Build Your Brand with Executive Thought Leadership
Highlights
Executive thought leadership can play a significant role in company brand strategy.
Marketing leaders are responsible for getting leadership buy-in, providing leaders a platform for sharing, and guiding the creation of thought leadership content for executive brand building.
A marketing strategy that integrates executive branding and company branding resonates with customers and can contribute to company growth.
In Prime 8’s work with many Fortune 100 companies, we’ve identified an often overlooked opportunity to leverage the personal brand of company executives to add value to company marketing strategy and campaigns.
Your C-suite can serve as key voices in your overall company brand awareness and equity---if you integrate their personal branding into your marketing strategy appropriately. Here, we share some tips we’ve tested with good results.
But first, here’s a look at why executive brand building is a growing best practice that enables your C-suite to contribute to overall brand strategy.
Executive Thought Leadership: The Secret Sauce for Brand Strategy
Company executives have a distinct advantage in brand building. First, they can speak about your company with first-hand knowledge, genuine enthusiasm, and conviction. They inherently understand your business and stay in tune with current industry trends. They likely already have an opinion about those trends and where your business and industry are headed.
Why Tap into Your CEO’s Brand
Second, their voices are valuable to people outside your company walls. Consider the following statistics:
65% of buyers say thought leadership significantly changed the perception of a company for the better.
In one research report conducted by Weber Shandwick, global executives estimated that nearly one half of a company’s market value is attributable to its CEO. CEO reputation continues to be a premium form of currency and wealth in an economy where companies trade on their reputations every day.
According to 2022 research from Brunswick, 82% of potential employees will research a CEO’s online presence when considering joining a company.
The same Brunswick study found that 49% of investors use digital and social media sources to learn what members of the C-suite are saying, and 4 out of 5 use digital to make an investment decision.
Leverage the Personal Visibility of Your C-suite
At the enterprise level, the C-suite is often almost synonymous with the brand. For example, who doesn’t think of Warren Buffett when they think about Berkshire Hathaway or Bill Gates when they think of Microsoft?
Your C-suite is an extension of your company’s image. Their personalities and actions reflect on your organization; they’re saying and doing things every day that align with your company’s values and reinforce your brand image. Why not tap into it?
In a recent Fast Company post, Mack McKelvey, founder and CEO of SalientMG, observed: “Focusing on the visibility of your founder or key executives is so important in building your organization’s brand. Especially these days, the human factor is more important than any feature or flash you can offer your audience. Putting a face to a brand is not new, but amplifying someone who is real and relatable in their own right has become critical.”
How do you get your C-suite involved in public branding building? How can you amplify executive thought leadership as part of your marketing strategy?
Support C-Level Content Development
At Prime 8, we’ve found that supporting the C-suite in personal brand building efforts goes hand in hand with supporting company brand building. This integrated strategy works best when marketing leaders guide executive brand building and control the narrative. Here’s how to do it:
Get Executive Buy-in
Understand that building their personal brand is not always at the top of the executive’s to-do list. C-level executives may need to be convinced that building their personal brands is a worthwhile pursuit and within their existing skill sets. Executives often have an opinion about marketing but lack expertise on the subject. Citing examples of strong employer and executive brands like Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway provides a good starting point. Connect the dots for executives; show how their actions and insights can contribute to a unique company identity.
Define the Executive’s Personal Brand
Define the executive’s personal brand, including tone and style of voice, personality traits, and other details that should be infused into all content and interviews. How does the executive wish to be perceived by peers and clients? Select a few themes that represent the executive’s areas of expertise, so that you can find appropriate content topics to explore.
Enable Thought Leadership Creation
Once you’ve got the green light from executives to work on personal brand building, it’s time to gently guide the creation of thought leadership that integrates well with your other marketing initiatives.
Executive thought leadership takes many forms, but at its foundation, it is about establishing and promoting a leader's expertise, insights, and vision within their industry or field. Here are some forms of thought leadership to spark your executives’ creative juices:
Thought leadership can include providing valuable insights on emerging industry trends, market analysis, and future predictions. Offering informed perspectives on any of these topics is a great start to thought leadership.
Thought leadership also includes authoring content such as articles, whitepapers, blog posts, research reports (especially the commentary that accompanies them), or case studies.
Although your executives may not want to create these types of content on their own, they can lend their expertise in the form of internal interviews with ghostwriters, quotable quotes to include in content, and perhaps the forward to ebooks or the executive summary for a whitepaper.
Distribute Executive Thought Leadership
Building an executive’s personal brand only works for your corporate branding strategy when you choose the right distribution channels and platforms to showcase your executive thought leadership. Prime 8 suggests the following distribution channels:
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the go-to social media platform for executives in most industries. Create LinkedIn posts to share on your executive’s personal page (with a link to the company page, of course) and in LinkedIn newsletters. Also, be sure your executives are joining the right LinkedIn groups for your industry and interacting with forums in those groups.
Industry conferences and trade shows: Secure speaking engagements at industry conferences for your executives. Promote these occasions heavily in your company marketing materials, creating social media posts and potentially even paid advertising to build traffic to the event and showcase the thought leadership of your executive.
Industry publications and media outlets: Work with your PR agency to place executive thought leadership articles and insights into prominent industry publications and with respected media outlets. The more exposure you can get for your C-suite, the better.
Podcasts and webinars: Host podcasts and webinars with your C-suite front and center. Don’t forget to also help your executives secure guest appearances on other industry podcasts and webinars as well.
Company social media channels: Offer access to your company’s social media channels, handles, hashtags, or other assets so executives can post and share at their convenience.
Create Best Practices and Guidelines for Executives and Marketing Professionals
When engaging in executive branding building as part of an integrated company brand building strategy, there are some general guidelines to follow as a marketing manager. Here are some Prime 8 suggestions based on years of marketing consultation with clients:
Ensure that any content shared by executives aligns with your company values and messaging. You can do that by creating a standard set of guidelines for executives, internal marketing teams, external ghostwriters, PR firms, and anyone else involved in content creation to follow.
Create a detailed content plan that includes the topics the executive will cover and the types of content for creation. Assign specific content to ghostwriters, internal writers, or the executives, if they feel comfortable with authoring their own content.
Ensure that all involved in content creation understand the target audience and any related company marketing campaigns for the content. (Prime 8’s Content Marketing Guide eBook provides additional step-by-step processes for every phase of the content creation process.)
Develop a review process that includes marketing leaders and executives to ensure brand alignment and avoid potential PR conflicts.
Monitor and measure the impact of executive content on brand building.
Create an asset storage system to collect and organize all assets created by each executive so that content can be repurposed when appropriate.
Get Help with Integrated Executive and Company Branding
Building the personal brand of company executives while also building your company brand can be challenging. We’ve found that in many cases, executives are too busy to build their brands without significant help and guidance from internal marketing leaders or an outside consulting firm.
Prime 8 and our partner company, Delightful Communications bring brand-building expertise to the table. Our consultants work with your executives and internal marketing leaders to create and even execute marketing campaigns that incorporate C-suite thought leadership, identify and monitor KPIs, and support all stakeholders with content services. Together, Prime 8 and Delightful Communications provide an end-to-end solution for integrated executive and company branding. Let’s connect to discuss your marketing goals.
