this challenge by looking for evidence that thought leadership influences C-suite buying behaviour through surveys. Here are a few recent examples:
- 74% of C-suite leaders always consider your thought leadership when making a buying decision (Thought Makers, Man Bites Dog)
- 90% of executives say they are moderately or very likely to be more receptive to sales or marketing outreach from a company that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership (2024 Thought Leadership Impact report, Edelman/LinkedIn)
- 77% of buyers indicate they are more likely to work with providers who offer strong thought leadership (Value of Thought Leadership 2025, Momentum ITSMA)
- 100% of executives say had made a purchase decision as a direct result of consuming thought leadership in the past year (ROI of Thought Leadership, Anthony Marshall and Cindy Anderson)
I understand why producers of thought leadership carry out research like this. I did it myself at my former company FT Longitude. We all want to justify the work that we do and we all know that finding direct evidence of the value that thought leadership brings is very difficult. So we use survey findings like this to show just how much our audiences value this kind of content, and the extent to which it influences the buying process.
Statistics like these sound reassuring, but I have always had an issue with them. Let’s take the first one from Man Bites Dog, that 74% of C-suite leaders always consider your thought leadership when making a buying decision. Think of the times you have made a buying decision in your business. Can you really say that you always consider the provider’s thought leadership? I just find it implausible that people would make this connection, or remember making it.
Then let’s take the finding from ROI of Thought Leadership, that 100% have made a purchase decision as a direct result of consuming thought leadership. Again, I struggle with this one for a couple of reasons. First, buying decisions in B2B are not usually made by a single individual - often there are ten people or more involved. So surveys of individual executives are unlikely to shed enough light on the extent to which thought leadership influences a purchase. Secondly (if I am understanding the finding correctly), the research suggests that these purchasing decisions have been made as a direct consequence of thought leadership - i.e. it was the sole influencing factor. I assume this is what they mean because later in the book they go on to include in their ROI calculation instances where thought leadership provides an indirect “assist” as a separate number. But the idea that thought leadership can be the sole factor driving a purchase decision seems extremely far-fetched. What about product, service, customer relationship, pricing?
More generally, I believe that all these findings could also be examples of what is known in market research as acquiescence bias. This is the tendency for survey respondents to agree with research statements, even though the statement is not a true reflection of their opinion. There are several reasons why this bias occurs, but among the most common are that respondents answer in the way they think the researchers want them to, or that they don’t really understand how to process and answer the question.
If you consider what respondents are being asked to comment on with these statements, you’ll realise that the questions are very demanding indeed. We are expecting them to trawl back mentally through previous purchases they have made and recall whether thought leadership influenced them (directly or indirectly). Of course, it’s very difficult to do this because a lot of that influence would have happened subconsciously; the thought leadership created a “halo effect” around the brand which developed cumulatively over many interactions (including but certainly not limited to thought leadership). It seems overly simplistic to think that there was an a-ha moment when a single executive said: “this thought leadership is great - we definitely should buy from these guys”.
So, bearing in mind these challenges, how should we approach the measurement of thought leadership differently? Let me tackle the point about surveys linking thought leadership with commercial outcomes first. We need to ensure that we are being objective in how we determine the extent of this link and we need to adjust for acquiescence bias. The companies listed above have a vested interest in demonstrating the connection between thought leadership and sales (I know, because I have done exactly the same in a former life). We therefore need more research from entities that can take a truly objective, independent line to this question, using surveys that control as much as possible for acquiescence bias and do not present leading statements. We need better evidence, not findings that are designed to support a commercial agenda.
My next recommendation would be to focus on metrics that demonstrate your content has influenced the audience. For example, social shares are much better than downloads in that respect, because they show that the audience saw value in your ideas and wanted to share them with their own network. Time spent on page is also better than downloads because it shows the audience was interested enough to spend time on what you have to say. Media coverage of thought leadership is also valuable because it shows that your ideas have the potential to influence or shape the debate.
Regular brand surveys remain a cornerstone of understanding the value of thought leadership. You should ideally look for a straight-line correlation between exposure to your thought leadership and perception of your business as an expert or trusted advisor. This relationship is key. With more general brand surveys that look at overall brand equity without reference to exposure to thought leadership, it is impossible to demonstrate cause and effect and isolate the impact.
Commercial outcomes from thought leadership are ultimately what companies want but, as discussed above, it is very difficult to establish strong attributions due to the length of sales cycle and size of the buyer group. But there are ways of demonstrating the value - although they do depend on good CRM discipline from sales teams and ultimately an open dialogue between sales and marketing. Metrics I would focus on include number of conversations initiated through sharing of thought leadership, sale cycle lengths for prospects exposed to thought leadership versus those that were not, and renewal rates for customers exposed/not exposed in the same way.
My final point would be that anecdotes can be just as powerful as quantitative data, especially when you are dealing with relatively small and defined customer segments. A single story about how a piece of thought leadership led to a conversation with a new prospect, which ultimately led to a major $500k project, has a lot more value, and means a lot more to business stakeholders, than any number of niche marketing KPIs.
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