The CEO’s Role in Marketing
With clean energy goals in place, Executives have an opportunity to get in front of the camera and educate their audience about what can be done to meet these requirements.
But when you’re running a business it’s hard to feel like it’s worth your time to create videos, blogs, and helpful content pieces. Surely a phone call or a meeting is more important?
Don’t underestimate the potential impact you can have.
Companies whose CEO’s are involved in marketing are much more visible in the marketplace. Your message becomes stronger.
And it’s even more critical now, as big changes are coming in the construction industry, to get out in front, and let your market know what you’re doing to help.
What’s your role in marketing?
As an Executive, Managing Director, or similar, you have a knowledge of your product and its significance to your market. You’ve gained this through hundreds of hours of conversations with customers. Or market research. And customer research. You can finish their sentences and anticipate their questions.
You also have an intimate knowledge of what solutions are available. And what adaptations specifiers will need to make.
What does this mean?
Where your marketing department struggles, you thrive. You can speak expertly and personably to the biggest questions on people’s minds.
So speak to your audience. Address their concerns. Provide guidance.
It shouldn’t be someone from the marketing department in front of the camera, or writing a blog, it should be you.
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t need to do the work of typing, or recording a video. Get your marketing department to do that. But share your knowledge with them. Be willing to get in front of the camera or sit an interview.
The Brand Effect
Here is a list of executives who aren’t afraid of the camera: Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, and Brian Halligan.
They regularly publish videos in an effort to build the intangible asset of brand.
As David Kinkaid (author of The Brand Driven CEO) says in his Forbes interview by the same name:
[Executives] must start thinking of their brand as an asset of the company as a whole – an asset that can be defined, measured and managed. To do this, they have to change the way they perceive the value of intangible assets.
This intangible asset of brand is the thing that can make you stand out on a list of suppliers if you don’t want to compete exclusively on price.
You can build this by simply anticipating topics of interest for your market and speaking to them, whether it be in a blog, video, or LinkedIn post.
Solutions Worth Sharing
Recently, I talked to a client and asked them to supply some thoughts on how their hydrogen conversion product could benefit the industry. They didn’t have anything on hand, but after a few days they got back to me.
Their managing director had uploaded a blog about their hydrogen conversion kits. These kits could be installed in about an hour and mitigate a large amount of carbon emissions.
My question: why was this not on there before? Sure enough, the blog got a strong response.
If you have an insight, product, or strategy that helps the environment – share it!
Here’s something to consider… If you put out a video you can reach hundreds (or even thousands) of people over time. You can save time, and reach a wider audience than if you or even your sales team were to have many individual conversations.
You can educate your market passively.
And pretty soon, new business will start coming to you.
Conclusion
As clean energy goals necessitate change, new solutions are required. And it’s likely that you’ve been busy to help develop those new solutions.
Now let people know about it. And don’t just hand it off to marketing. Put your own face behind it.
It may be uncomfortable at first, but don’t underestimate the potential impact of speaking directly to your audience.
Besides being helpful to your marketing you’ll also be helping the industry. The more solutions there are, and the more people know about them, the more efficiently we can work together to create a cleaner future.
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Written by Jack Meisinger, General Manager of Project Prospecta
