Although those in the C-suite often feel disconnected from content marketing, they can nonetheless be key contributors to its success for their organization.
For many executives, content marketing, or its impact, is like a unicorn: Someone might have told them it's real, but they don't have the time or inclination to prove it. That, together with other constraints, leads executives to leave the management and measurement of content marketing to marketing managers.
What may grab the attention of execs is that content marketing can provide conversion rates up to six times higher than other digital marketing methods. However, though the ROI can be high, top-quality content marketing requires a significant time investment—from planning to writing to editing to distribution.
Considering the focus and energy your marketing team is putting into content marketing, wouldn't it be great to find ways for leadership to amplify those efforts?
For insight into how B2B leaders can (and should) contribute to content marketing efforts, here are three key content marketing initiatives that especially benefit from leadership participation, input, and energy.
1. Webinars
For many, webinars remain one of the most popular forms of B2B marketing outreach: Of all the webinars held within a year, B2B companies account for 61%. And your team is working hard on these webinars to pull in the 20-40% of webinar attendees who are going to turn into qualified leads.
To pull in more attendees, having presenters with "CEO," "president," or "executive" in their title can help to viewers who are interested in learning from professionals at the top of their field.
Your team can still be responsible for creating the content and designing and packaging the webinar, but showcasing an executive presenter can be a huge booster to their efforts.
Webinars are commonly just 30-45 minutes, which means you as an exec need to devote only a small portion of your time to generate a larger pool of high-quality leads for your organization. If you do want to take a more active role in the webinar itself, marketers on your team will be eager to get your insight into topics that will resonate the most.
Through your daily conversations, insights you gain from industry events, or even emails you receive from newsletter subscriptions in your industry, keep an eye on the most discussed topics in your field so that you can share them with your marketing team and they can turn them into valuable B2B webinars.
2. Informational Interviews
Encouraging your team to sit down with you for an informational interview on a topic is another way to add value to your content marketing. From just a 20-30 minute interview with you or another executive team member, your marketing team can gather inspiration and collect content for blog posts, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, and more.
Our team practices this tactic by regularly sitting down with our executive team to discuss a topic that is relevant to our audience and about which our leadership team has expert knowledge. (See the Four Questions Answered blog series to see this approach in action.)
To ensure that the interview is as impactful and valuable as possible, request that your team prepare the following deliverables, to be shared with you prior to the interview:
- 5-6 primary questions
- 2-3 additional questions
- Proposed content marketing opportunities
- Sharing and syndication plan for the content
3. Videos
Content marketing is traditionally thought of as taking the form of blog posts, whitepapers, and e-books; however, many people are visual learners. They want to watch instead of read.
Though digital and online are often seen as media that disconnect people from their surroundings, including people, video marketing is proving that audiences want a more human and relatable type of content to consume.
Videos can also paint a picture more clearly than words can, in some cases, particularly when you're trying to communicate information quickly and succinctly.
And informational videos featuring organization leaders or showcasing their expertise create pull and intrigue that drive clicks, leads and ultimately sales.
Videos can be used in many different ways and across may different channels—on social, in emails, on your website, or in exhibits. Embedding a video on a key website page can also increase the time spent on-page, exposing visitors to more content and lead gen opportunities.
Videos will also increase the opportunity to get your organization and brand in front of key decision-makers: Of B2B decision-makers asked, 59% prefer video content to text.
Here are some B2B video ideas to get your team thinking creatively on how they can use your expertise in a digital format:
- Company core values
- Customer pain-point remedies
- Industry best-practices
- Product, service, and solution overviews
- Thought-leadership topics
Executive Impact on Content Marketing
Though an effective marketing team is equipped to produce content marketing that resonates with prospects and customers and aligns with your company's goals and strategies, buy-in and participation from the executive team can elevate their efforts and open more opportunities to attract higher numbers of qualified leads.
Particularly in the B2B world, putting faces and names to a company's leadership team can also make the business feel more relatable, reliable, and reachable.
