What do you do when your target audience is almost impossible to reach? If you serve CEOs and other top C-suite executives at larger companies, you’ve probably asked this question yourself.
Here’s how it goes down:
Let’s say you are a consultant who wants to work with top leadership at a particular business. You check their website, but there is no individual email address, phone number or other means to contact them directly. So you look them up on LinkedIn—knowing that you can use the platform’s InMail feature to reach them. Only they aren’t on LinkedIn! Nor are they on X, Facebook or any other social platform.
You call the company’s main line (not hoping for much, but it’s something). You’re directed to an assistant who takes a message but won’t commit to a callback. Of course, you hear nothing. You consider sending an email through the website’s main contact form, but you know that’s going to be a dead letter. What do you do?
Eventually, you give up in frustration. You never even got a glimpse, much less a shot.
Now, I’ve worked with some of these unattainable leaders. They tell me they don’t have the time to engage on LinkedIn or deal with unsolicited email. They don’t want marketing or sales pitches. The won’t ever download a piece of content. That’s not how they operate. Being inaccessible allows them to focus on the important things.
Do you throw up your hands? Are they simply unreachable?
Not at all.
You see, just below the top leaders are a cadre of executives and upper management who interact with them every day. Leaders rely on these individuals to implement key decisions, supply insights into the company’s performance and provide a wide range of advice.
In short, this penultimate tier of management is highly influential. If you can catch their attention, you have a pathway to the top. And chances are, these folks are far more accessible.
But to reach your ultimate goal—the top executives—you need a change in strategy. You need to convince these one-rung-down executives that you or your firm has something special to offer.
Whether you are using marketing to target specific executives or to reach a particular role or segment (for example, VPs of Technology and CIOs), you can use a quiver of familiar techniques to nurture them, such as social media, email, advertising and networking.
The most fruitful path to your destination, however, is to establish familiarity and trust in your firm. That means exposing your (recalibrated) audience repeatedly to your expertise. Look for opportunities to speak to them about business challenges that your firm can solve. Write expert educational articles, blog posts and guides. Use the principles of SEO, AEO and GEO to make your content and firm findable online.
As you write, however, keep in mind that your ultimate audience is a busy leader, not a technical professional. The goal is to produce content that can easily be shared up the food chain and that the CEO you want to reach (or whoever you are targeting) will find insightful.
An equally important goal is to turn the one-rung-down executives into fans—people who will readily recommend your firm to the top executives when they need to hire an outside resource to solve the kinds of problems you deal with every day. Repeated exposure to content is an important component. Video, webinars, podcasts and speaking engagements can be great ways to put a human face on your firm and build a personal connection that is more challenging with the written word alone.
At the end of the day, marketing to ivory-tower CEOs is not that different from the kind of marketing I’ve written about countless times before in this newsletter. All it takes is a simple shift in your target audience—and the patience for the strategy to bear fruit.
