Do CEOs with Opinions and Big Followings Need Marketers?
The point of B2B marketing is to build a company’s reputation and relationships, mostly to accelerate sales. A marketing department owns this function. They identify the structural problems the business is facing, define a message to help solve that problem, and amplify it to build those aforementioned relationships and the company’s reputation. As a result, their work grows the company.
Many CEOs are not natural marketers. They have other talents and priorities. So, there is a natural place for marketers to help the CEO devise a story that will differentiate the company from its competitors and galvanize customers — and then amplify that story. For example, a lot of CEOs will say to me, “What am I going to talk about publicly?” Or they may simply say they don’t have the time or inclination to be out in public evangelizing the company. Those CEOs obviously benefit from marketing support.
But what if a CEO is a natural marketer in his or her own right? Some CEOs, especially those who have been in their chosen industry for a long time, command large followings. They know the industry extremely well and are comfortable sharing their opinions publicly. They’re prolific, present, and personable. In other words, they cover at least two (if not three) of the four ways to win with adtech marketing:
Own narrative white space (Scope3: synonymous with sustainability in advertising)
Share data-driven insights (Adalytics)
Lead the conversation with expert analysis (Ari Paparo)
Be prolific, present, and personable (Barash, ATG)
Whether these CEOs can benefit from marketing help — or, more to the point, whether it makes sense for them to invest in marketing help — depends on the maturity of their organization. It generally doesn’t make sense for startups to spend the six figures it will take to hire serious marketing support before the $1M in revenue or Series A mark, anyway. CEOs with a knack for marketing may be able to delay the investment even further, or, because they have an inclination for storytelling and audience building, they may be able to hire a more junior marketer to help with tactics instead of hiring an agency or senior marketer who will cost about $150k annually. (By contrast, CEOs with less command of marketing should absolutely hire a senior person who understands how marketing can help the company win — hiring a junior person without a plan will just amount to wasted spend.)
Eventually, though, it makes sense even for CEOs with marketing chops to hire marketing help (in the form of both strategists/leaders and tacticians) for several reasons.
Scalability: The company cannot scale infinitely with the CEO as the only evangelist. Ultimately, the company should have a powerful reputation and relationship-building function that exists independent of any one person, including the CEO or founder. Of course, this doesn’t mean a company should hesitate to exploit the advantage of a public-facing CEO; that’s a huge advantage on which any good marketer will seek to capitalize. But the company becomes more valuable when the CEO isn’t the only person able to boost the firm’s reputation or generate relationships.
Impact: A company with twenty marketers should be much louder than a company with one or two. Each of those people should be actively contributing to growing the company’s reputation and relationships — and, at that team size, a dedicated person, i.e. a CMO, should be organizing those people around a message and spurring them to evangelize the company. The CEO is simply unlikely to have the time or energy to do this, and they can’t be in 20 places at once. So, to produce maximum impact, hiring a CMO and a talented marketing team will ultimately beat the pure CEO-as-evangelist marketing model. You just need the scale to justify the investment.
Data-driven storytelling: See the second way to win with marketing (above). If I were constructing a ten-person marketing team from scratch, I’d hire an insights person whose sole job was to work with product and engineering to surface industry insights and then craft them into stories that will captivate the press, influencers, and customers. Adalytics has done a stellar job at this. Any adtech company with 10+ marketers should be trying to replicate their playbook. The CEO isn’t going to own this time-consuming process.
Perspective: Two brains is better than one. In a company’s early stages, it won’t have the luxury of bringing in marketing strategists who understand the industry really well to identify the big problems facing the organization and craft a story that will allow it to advance to its next stage of growth. In other words, an early-stage startup can’t afford a strategic marketer. But when it can, a CMO can provide a lot of strategic value, largely rooted in their understanding of the company’s market perception and its customers. As my collaborator Paul Knegten puts it, the CMO is the one sitting in the executive meeting saying, “Wait, what?” In more highfalutin terms, they’re the one who isn’t just thinking about the best market opportunity (the wont of CEOs) but the best opportunity that the company can actually seize based on its reputation — and how to shift the reputation using the tools of marketing to enable optimal growth.
Specialization: World-class organizations have world-class marketing functions with experts at the many different levers a company can pull to grow. How do we best liaise with the advertising press? Who can mobilize influencers on our behalf? How do we grow on LinkedIn and Twitter? Who knows how to craft compelling white papers and case studies? Who will create a bespoke event so we can own our corner of the industry? How do we best wield influence at Cannes? These are the kinds of specialties you forgo in the early days, but as a company grows, it should find people with increasingly specialized skills (as is true of any function). The CEO won’t have the time or knowledge to master all these different aspects of marketing, nor the time to manage each specialist (hence the need for both tacticians and strategists/leaders).
In short, CEOs with a talent for evangelism and existing audiences can indeed go without marketing help, including strategic marketers, for a longer period than CEOs without marketing chops. But those CEOs shirk marketing forever to the detriment of their organization. Because, ultimately, marketing is like any other function: the CEO should have some connection to it, but it requires investments of time and domain-specific expertise that no one person (even a very talented CEO) brings to the table.
World-class organizations have world-class marketers. Because marketers are the people tasked with building a company’s reputation and relationships. And no world-class company can go without that.
