Abel Delgado
Marketing Director
AMI
No need for suspense: B2B Marketing in Latin America is missing thought leadership.
More importantly, it’s missing the key ingredient to producing fast, effective and prolific thought leadership: market research.
Before we get into how market research will make a gigantic difference, let’s examine why thought leadership marketing can be particularly effective in Latin America.
Latin America lacks data. Fresh takes on topics can be driven by the experience of an expert who develops important insights—but as we know from medical breakthroughs, they are also driven by new data from recent studies. If your new data solves a pain point for your customers or helps them find new business opportunities, it will bring people who may need your products or services.
But Latin America doesn’t have the data ecosystem found in other regions. While you can certainly find SOME data from industry associations or government sources, you won’t be able to access the wide range of information available in other regions or countries.
This is a significant gap.
However, a company that develops good research can fill that gap in their niche—and us it to drive traffic and new business. Obviously, the numbers aren’t usually enough. However, most companies abound with internal experts who can analyze what the numbers mean for their industry and why. The challenge is less in gathering and analyzing the data as it is in selecting the area to research to make sure it will be of broad interest to your audience.
Google algorithm changes in April 2025. The big takeaway from this is that Google is using more AI summaries that break down website content. This means that people search, find an answer neatly summarized at the top of the search results, and don’t scroll down to visit the sites with the content. They don’t have to. This kills organic traffic from searches, which most companies rely on to keep a steady flow of visitors to their sites.
For B2B companies, this means that generic content that can be easily summarized won’t work to bring people to their sites anymore. So simple lists and easily researched factoids found by AI that writers use to create pieces will—ironically—be rendered useless by AI.
But true thought leadership is by definition original—it doesn’t come from AI scanning websites and using large language models to provide a quick answer. Developing content that isn’t simple lists of easily found facts—though difficult—can help your company attract more potential customers to your site.
Thought leadership changes perceptions. In many cases, a company will spot an opportunity—but it doesn’t just need buy-in from prospective customers. It also needs to get new partners on board to take full advantage of an opportunity. As we’ve seen in the past, new technology can require a network of partners adopting it in order to attract the end users that are the target market.
A collective effort is needed to make this work. That’s where thought leadership can help partners become aware of the opportunity, see the value of it, and work with the company who created the thought leadership to turn the opportunity into revenue.
Besides attracting partners, thought leadership can show why a new approach is needed in a specific industry or show why a new technology can save money or time or offer other benefits.
A Quick Way for LatAm B2B Marketers to Build a Thought Leadership Program
Launching Thought Leadership with One Key Step
For B2B companies, the fastest way to become a thought leader is to produce a market research study, either on their own or through a partner. While a survey of customers is a common approach, you also can arrange for longer interviewers of top leaders in your industry to get their thoughts on trends, challenges and solutions, an analysis of risks posed by political circumstances or legislation, or any number of other approaches. The study format is important, but it’s even more crucial to make sure the study relates directly to:
- Your company’s current or future strategies
- Your current or prospective customers
Some ways for your company team to kick off ideas for a study would be to ask:
- Is there a problem a large group of customers are experiencing—and can your company solve it?
- What are existing or potential customers in your sector doing that is different?
- Does this behavior offer an opportunity or present a threat by disrupting current business models?
- Is a new technology disrupting your sector—and what does this mean for future business practices or strategies?
- What new technologies or mega-trends are on the horizon that will impact your sector or industry?
Those questions get at the basic topic and scope, but you must ensure that the study also aligns with your company’s strategic goals, so ask:
- Which company goals will thought leadership based on this study achieve? How?
- Will these results influence changes in laws/regulations that favor your company?
- Will the study highlight an opportunity the company can leverage?
- Will the study influence other players in the industry to change business practices in a way that will benefit your company? How so?
- How could the sales team directly benefit from the data produced by the study?
- What kind of content would this study produce—and would these content types be of interest to people in your industry?
- Who will be the face of your thought leadership? Who will help author the content, narrate videos, present study results at trade shows, talk to the media?
With answers to these questions, now a clear direction emerges:
You’re investing X$ for the study because with the results in hand, you can sell more of an existing product, sell more of a new product you would develop, influence legislators to pass favorable laws for your business or roll back restrictive regulations, attract new partners for a new initiative, convince customers to purchase your technology, etc.
You have thought leader(s) in place who can present the results in different formats because they are mediagenic AND have a powerful track record in your industry, so they are known to colleagues and maybe to the whole industry.
So now you don’t have a vague idea that MIGHT be helpful or that FEELS right in your gut. You have a defined study whose results will offer tangible benefits with specific goals you have defined. That’s key for thought leadership that offers a return.
What to Do with Study Results
With powerful, relevant results for your industry, you can get the most value out of your study by branching it off into a wide range of topics, such as:
- A keynote presentation at an industry event(s)
- A pitch for industry podcasts that would feature your study results
- A series of podcast episodes (if your company produces a podcast)
- A standard whitepaper (text and graphics)
- An infographic report (breaking down the data with illustrations and graphics)
- An infographic nugget series (short infographics highlighting 1-2 data points per infographic that you distribute on social media)
- A short video series where one of your company leaders breaks down a key study result in 60-90 seconds or less
- A blog post series covering different aspects of the study results
You can use some or all of these content formats (and more), but the key is mapping out the content plan in steps before the study kicks off—and sharing the content plan with your research team, whether internal or external, since they have to align their methodology and execution with the content.
Next Steps
Contact us to save time and ensure success. Why?
We’ve done over 4,000 market research studies in Latin America since 1993.
We’ve done 100+ studies designed specifically to fuel thought leadership by companies.
We execute thought leadership for ourselves, so we can easily help you shape the thought leadership content for your study results—and even produce it for you.
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