Saturation, Strategy, and Staying Power: A Conversation with iResearch Services SVP of Global Marketing Madelaine Oppert

Brittany Williams: What’s going on with distribution? It’s this weak link. Everybody knows it’s their weak link, and yet everyone’s really struggling to fix it.

Madelaine Oppert: People make assumptions of how consumers consume. And a lot of people distributing thought leadership—and marketing content in general—assume that people consume insights and data and content the same way they do. Or the same way their C-Suite does, or their board does. It goes back to not knowing your audience well enough.

We are so bombarded by content on a day-to-day basis. Every single organization has thought leadership on a different topic, so we’ve become far more selective about what we give our attention to.

So, you have to ask, “Is it relevant to our audience? Is it showing up in the right space? Are we distributing it in the right formats?” A lot of people don’t have time to read a 40-page document. They want a quick two-page executive summary. They want a 20-minute podcast or video they can listen to on their school run or while they’re on the treadmill or cycling before work starts.

Brittany Williams: So is everyone just running, listening to podcasts?

Madelaine Oppert: I don’t. But an alarming amount of people do. Think about where a lot of your audiences are based—they’re based in cities. New York, Chicago, Dallas. These people are going to have to commute via public transport a lot of the time. A lot of people are using their commute time to get work done, to get the download.

A lot of distribution challenges would be solved if organizations focused more on creating content that genuinely lands with the audience and making sure it shows up in the places that fit their daily habits naturally. If you know your audience well enough to say, 90% of my audience travels to work and is likely to look at LinkedIn on public transport, make sure your social media is posted before 7am so it shows up on their feed when they are on the train.

And also, if you’re going to put a video on LinkedIn, please put captions on it. Because people are not listening to social media with their volume up. Make sure the captions are edited—though if you’re a band of one and you can’t, then use the auto caption on LinkedIn. It’s better than not having them at all.

Brittany Williams: OK, so pretend you’re a one-person thought leadership band, or maybe you’ve got a really small team and you’ve got limited resources. Where are you spending money and where are you spending time to get your firm’s thought leadership out there?

Madelaine Oppert: I would spend money on infographics. Cutting important information down into like, visual storytelling, I think it’s incredibly important and powerful. And we’ve seen that video works for people. Specifically, video with humans, like a really good conversation with a subject matter expert. Those are the two that I like. And then I would put a bit of paid advertising behind it to generate touch points and awareness.

The thing about getting your thought leadership out there and distribution is people assume ‘I’m going to put a report into the market and people are just going to find it,’ right? So, I’ll do a few social media posts. But people don’t trust company LinkedIn pages when you’re talking about your own stuff.

People don’t really want to hear from organizations. They want to hear from people. Especially now, in the age of AI, human perspective and authentic voices matter even more.

Brittany Williams: According to our data, LinkedIn crushes the other distribution channels (owned websites, etc.) in ROI. Why do you think that is?

Madelaine Oppert: When you’re on LinkedIn, people are in the mindset. They’re looking for business content. Nobody goes to LinkedIn to find out how somebody’s doing. That’s Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat. You go to LinkedIn to find who’s talking about what, what news is there? So, if your thought leadership is showing up in their feed, they’re far more likely to click on it and look at it.

When an organization releases a thought leadership report, it’s so important to then go to your subject matter experts and say, “So this was the data and this is the story. What do you take out of it?” And then get them to put it out there, because people are far more likely to listen to what other people in your organization have to say. Do I go to company pages? Never. I go to people I know that work for them.

Brittany Williams: For a lot of my career and thought leadership, the model has been publish the main report—and then publish a bunch of stuff that are derivative from that main report and match it to the format, match it to the channel. Is that still the correct approach or has that evolved?

Madelaine Oppert: I think it’s evolved. Too many organizations create a large report first and only later ask how they’re going to distribute it. I would get marketing people in at the ideation phase with the editorial team and sales and say, “OK, editorial has ideated this topic that we’re going to be talking about,” and then let marketing and sales do a bit of research about the format. How many people downloaded your last white paper? Was it too long? Was it just right?

Your marketing and sales teams are going to be able to help the editorial team to determine, OK, our audience likes long-form content. So, is it always necessary to do the short-form cuts, the articles, and executive summaries? Not if your audience is not reading them because they like long-form. But you’re not going to know that until you’ve spoken to your audience. And nobody’s expecting the editorial team to know the audience as well as the marketing and sales teams, because it’s different disciplines. We speak to them all the time.

The most useful metrics are usually things like engagement from the right people, conversations starting in the comments or inbox, content being shared within peer networks, and seeing the same audiences return and engage consistently over time. Those signals often tell you far more than reach alone.

Thought leadership is not a lead generator. It’s a trust builder. It’s a reputation builder. It’s an awareness builder. You have to consistently show up. You need consistent short-term performance to build long-term reputation. The two are connected. Short-term metrics still matter because they help you understand whether your content is resonating and whether you’re reaching the right audiences. But thought leadership cannot be judged purely on immediate conversions or downloads.

Brittany Williams: What was the traditional approach to gating content, and what’s today’s approach?

Madelaine Oppert: Gating is very old-fashioned. The traditional approach to gating content was to gate everything so that marketing can get the leads. That was based on the assumption that everybody who came to your website and downloaded your report was a potential lead. But if they were a potential lead or they wanted to work with you, they would click that little button at the top saying “Contact us” or book a demo. They would do something.

When they download your report, they’re there to learn something. They thought the topic was interesting, and they just wanted to read it. So, stop thinking that anyone downloading a report is a warm lead. They’re not. So un-gate everything. Especially in the world of AI.

We’re in a zero-click world at the moment. All organizations are seeing their website traffic fall off a cliff because people are using Perplexity and Claude and ChatGPT to do research. AI tools are surfacing and summarizing content on behalf of users. That means discoverability and visibility are becoming just as important as lead capture. So, you have to un-gate everything so that AI has a chance to come in and crawl your information.

Brittany Williams: Where do you turn for thought leadership? Who do you read?

Madelaine Oppert: I read all the big players. Obviously I’m going to read what our competitors are doing, and also companies that we aspire to and the people that we work with. But small teams shouldn’t compare themselves to organizations that have marketing teams in the hundreds and budgets in the hundreds of millions. You’ve got to be realistic for what you can do—and sometimes doing less but doing it well.