CEO's expectations on Corporate Marketing

Dieter Weisshaar • April 13, 2023

CEO's expectations on Corporate Marketing

Marketing budgets are always a discussion topic. What can a CEO expect if a percentage of revenue is spent for corporate marketing? Have the goals been defined and expectations aligned. Marketing can not meet expectations if the ecosystem is not supportive. Let's have a deeper look in the B2B sector and the dependencies.

Corporate Marketing is responsible for many things like the brand, the employer branding and sales leads. That is a pretty widely distributed responsibility.

Marketing is responsible for the brand but what is branding about and how do we measure it. Branding has many components, it is the brand itself: the identity, the image and the reach. So your brand should be widely known in your target group and serve your values, it should have a positive emotional appeal to create a supportive behavior. Best case it becomes an intangible asset on your balance sheet.

A brand is something on how the target group should perceive your company while the reputation is how the company is perceived. There are short term aspects to reputation which can change it pretty quickly. On the other hand a brand is built long term. More Nevertheless if you define your target group as a set of stakeholders like prospects, customers, employees, talents, business partners, shareholders, press, politicians, public it comes closer together in the way that your company reputation is how the company is perceived and your brand is how you want it be perceived based on certain criteria.

The main drivers are:

Vision & Leadership
Products & Services
Social Responsibility
Work Environment
Financial Performance

It is important to mention that Vision & Leadership are main influencers on your reputation. Hence the CEO in person is a driver of company reputation. Source: Wiedmann/Fombrun/van Riel, 2007

The reputation drivers address your target group (stakeholders) as mentioned above to create an emotional appeal (Admiration, Credibility, Sentiment, Trust) and finally lead to the reputation value which can be measured by the reputation quotient. The better you do on your brand marketing, the closer is your reputation reflecting it.

But Marketing can not do Brand Building on its own. The board needs to agree on the purpose, the values, the vision, the mission and the strategy the company stands for and execute upon. That requires many functions in the company to be aligned such as Public Relations or People & Culture as the reputation reflects on the work environment, social responsibility, ESG etc.. Your products & services need to step up to meet your values and create customer value. It will become really tough to create a great brand and reputation if you have an innovative product but the work environment is challenging or your environmental footprint is not good.

By the way if you manage to create this positive brand and reputation driven by the board and fully embraced by your employees, the likelihood of a great employer branding is high and ability to attract the best talents as well.

Take away #1: Brand and Reputation need to come together but this is a board topic and need the whole company to be aligned. Marketing can drive all of it.

Marketing needs to fill our pipeline and not only with sales leads but with candidates to hire as well - that is true but what does it require.

While building a brand and addressing your target audience Marketing needs to create traffic and reach. Ideally the traffic and reach serves three main topics:

Building the brand
Creating Leads
Attracting Talents

To create reach you need an ecosystem that is ready for traffic. It all starts with what you have to tell - the content. Content has many flavors: Company news, product announcements, strategic advice in white papers or webinars, survey results, hints & tips, customer reference stories, investor presentations.

The content can be created and published by marketing but in many cases marketing depends on the other functions to deliver input, have speakers and giving meaningful insight. Valuable content is key to succeed in creating reach.

Second your ecosystem needs to be ready. That means you need the whole process chain up and running. No matter if you create traffic with events, fairs, advertisement or the below the line approach (online marketing, SEO etc.) there needs to be a corporate website that is able to point the visitor in a user friendly way to the relevant content. There should be a marketing automation software behind to achieve GDPR compliance, ability to identify the visitor and provide analytics. Valuable content can be provided in exchange for customer data such as name, email, phone number (gated content). The marketing automation software will do all of this, follow up with eMails and measure the interest of your visitors. At some point the visitor becomes a lead will be contacted by inside sales and handed over to sales after qualification.

Same applies for your ecosystem on the people & culture side, when traffic hits your website, your ecosystem should be ready to get interested talents informed, attracted and easily apply for a job through a real time job portal. If the user journey is great, you get far more candidates.

As soon as you have valuable content and an ecosystem that is modern, user friendly and automated, you create more traffic. Traffic comes through channels, they can be traditionell such as advertisement, TV, Radio, fairs and events or through social media, search engine optimization etc. You need to define your target personas and have a team with the right skill to place your message (content) through the channel to your target persona. This is a clear marketing task of a highly specialized team.

Your cost per lead and candidate will be optimized when your content, ecosystem and skills are excellent. Marketing can lead the effort in creating the content, setting up the ecosystem, managing traffic but it requires IT, P&C, Sales to be supportive and aligned.

Take away #2: Creating leads and attracting candidates is using a similar approach and requires great messaging based on valuable content with an automated ecosystem and highly skilled team. It is a team play across multiple functions and an investment decision for the board.

Executive Summary: The CEO's expectation towards corporate marketing can be that they lead the process of brand building, reputation management, lead generation and candidate attraction but it is a team play that starts with the board, IT, P&C, Sales, Public Relations and many others to succeed. It requires alignment, investment and highly skilled specialists. At the end it is all about leadership.

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