By Mike Azzara, Chief Content Strategist, Stein + Partners Brand Activation

Wouldn't You Really Like To Activate The C-Suite?

In answer to the headline question: Of course you would!

If there’s a chance to get your brand’s message to C-suite executives via branded content, their “cut to-the-chase” influence throughout their organizations often is too big a prize to resist. Unfortunately, the difficulty of achieving success in reaching the C-suite is commensurate with the size of the prize.

In a Content Marketing Institute post, Roanne Neuwirth of the Farland Group provides what amounts to a template for cracking the C-suite code. Here’s her succinct explanation for why the C-suite is so hard to crack:

 “Their relentless schedules and need to sell and defend decisions make them very focused on outcomes and a clear path to value for the time invested. This group relies even more heavily than others on the advice and perspective of their true peers and those they perceive to be authentic experts. They know the information they need and value, and do not want to waste time with 'salesy' pitches and lightweight stories.”

Well, that leaves out about 99 percent of the branded content I read–which is a lot because it’s often my job to audit the content generated by a client’s entire competitive set. Even when it’s not “salesy” and “lightweight,” it’s wrapped up in the brand’s own worldview, not that of its customer’s C-suite. And it doesn’t contain a lot of C-suite peer interviews.

There are exceptions. Neuwirth goes on to describe a half-dozen key elements that derive from her C-suite description, followed by a short, insightful case showing

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how The McKinsey Quarterly lives the dream. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out our own success, in focused markets, such as this media industry paper on business process outsourcing done for Aequor Media.

But what struck me most as I was reading Neuwirth’s post, and considering our own experience, is just how hard it is to follow her advice. Access to your customers’ C-suite peers, productive interviews, synthesizing the results into actionable insights of real value to your C-suite audience that also drive home your brand’s key messages–these qualities are not often found among marketing writers. They’re capabilities of which the world’s best journalistic organizations would be proud.

So it’s no wonder that you get 38,900 results when you Google “every company is a media company.” Or that our content marketing team at SPBA comprises all award-winning former B2B journalists.

In this case, hard doesn’t mean impossible, though it may be damn near. And because success is so rare, it makes it all the more worth doing.

Read more: http://www.cmo.com/branding/wouldnt-you-really-activate-c-suite#ixzz27axiR2FJ

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