Your key audiences—whoever and wherever they may be—face constant disruption, unexpected events, hyper competitive markets, and increasing complexity. They're bombarded with content that's mostly clutter. By offering new ideas that help them penetrate that complexity, you increase your credibility, relevance, and demand-gen impact.

Hold your ideas up to a prism and break them down into their constituent components—the more nuanced colors. That helps you paint a fuller picture for your audience and amplifies the demand-gen impact of your other marketing efforts.

3. BYOPOV (Bring your own POV)

This is the whole point of thought leadership, isn't it? Simply repackaging retread ideas isn't thought leadership, it's thought laggard-ship.

Pinpoint potential opportunities that lie just over the horizon, industry trends you see coming that others perhaps don't. Provide insights that help audiences be more effective and successful.

Above all, deliver value and demonstrate that you understand opportunities they might not yet have recognized. That is what helps generate demand.

4. Be specific

Gross generalizations are a demand-gen death wish. Much of what passes for thought leadership might sound compelling at first. But it's superficial at best, and unlikely to contribute to demand gen.

Here, again, the prism metaphor helps. Shine the light of your ideas through a (metaphorical) prism. Break them down into more nuanced concepts that can be explored in ways that make them more insightful and valuable to audiences.

5. Establish an internal 'idea bank'

An idea bank is a storehouse of ideas that you can later draw from and invest in creating thought leadership pieces. Make it findable and accessible to other stakeholders. Encourage "deposits" from anyone, but assign ownership of "withdrawals" to the team or people responsible for producing thought leadership.

Help internal teams understand your vision of what thought leadership looks like in demand-gen clothing, so they have a better grip on what you're seeking.

Here are a few other "idea gen" suggestions:

1. Mine your metadata. That's data about your data. What you're looking for are trends, anomalies, curiosities, or insights of any ilk hidden inside the data you may already possess or can easily access.
2. Ask questions. The simple act of asking questions (which includes then listening closely to the answers and asking the follow-up questions those answers provoke) is the most overlooked methodology for uncovering ideas and insights, and linking them to your demand-gen goals.
3. Poll your people. The minds within your organization are always an excellent resource. Your own subject-matter experts (SMEs) may be brimming with ideas that merely need to be coaxed out and developed. You can probe for them by using the questioning approach above.
4. Do original research. The path of least resistance many large organizations take for doing research is to retain one of the big research, polling, consulting, or PR firms to conduct a study or survey of some kind. That can be effective, but it's expensive and often discounted by audiences. There's no guarantee that it will be solid, or it will yield unique insights, or it will be based on reliable data. My preference is to hunt down and extract golden nuggets from your own metadata.

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No one has to read or listen to what you say. So be provocative and give them reason to listen.

More Resources on Thought Leadership and Demand Generation

Content Intelligence Isn't Just for Demand Gen Marketers

So, You Want to Be a Thought Leader? A Framework and Guide for Your Thought Leadership Strategy

The Top Benefits of a Data-Driven B2B Demand Gen Strategy