Building Executive Brand Image

Building Executive Brand Image

by | Jun 28, 2023 | B2B Marketing

Here’s what I’m seeing in B2B marketing:

There’s a lot of talk on building executive brand image today. And for good reason.

I’ve been in the c-suite for decades, mostly in marketing.

Let’s look at the reasons why exeutive brand matters.

#1 – It’s getting much harder to differentiate

#2 – Most solutions seen as commodities

#3 – Lack of relevance & personalization in B2B

#4 – Ad-blocking & ad-blindness

#5 – People follow humans, not companies

Collage of business people, used to illustrate personal branding for executives.

Why build executive brand image?

You may not like their view, but plenty of B2B purchasers view most solutions as commodities at first glance.

Still, most buyers will pay attention to what makes you different, if they notice a human touch.

Think of executive branding as:

  • a GPS that maps prospective buyers to your company’s ‘why us, why now’
  • a meaningful narrative that causes something to happen
  • the hook by which an audience will place you on their ladder of experiences and preferences
  • a trusty loom that transforms mere threads into colorful tapestries that create visualizations

What’s not working?

😧 your history? not so much…

😧 leadership bios? meh…

😧 client logos…everyone has those

😧 speeds and feeds…worked in the ’90s

Building executive brand image is a touchy subject

Young man in shirt and tie, frozen in ice cube.

Many talented people feel frozen about executive branding strategies.

Yet they’re experiencing:

lack of market presence and acknowledgement

small fish in a big pond syndrome

not enough engagement with quality followers

missed opportunities in growth and career

Building executive brand image answers ‘why connect with you?’.

Also, it helps you resonate with your market. Remember, people buy from people they like.

Most executives have integrity and credibility, but those are not apparent to the casual observer. But in our new era of increasing distrust, your integrity and credibility can be a powerful motivator for others to engage.

Building an executive brand image is crucial for selling solutions and ideas, attracting talent, and moving up the ladder.

Opportunities abound

Ernest Hemingway writing at desk with pen and paper.

Yet, you don’t have to go all Ernest Hemingway to build an executive brand image.

Here’s the blueprint:

  1. Highlight your successes
  2. Show how you do it
  3. Talk the real you..be yourself
  4. Share your passions and motivations

That’s all there is to it.

If you don’t have the time or skillsets, hire someone to help you. Make a decision about investing in building an executive brand, just like you invest in exercise for your health and wellbeing.

It’s what we do…

I offer multiple solutions for tech and SaaS executives stories and brand image.

Would love it if you checked them out!

Personal Branding for Executives

Discovering Product/Market Fit

Discovering Product/Market Fit

by | Jan 21, 2020 | B2B Marketing, B2B Strategy

Discovering Product/Market Fit

dog with cheeseburger in mouth, discovering product market fit

Will the dogs like the dog food?

 (B2C)Product/market fit determines whether you grow steadily, slow, or not at all. Remember, a B2B tech or SaaS product exists for only two reasons:

  • saves time
  • saves money

A consumer tech or SaaS product exists for these reasons:

  •  attractiveness
  • immediacy

You must prove to yourself and your investors that your idea will fly in the marketplace. But the typical Catch-22 is that you don’t have a ton of money for formal market research.

You don’t need it. Use these no/low cost techniques to disover product/market fit, before you develop it.

Why do this?

  • To see your product’s value from your prospects’ standpoint.
  • To hear what your salespeople will hear.
  • To learn how to align your new concept with the marketplace

Sales & marketing are social processes

The first thing to understand (and many people don’t) is that business is a social process. To do this successfully you’ll be spending the bulk of your time talking with people…not staring at a laptop screen.

If this provokes anxiety you’re in good company. Many people are hesitant to reach out to strangers. If you take the plunge, however, you’ll find it gets much easier as you go along.

 

Discovering product/market fit: a 5-point model

Work through the following 5-point strategy model as a first step to discovering product/market fit. Just apply what you already know, or strongly suspect, is true about your market. Support each assumption with whatever market information you have on hand.

  1. What are the trends in my industry?
  2. What’s driving the trends?
  3. What are we doing about the trends?
  4. What are our competitors doing about the trends?
  5. What should we be doing about the trends to grow revenue and profits?

Now you have a baseline.

The rest of this guide is in a PDF. Click button to view/download.

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Best B2B Content Marketing

by | Sep 10, 2019 | B2B Marketing

Creating B2B content that gets shared...a tech company example

It’s fairly easy.

Creating the best B2B content marketing for technology and other companies is relatively simple, even if you skirmish with ideas, grammar or writing. Here’s how to make it easy and enjoyable.

Best B2B content marketing – 1 step at a time.

So you want to create the best B2B content marketing ever?

The best content focuses on a single, current industry hot button. Think user challenges, cost, support, adoption and integrations, for starters.

Keep your eye on the ball. The knowledge you’re distributing will help someone do their job better.

The most effective B2B content

  • Case Study 55% 55%
  • Best Practices 53% 53%
  • How-To Guides 47% 47%
  • Market Trends 43% 43%
  • Product Features 24% 24%
  • Competitive Comparisons 17% 17%

Next steps

To create the very best B2B content marketing, the next step is to go through this short exercise, jotting down a few bullet points.

1. Background: usually a recent trend in your industry, vertical or market space around this topic.

2. Current challenge: a B2B challenge is almost always described in terms of time and money wasted.

3. Your experience: ‘we’ve seen this happen with some of our customers’.

4. Your recommendation: ‘based on this, I recommend…’ It’s fine to recommend something your solution fixes. Just don’t mention your company, product or service.

5. Conclusion: the best B2B content marketing conclusions begin with next steps.

Example: an article for a tech company

You are with a company that sells file management software to certain verticals. Here’s how you would create a piece for an enterprise data storage audience focused on the life sciences vertical.

1. Background – Life sciences is creating petabytes of unstructured data through genome and related projects that have complex workflows with lots of technical and/or rich content. This leads to soaring storage and IT costs for those companies.

2. Widespread Challenge – Data storage costs are skyrocketing and overburdened IT staffs need a way to push file management down to the business user, in this case the research scientist. Allowing the researcher to determine what, when and where to archive data for later retrieval will migrate data to lower cost storage and save huge amounts of time and expense for IT teams.

3. Your Experience – Recently we’ve seen next-generation enterprise software solutions that solve this problem. With ROI focused architectures, these solutions are ideal for cloud computing and object storage.

4. Your Recommendation – Look for software companies that offer cloud file management across multiple storage locations. Fashion a bullet list that, of course, highlights your company’s competitive advantages without ever mentioning the name of your company or product.

5. Conclusion – There’s no longer a mandate for IT departments to keep adding costly near term storage. Nor is it necessary for IT teams to bear the labor brunt of mediating between business users of data and storage archives.

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Write or delegate

With those simple bullet points you have an outline for an article. And you’re on the way to creating top B2B content marketing.

Once you’re happy with your bullet points it’s time to write the article or delegate to someone else. If you delegate make sure it’s someone who knows your company, products and markets.

For written posts aim for a minimum of 1,000 words because search engines won’t take you seriously otherwise. Search engines like to see more than the minimum.

 

Create a headline

Next, look at what you’ve created and think of a seven word headline that grabs someone’s attention and gets you found by search engines. Potential headlines for this article could be:

  • Overwhelmed By Unstructured Data? Here’s Good Medicine.
  • Need Relief For Your IT People?
  • The Unstructured Data Tsunami. Here’s How To Manage.

 

Finally, notice how easily this article can be converted for an audience in a different vertical.

Ninety percent of this content can also apply to industries with rich content or technical workflows including Media & Entertainment, Oil & Gas, Software Development and others.

So with relatively little effort you now have interesting, relevant content that can be blogged, tweeted and posted multiple times across multiple verticals for several weeks.

About Mike Harris

Mike is the founder of Harris CMO Partners, a Nashville based firm offering on demand CMO services for SaaS and tech companies.

He enjoys writing about what's working in B2B sales and marketing.

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