How to engage with C-suite audiences

How to engage with C-suite audiences

Reaching the C-suite - the most influential of your target audience - can be a significant hurdle to generating the business you’re aiming for with your marketing strategy.

 Participants in our recent webinar, ‘Using thought leadership content to grow your sales pipeline and engage market professionals’, said reaching C-suite and niche audiences was one of the biggest hurdles for content creators, representing almost a fifth of survey responses.

 Tell them something they don’t know

 Having something interesting and informative to share is vital, says Philip Harding, global head of commercial content at marketing and content services provider Infopro Digital, which guides clients through long-term editorial strategies across multiple channels. “If you do social well, you give more than you take,” he said.

 “The conversations [the C-suite are] having in their organisation are with their peers and a couple of levels below their pay grade,” he added. “It’s important we get to those people as well with the content… Everyone wants to impress their boss and might say, ‘have you seen this article?’”

 Human connection

 Sellers need to develop their connection with customers by honing their own editorial voice.

 “The hardest thing for a lot of social sellers and marketers is, ‘what is my personal voice?’” said Jim Jockle, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of global marketing and corporate communication at software provider Numerix.

 “It’s not good enough to share your content but how are you empowering your sellers to develop their own voice and their own relationship with the people they’re trying to connect?” he added.

 “Don’t forget the importance of your employees… said Payal Raina, global head of marketing at cloud-based technology company Torstone Technology. “In marketing, you might be a team of 10 or 100. Engage your internal brand ambassador; make sure they have the right tone of voice. That can help amplify and get that message out.”

 Which type of content is right for my audience?

 Audiences are time poor and attention spans are falling. What components of your marketing campaign are going to most effectively help you tell your story?

 About a third of respondents to our survey said smaller events such as webinars - which give you the opportunity to debate a specific topic in your niche with an interactive audience - were the best at driving engagement with capital markets audiences.

 Short-form content like articles; long-form content such as surveys and thought leadership pieces, and industry and media events including conferences each followed at 20%.

 “What’s your audience consuming and from there, do a content audit,” said Karyn Jones, director of marketing, Asia-Pacific, at information and software provider Wolters Kluwer. “Pre-covid and covid, it’s a massive change… go back to the data.”

 “Think about that end-user and what is the overall objective,” added Jockle.

 Additionally, having an omnichannel experience will help you feed the various content consumption styles across your audience.

 “If you’re trying to target that person who might be reading a newspaper, why, somebody might be logging on to Risk.net or somebody who is actually on LinkedIn or social media… we just need to make sure… you’re touching on all three of those channels.”

 Watch our recent webinar: Using thought leadership content to grow your sales pipeline and engage capital market professionals - click here