Today’s C-Suite leaders are flooded with information from all angles, and especially in these challenging economic times, their attention is stretched thin. If you are tasked with marketing to such a highly-sought-after audience, you must be able to deliver unique insights and usable tools that provide value.
However, an effective C-Suite content marketing strategy can’t be created if you don’t truly understand the people behind the titles. Here are three tips for communicating with the C-Suite that Mindsailing gathered from our recent award-winning creative campaign for a national health care company.
Related Content: Read more about Mindsailing’s award-winning campaign that achieved a 63% engagement rate with C-Suite leaders and resulted in over 1,400 new subscribers.
Get to know them through audits and interviews
In order to understand C-Suite leaders, it’s important to go to the source and interview leaders in the actual roles. Through these exploratory discussions, you can take the general temperature of their sentiment while validating the most pressing problems and concerns that other research claims these leaders face. What are the trends they see emerging in their markets? What do they see developing on the competitive horizon? What industry pressures are shaping their priorities and their decision-making? These answers can help you create a relevant framework for your messaging while steering the direction of the content to real and specific business challenges.
Reaching this audience is always a challenge. But you can gain insights into their current conversations by conducting an audit of the media sources they consume, as well as the content they produce. Areas of interest can be discerned through a review of trade media themes, C-Suite authored event presentations, executive social media platforms, blogs and round tables. It’s important to understand the information that your audience is creating and absorbing so that you can ensure your communications strategy is relevant and delivers vital information they don’t already know.
Build personas for each position
These insights can be combined to help create persona profiles for each C-Suite role (which may include Chief Financial Officers, Chief Executive Officers, Chief Marketing Officers and others). This exercise goes beyond just illustrating the business goals or functional role of these positions. Creating profiles allows you to dive levels deeper, fleshing how their roles may be changing, organizational pressures they’re facing, their key stakeholder relationships, and their attitude toward transformation, partnership, and guiding innovation within their industry.
It’s crucial to create these human-centered portraits of your C-Suite audience before you begin crafting communications for them. Along with guiding content, it protects the creative process from cliched imagery, jargon or unfavored formats. Once you have personas established, they serve as the bedrock of your strategy and a north star you can refer back to consistently throughout the content creation process.
Related Content: Read more about how your organization can tap into the power of transformation through empathy-based communications.
Serve up fresh, focused insights
Because C-Suite leaders face a high level of information overload, it’s imperative to deliver focused, credible content that will grab their attention and keep it. They only have time for relevant information they haven’t seen before — information that can be easily digested, then readily applied to their work. As you create C-Suite-focused content, refer back to the persona profiles you created for each targeted role to ensure you’re speaking to them literally and visually in their terms and filling the gaps with the kind of messaging and imagery they want to see.
Additionally, it’s important to consider the gatekeepers — likely a member of the C-Suite leader’s own team — who could be the first touchpoint for your content. If your messaging can add secondary value for them, it increases the overall likelihood that it will make an impact and stick in your targeted organizations.
Related Content: Check out more of the B2B marketing insights that we learned at the 2020 B2B Marketing Exchange Conference.
Even with the most impactful communications strategy, gaining the attention of C-Suite leaders can prove difficult. That’s why it’s so important that once you do, you only deliver meaningful, pertinent and effective content designed to help them succeed in their roles.
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for an executive audience? Contact us today.