This post is for owners and CEOs of companies. If you think that marketing is a necessary evil, something you have to do rather than a real opportunity to grow your business, don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you when business stagnates.
By the time you own or run a company, one of your most important jobs is to shape the organization’s culture. If your attitude toward marketing is dismissive, that’ll become part of your organizations’ DNA. It will affect who you hire, how much respect and autonomy you give them, how many financial resources you allocate and what kind of results you get. I’m stunned by business leaders who think so little of their employees’ job functions (and usually the employees themselves) that they set them up to fail.
Content marketing takes skill, money and time. It can help take your company to the next level in terms of growth, but you have to believe it’s going to work. And if you don’t, it might be that you don’t understand how it works.
If you’re a business owner surrounded by people whose job you think you can do better, guess whose fault that is? If your marketing staff doesn’t know what they’re doing, then why don’t you spend the money to hire people who do, then let them do their jobs.
Sometimes, owners and CEOs lose sight of the big picture. They focus more on themselves—how much money they make, how many years until they can retire or move on—that they stop making decisions based on the company’s good. They don’t want to invest in marketing, for instance, because that would mean spending money out of their retirement or justifying an expense to their Board of Directors. Is that you?
Some CEOs forget that the company depends on the people working for it. When you tell professionals how to do their jobs, you might as well be asking them to update their resume. Even in this economy, skilled marketers can find jobs.
Some CEOs are more interested in office politics than business results. They’re the kind of people who would rather market on billboards because they’re flashy and highly visible and easy for other CEOs and managers to understand, rather than market in online forums and social networks, because that’s not where the Board is, even if it’s where customers are.
A good CEO asks questions, finds out why a marketer wants to perform strategy A or strategy B. If they don’t understand, they ask more questions until it’s clear. They ask for the advantages and disadvantages. They ask for the upside and downside. A good marketer will tell them honestly and anticipate all the things that could go wrong or right. Then a good CEO says, go for it.
Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Content Strategy
