What do you do when your target market is nearly unattainable to achieve? Should you serve CEOs and different prime C-suite executives at bigger corporations, you’ve in all probability requested this query your self.
Right here’s the way it goes down:
Let’s say you’re a marketing consultant who needs to work with prime management at a selected enterprise. You examine their web site, however there is no such thing as a particular person electronic mail tackle, telephone quantity or different means to contact them straight. So that you look them up on LinkedIn—realizing that you need to use the platform’s InMail characteristic to achieve them. Solely they aren’t on LinkedIn! Nor are they on X, Fb or every other social platform.
You name the corporate’s principal line (not hoping for a lot, nevertheless it’s one thing). You’re directed to an assistant who takes a message however gained’t decide to a callback. In fact, you hear nothing. You think about sending an electronic mail by the web site’s principal contact type, however you know that’s going to be a lifeless letter. What do you do?
Ultimately, you quit in frustration. You by no means even obtained a glimpse, a lot much less a shot.
Now, I’ve labored with a few of these unattainable leaders. They inform me they don’t have the time to interact on LinkedIn or take care of unsolicited electronic mail. They don’t need advertising and marketing or gross sales pitches. The gained’t ever obtain a chunk of content material. That’s not how they function. Being inaccessible permits them to concentrate on the necessary issues.
Do you throw up your fingers? Are they merely unreachable?
By no means.
You see, just under the highest leaders are a cadre of executives and higher administration who work together with them daily. Leaders depend on these people to implement key choices, provide insights into the corporate’s efficiency and supply a variety of recommendation.
In brief, this penultimate tier of administration is extremely influential. Should you can catch their consideration, you’ve gotten a pathway to the highest. And chances are high, these of us are much more accessible.
However to achieve your final purpose—the highest executives—you want a change in technique. You could persuade these one-rung-down executives that you simply or your agency has one thing particular to supply.
Whether or not you’re utilizing advertising and marketing to focus on particular executives or to achieve a selected position or phase (for instance, VPs of Know-how and CIOs), you need to use a quiver of acquainted strategies to nurture them, corresponding to social media, electronic mail, promoting and networking.
Essentially the most fruitful path to your vacation spot, nonetheless, is to determine familiarity and belief in your agency. Meaning exposing your (recalibrated) viewers repeatedly to your experience. Search for alternatives to talk to them about enterprise challenges that your agency can remedy. Write knowledgeable instructional articles, weblog posts and guides. Use the ideas of search engine optimisation, AEO and GEO to make your content material and agency findable on-line.
As you write, nonetheless, take into account that your final viewers is a busy chief, not a technical skilled. The purpose is to supply content material that may simply be shared up the meals chain and that the CEO you wish to attain (or whoever you’re concentrating on) will discover insightful.
An equally necessary purpose is to show the one-rung-down executives into followers—individuals who will readily advocate your agency to the highest executives when they should rent an outdoor useful resource to unravel the sorts of issues you take care of daily. Repeated publicity to content material is a vital element. Video, webinars, podcasts and talking engagements will be nice methods to place a human face in your agency and construct a private connection that is more difficult with the written phrase alone.
On the finish of the day, advertising and marketing to ivory-tower CEOs isn’t that completely different from the form of advertising and marketing I’ve written about numerous occasions earlier than on this e-newsletter. All it takes is an easy shift in your target market—and the persistence for the technique to bear fruit.
