The goal of thought-leadership marketing is not to create sales-heavy content, but to provide an entry point to your business by branding yourself as an expert. There are still opportunities to highlight your product or service, but first and foremost you want to be viewed as knowledgeable and willing to help. Do you have what it takes to be a thought leader? You will if you follow these simple steps in today's Promotional Consultant Today.

1. Consider what questions your customers and potential customers are asking. The first thing you should do is identify the questions your target audience and current customers are asking—and build your thought-leadership marketing strategies around the answers to those questions.

By identifying the questions, and strings of words your customers type into search engines like Google, you can create your content in a manner that will answer those questions. To get started, think about the types of problems your products and services solve, and find the questions one would ask related to those problems.

2. Demonstrate your company's expertise on social media. As long as you are engaging and providing value on a given platform, such as directing people on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or a niche community to one of your well-written blog posts that answers a timely question, you are showing people that your company is an expert in the industry.

3. Display your thought leadership beyond your blog. In my opinion, your company blog should always be the hub of your audience-building efforts, but it's critical to discover other audiences by posting your thought-leadership content on other platforms. We recently started posting to the beautiful publishing platform, Medium, to reach the early-adopter crowd. Guest blogging is another great way to discover a relevant audience interested in your thought leading commentary.

4. Revise your questions on a regular basis. When your thought-leadership marketing strategy is built on a foundation of customer questions, you must revisit these questions constantly. As industry trends and general business trends change and you develop new products and services—your answers to old and new questions need to evolve as well.

5. Use thought-leadership marketing to brand your business. Since the goal of your thought-leadership marketing strategy is to create an entry point, it is the perfect opportunity to brand your business. You can do this through your writing style, the level of creativity in your videos and images, and by demonstrating how well you understand your B2B clients' wants and needs. When creating new content, ensure that it supports how you want to be identified as a brand.

6. Don't be afraid to copy what's working. Just because your competitors are killing it with thought leadership already does not mean that you can't do it better. Go for it. Share your knowledge, and be helpful and informative to your customers.

Source: Will Fleiss manages customer acquisition for Outbrain Amplify. He's been doing online marketing since 2005, spending time on the agency-side at BKV, Ogilvy, and Converseon and with startups Knewton and Startup Institute. He lives in New York City with his wife and their Cavalier spaniel, Luna.