What if No One Sees Us as Experts?
Everyone knows that a well-run company must have a Chief Executive. It helps to have a legal advisory, a CFO, CTO and someone to head up operations. If you want to stay in business, you should probably have a Chief Marketing Officer and a crack sales team.
Assemble the right executive team and you have a fighting chance at success.
So, which one of these players do you expect your prospect to come to when they realize they need a solution to a problem that just isn’t going to go away? Hint: they won’t come looking for an executive by title; they’ll come in search of an expert.
When people need help, they go to people who they know can solve their problem. If your team isn’t viewed by your industry as a team of experts, you have some work to do.
Here is how we help our clients solve this problem and win more business.
Goal: Pick an executive to establish as your thought leader. If you have time and budget feel free to pick a team, but it’s cheaper, faster and easier to start with one. I like to go with either the CEO or the Head of Marketing. The goal would be to establish this executive as an expert as soon as possible.
Strategy: We’ve already established the basic strategy and tactics when we solved the unknown executive problem in a previous post. This is the same, except we focus our content marketing on the specific problems we know the company’s executives need to solve.
Tactics can include any or all of the following.
– Author byline articles each quarter for the industry’s trade publications focused on relevant challenges.
– Speak at 1 or more industry conferences.
– Participate in as many industry podcast interviews as possible.
– Post weekly updates and engaging content on LinkedIn.
– Launch a company podcast and live stream it to the industry.
– Participate in industry awards programs recognizing top talent.
– Develop a blog on our company site with the executive’s insight.
– Promote content, media mentions, and speaking engagements through our social channels.
– Pitch the executive as an expert source for press related to his expertise.
– Make sure everyone in the company shares the executive’s thought leadership content in their networks.
We generally like to focus on tracking the following Success Metrics:
– number of byline articles published
– number of speaking sessions in a year
– growth in followers and engagement on executive’s LinkedIn profile
– number of podcast and media interviews secured
Of course, the most important success metric for any kind of business-related strategic communications is the number of times the phone rings with requests for information or an RFP. If the work isn’t resulting in more sales, then it’s not working.
Once your first executive is out of the gate, you can add others to the program. For more information about how we structure this kind of engagement, schedule a call with us today.
