CEOs Guide to Content Marketing

The brand voice must be formed in the boardroom. But is that the case? CMOs alone cannot bear the brunt. It’s time for the rest of the C-suites to step up.

Modern marketing is highly competitive and complex. It involves multidimensional facets and is more tech-driven. This has led to diverse touchpoints in the buyer journey while the use of data and tools has grown exponentially.

Standing out is the challenging task here. With a waterfall of diverse and relevant content, how can a brand establish a distinctive voice? By providing customized experience and dedicated assistance.

Content creation is the key to doing so. It’s extensive but requires a particular focus. This depends on the audience the brand is catering to. For example, an organization’s IT team wouldn’t show interest in marketing-related content.

It is obvious that as already-established brands, their resources and communication efforts are refined, along with the necessary knowledge and expertise of the market. This further aids in refining their marketing efforts from perspectives unavailable or accessible to everyone.

This is where the C-suites step in with their market expertise and years of experience.

How CEO’s Leadership Impacts Brand Visibility.

leadership and their perspectives can largely influence brand visibility.

Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X is the perfect example of how senior leadership can influence a brand’s identity and impact its growth.

Australian Financial Review reports that the rebranding effort from Twitter to X decreased its value by over 4 to 20 billion dollars. Since this transformation, the users have been migrating in hundreds and thousands.

But is that the only reason? How has Musk’s leadership impacted the brand?

A case study by Agile Consumer Insights outlined that 44.3% of consumers believe that Elon Musk has had an undesirable influence on the platform since he acquired it in 2022. Even the critics add that the rebrand has been overwhelmingly negative.

This was Musk’s response to pessimistic reactions after the rebranding. It is evident that he aims to erase any remnants of someone else forming this platform. This has had a significant impact on X’s branding.

Users first questioned – Why X? But soon understood that aligning with Musk’s personality and entrepreneurial inclinations mark this as the roadmap to the Everything app. In layman’s terms, this is part of a big plan. Users understood this was very on-brand with Musk’s personality and vision in quite a condescending way.

While the rebranding efforts to X hold a special place for Elon Musk, it has lost its meaning. Several brands have also pulled their ads since his takeover.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, only 44% of US citizens trust the CEOs. Thus, their leadership and trust have become more significant than ever before. Meanwhile, another study by Edelman and LinkedIn asserts how B2B thought leadership can foster sales and conversion rates.

Understanding CEOs Content Strategy.

As in the case of X, we witnessed that senior leadership can significantly influence the brand’s direction. When this influence is positive, it can work wonders for brand visibility and reach.

The need is to outline how CEOs influence a company’s content marketing strategies and what difference it inherently signifies to help drive business growth. Content marketing is significant in fostering brand awareness and recognition.

However, as a CEO who has invested resources and budget into the same, how do we know if they will generate any ROI?

Isn’t that the end goal of marketing for the business?

While the crucial question is whether the strategies are worth the expenditure, you can attribute the generated revenue to these efforts.

There are free tools such as Google Analytics that help you track the performance of your blogs and highlight the website traffic or number of podcast listeners. This is not the end.

Involve your teams. As a leader who represents the brand, a CEO can encourage different sub-teams in marketing, such as SEO, writers, social media, and graphic designing, to sync their ideas and schedules. But one of the essential elements here is the CMO and CEO stepping into each other’s shoes to understand the expectations in their entirety.

Content is a synergistic product of these teams. And the decision-makers apply direction to it. Without expert leadership at the forefront, the marketing creatives and the business goals (evident in numbers) will never align.

If CMOs and CEOs do not find a middle ground, the changes across the marketing-scape could outrun the strategies they come up with, especially with a limited view of the playing field, as most CEOs come from a finance or tech background. They should understand where the disconnect between marketing measurement and business impact lies.

CEO expectations vs. deliverables.

But what is the reason?

In the Harvard Business Review article “Why CMOs Never Last“, research asserts that:

Eighty percent of CEOs say they don’t trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs. Not surprisingly, CMOs have the briefest tenure in the C-suite. The churn can lead to internal business disruptions.

Additionally, 40% of Fortune 500 companies do not comprise customer or growth-related roles in the CEO’s executive committee.

The spotlight is on CMOs, but the disjuncture between them and CEOs is not a one-sided wrestling match. Rather, it is not a wrestling match at all but a disconnect on both sides. The article highlights one of the biggest problems that CEOs face: not understanding the extent CMOs play in driving growth.

This can lead to a gap between the undertaken responsibilities, expectations, and actual performance. However, it isn’t about making a bad hire.

Neil A. Morgan and Kimberly A. Whitler state that it is about the role design at the end of the day. And a lot of this responsibility falls on the CEOs. If a CMO’s position had a different history of responsibilities compared to the present one, it can impact other C-level executives.

As someone part of the upper management, they have a concrete idea regarding the company’s internal workings in cases when its business model has changed or the industry itself is transforming.

CMO Guides Through Uncertainty.

However, the CEO has to communicate internal expectations regarding two specific factors:

1. Scope: Is there enough breathing room between strategic thinking, decision-making authority, and implementation process?
2. Structure: Are the responsibilities centralized or disintegrated across the organization?

The HBR article reports a similar stance – “Typically, CMOs aren’t given enough authority to do what’s expected of them.”

It is crucial to note that CEOs can significantly assist in enhancing the overall marketing performance. They should have a clear picture of the outcomes, roles, level of responsibilities, skills, and experience required – all in alignment with the success they have envisioned or the milestones they expect the CMOs to reach, along with much-needed wiggle room for innovation and creativity.

Here, the disconnect is evident.

A brand’s growth strategy should foremost align with marketing, and even a report by McKinsey & Company asserts this. In marketing, business leaders hold two different priorities: customer and growth.

According to a McKinsey report, CEOs often turn to other operational or strategy leaders, as opposed to CMOs, for growth strategies. This largely determines whether the marketing strategies are more analytical or consumer-centric.

The CEO and CMO’s joint assistance in defining marketing’s role while reshaping the growth strategy can impact the overall performance of these strategies. This misalignment between the two C-level executives’ perceptions of the role marketing plays in business growth can skew the company’s performance.

How to Develop a Content Strategy that Aligns with the CEO’s Objectives.

The business goals should fit in like two pieces of a puzzle with the right content marketing strategies. Thus, the efforts should be:

But how can we ensure that the outlined strategies meet the necessitated objectives?

1. Defining Clear KPIs

First, the focus is on these objectives aligning with the overall business goals. Hence, define clear KPIs, i.e., outline measurable indicators.

Consider CAC, i.e., your organization’s goal is to reduce customer acquisition costs.

There are numerous flexible approaches to acquiring customers, including promotional and advertising strategies. But one of the most seamless and sustainable ways involves content marketing, especially investing in SEO tools.

SEO helps optimize your high-quality content to be easily found by your target audience, helping the brand content rank higher on SERPs and increase CTRs.

The process of curating high-quality content through thorough research might be extensive. Then, optimizing it to rank higher is another feat. But SEO is not necessarily science. HubSpot states that all you need is for the search engines to read and understand your content.

While understanding what SEO is and how it works is easy, making it work for your brand can be a challenge that is not unique.

Targeting the correct keywords here is paramount.

There are certain factors to consider here – conversion potential, keyword difficulty, search intent, and search volume. Often, if people are using informational keywords for searches, it is understandable they have negligible to no purchasing intent.

There are four types of search intents:

Understanding the search intent behind the keywords relevant to your subject matter will help you curate the right content for the audience. Your content should address and resolve the searcher’s query.

This is how Google ranks pages. It ranks pages that are the most relevant results.

And having direct experience can be a contributing factor. Here, the CEOs must work with CMOs and other marketing leaders to ensure that investing in these tools and strategies drives actual results (numbers and data!).

An increase in market share, revenue, and brand loyalty – the content marketing KPIs should indicate what your business hopes to achieve with the developed content marketing tactics.

Your brand’s corporate value is evident through the numbers visible to the stakeholders and should be realistic and achievable.

2. Curating a Detailed Buyer Persona

According to another HubSpot 2024 marketing report, only 65% of the businesses hold high-quality information on their audience base. And others lack any crucial information.

When questioned on what they know regarding their target audience, most marketers were unaware of their preferences, interests, demographics, and the type of content they consume, among other things.

Now, as marketers, we witness plenty of content, especially blogs, that state that knowing your target audience is crucial. And the core of how marketing works. But even in 2024, with AI and other tools at our doorstep, the marketers who actually might know their customers is 65%.

The other 25% should invest in securing time and resources dedicated to curating a detailed buyer persona. Why are we so adamant about this?

The answer is personalization.

Personalization has become the go-to component of content marketing. This is not merely because it elevates the quality of the content but also because it speaks to prospects, making them feel appreciated.

Personalizing content attracts potential customers rather than just resonating with your existing clients. Once your brand has curated the persona according to its relevant audience, you can attract a much larger and fresher audience pool.

HubSpot report proves this. A staggering 96% of marketers state that personalized experience can increase sales and facilitate customers to become repeat buyers. Isn’t that amazing?

These stats should encourage your marketing teams to map a detailed buyer persona.

A detailed buyer persona is like an engine oil, enabling your marketing and sales strategies to work better. Beyond enhancing your audience pool, it also helps improve your products, optimize content, and tailor marketing messages.

While feedback loops and surveys have advantages, buyer personas tell you what potential buyers want to hear, fueling your demand generation strategy. For example, if your target audiences prefer emails, your content team can develop an engaging email template to resonate with prospective clients.

This helps segment the audience and customize messages that cater to their pain points and align with their purchasing behavior. Hence, every buyer persona differs and is unique to a business because each has different requirements.

So, how do you develop a persona such that it aligns with your business goals?

Creating a buyer persona requires generalizing first. You find the commonalities between your prospects and then pinpoint the specificities according to which you tailor the messages.

The messages transcend the template-ness of the structure and comprise the nitty-gritty vocabulary with the elevator pitch that is deemed relevant for your potential buyers.

3. Reiterating the Tone of the Content

Your brand cannot just be one of the many in the market. It needs to stand out.

While your content team creates high-quality resonating content and the SEO team helps it rank higher, what if its tone and quality merely fit the basics? How is your content different from others working on the same stuff as you?

Primarily, what type of content do your marketing and website materials entail? And there is a vital distinction between what you do and what should be done.

Think about the subject matter of the curated content. Is it solution-oriented, informational, or conversational? Today, with the world filled with different types of content, such as short-form videos or long-form blogs, the audience is fatigued.

This is the era of attention-deficiency that snackable content thrives on. So, how do you gauge which content type will work for your brand?

Find the balance between keeping the abstractness and keeping it to the point. It can be a combination of both. Your clients need the solution but also something new, a subject matter that doesn’t touch upon the same material rampant across the market.

How else will your brand foster recognition and awareness among newer markets?

Imagine if you are only creating content such as product comparisons. This will generally appeal to those in the last stage of the buyer’s journey.

What about the top of the funnel? You still have to attract and engage them so much so they move ahead in their purchasing.

Balance the promotional and educational content to inform and nurture prospects.

Case studies can help build trust and help those with any form of intent move ahead with your sales team.

But building that intent is also crucial. And the perfect form of content can assist. Inform your audience and lure them. The art of storytelling has been wavering for quite a while now, especially with the advent of AI.

But content is an area of marketing that can re-establish the creativity and essence of what marketing is supposed to do – end in a sale by fascinating and engaging your prospect.

Content Should Avoid Sales Pitches.

A content of this specific type becomes diluted to say the same things over and over again. But, each infographic, blog, podcast, and whitepaper, while remaining consistent in the tone that your brand holds, should also be unique and say something new.

In B2B, your target audiences are majorly other established businesses and decision-makers. Generalized content doesn’t say anything new to them. So, it would instead give them the solution they require by knitting the content differently than a machine would.

A unique perspective combined with high-quality informative content can foster your brand visibility. Also, encourage your clients to approach your brand in the first place and help with their decision-making processes. The main focus to ensure the aforementioned should be on:

• Avoid fluff and generic AI content that doesn’t offer a solution, analysis, or insight on the chosen topic.
• Recognizable subject-matter expertise that holds the authority to say, “This is the right solution for your business”.
• Leverage the detailed buyer persona to identify and address customer pain points. The storytelling may determine the tone of the entire piece.

However, if the introduction is not concise and addresses the problems that the customer is facing, they may not be willing to read the piece in the first place. This will impact the time that your prospect spends on the page, influencing your overall engagement rates.

Each persona should be addressed differently, as they require different levels of detail from your content. If you target only a specific section, your strategies will miss out on the possible clients, which is detrimental to your business.

4. Promoting Your Content

One of the most engaging and seamless ways to promote your content is using different content types across multiple channels.

When you share a post on LinkedIn or upload a blog post, it might witness engagement, but there is still something amiss.

Share long-form content across different platforms and tap into diverse forms of content. A blog post on cross-border payments can be filtered into diverse short-form content such as an infographic on emerging trends in the landscape, a summary on LinkedIn, or a newsletter adding to the subject matter.

Imagine browsing through a blog post, and a pop-up studies your intent to identify your pain point. It makes the readers feel seen.

This can lead to increased website visits with the ideal CTA and click-through rates, giving more traction to your website content. And also helps in converting a reader into a paying customer.

Leveraging different marketing channels and platforms can target different audiences. Webinars and live streams also serve a similar purpose. When your brand’s representative is in front of a camera or conversation with another industry expert, it can also concretize your brand as a leader.

Conversations Build Brand Trust.

It’s evidence of your loyalty and capabilities. Leverage trending topics on the latest tech and marketing trends, use case studies and offer best practices. This will not leave any space for prospective clients to wonder what you have to offer.

These platforms are some of the best ways to engage with your audience. Once a webinar or LinkedIn Live is scheduled, promoting them becomes paramount to increase attendees.

Including CTAs on social posts and newsletters can help you here. But also, don’t miss out on curating content that focuses on leaving your audience intrigued regarding the live event. Hence, the content should be consistent to leave space for imagination and touch upon what the audience can expect from the event.

While the live event is educational, creating intrigue beforehand is significant.

CEOs Must Maximize Resources.

The CEO’s long-term brand strategy should align with the time and resources CMOs are granted under the guise of a marketing budget.

Hence, a CEO’s task in ensuring that their company’s marketing strategies demonstrate positive results includes designing the CMO’s role in the right way, as this directly influences the business’ performance and growth.

The brand performance is also highly dependent on the brand’s reputation. Yes, negative reviews create a conversation around the brand and might help elevate awareness, but it’s a dead end. The conversation still doesn’t generate revenue but results in more customers dropping off.

Brand identity should not equal a CMO’s or CEO’s personality but have an essence of its own to develop a positive market conversation.

Content marketing plays a vital role here.

CEOs leverage content to help their businesses compete and lead in the market. The chief executive is the leader of the brand and, to a large extent, its face. A leader with a specific vision is their brand’s chief ambassador.

The quality of the curated content also holds crucial weight.

Brands require a narrative that entails a fundamental intent, even a global one like X. The lack of one is why the public perception of the platform has shifted. The marketing gimmicks should inculcate and enhance the essence of the brand rather than that of a single business leader.

With direct expertise and involvement of C-suites in curating content marketing strategies, marketing can enhance its approaches and streamline them to meet the overall business vision.