Five Steps to Create Hyper-Personalised C-Suite Marketing Content

For business development managers, salespeople, and marketers, building relationships with senior executives is central to the job. Whether you're targeting new accounts in industries where you already have a track record, or trying to break into new markets, gaining the attention and trust of the right people is vital. 

And that's where the challenge lies. 

Today, it’s harder than ever to get through to key decision makers. Technology might have made it easier for us to connect, but it has also introduced new challenges. The competition for people’s attention has never been more intense, and expectations are at an all-time high, making it more difficult to stand out. 

As a result, high-value executives are ever more selective about who they listen to and connect with. If you’re not already on their radar, it can seem impossible to get their attention. There is no shortcut to great communication. No matter how clever your marketing strategies are, it all starts with knowing your audience and delivering relevant content.

In this article, we're going to look at five simple steps you can follow to create a content strategy aimed at senior-level executives. We’ll look at how to define your audience, the practical steps to take to understand their interests, and the sources you can use. We’ll then look at turning your customer insight into a marketing strategy that builds rapport and develops relationships that go beyond transactions.

Before You Start

It's easy to get excited about a new research project. You want to dive straight in and get to know what your customers are thinking and feeling. Or perhaps you're less enthusiastic about this stage of the process and want to skip straight to the creative part!

Before you jump in, it's important to set your research parameters so you can be more strategic. You need to make sure that you're collecting information that will actually help inform your business decisions and improve your campaigns.

In addition, the more value you can extract from your research, the greater its return on investment. This goes further than knowing what information you need to collect for this particular project. 

Thinking about how your research could be applied in future projects will help you to collect, organise and store data systematically. This will allow you to access and use your data more easily in the future. It will also make it easier to share with others.

Consider how your data could benefit other departments within your organisation. Beyond gaining brownie points for being a team player, identifying opportunities for collaboration could come with the added benefit of unlocking additional resources. If you can demonstrate your research will provide insight and value for marketing, sales, and business development, a cross-departmental project team to help you execute it makes sense.

Designing a research project could be the subject of a lengthy article in itself. For now, it's enough to say that you need a clear vision of what you want to accomplish and how—and then get going on gathering the necessary information.

Step 1: Identify Your Targets

Perhaps your starting point is a list of companies you would love to do business with in a new sector. Or maybe you would like to grow an existing account by identifying new opportunities in different divisions. 

Either way, you need to learn about your potential customers and their needs before you can communicate why your solution is truly valuable to them.

So, the first question you need to answer is - who are my best targets?

You need to identify the people in the company who are able to decide whether or not your company will be the one to provide them with their solution. 

In part, this will depend on what your product or service is. When aspiring to reach senior leadership, people will often focus on the C-Suite. But don’t be elitist! If your service is likely to be adopted by the entire enterprise, your decision maker may well be a C-Suite executive.

However, in many cases, your best target is not going to be the CEO or CFO. If your solution is one that only individual departments will use, your decision maker might be someone within that department. Consider whether you'll get better results aiming to connect with heads of divisions, brand portfolios or departments instead.

Begin your research at the source and take some time to gain an understanding of how the company operates. Official documents, such as annual reports, will give you background information on the company's structure, recent acquisitions and performance.

You should also check out publicly available information on the company's website. The About Us and Meet the Team pages often include biographies of senior executives in each division, as well as details about their roles. 

The company's LinkedIn profile is another great place to find information about the people who matter most. Having gained an understanding of the business, you can search LinkedIn for people who are currently working in the relevant divisions or levels of seniority in your target market.

Finally, as obvious as it sounds, the advice to 'Google it' is easy to over-complicate things and overlook simple solutions. Along with the standard results, Google offers useful ‘knowledge panels’ on particular organisations and high-profile executives. These results will often duplicate what you can find on sites like Wikipedia, but these pages are also worth scanning over too.

Once you have compiled your list of people to connect with, then you can start thinking about the mechanics of how to do that.

Step 2: Three Levels of Research

This is the most critical step in the process and the most time consuming. 

Everyone wants to be heard and understood, so it’s important to take the time to listen carefully so you can communicate thoughtfully.

Often you’ll see advice to create a buyer persona. But for this group of VIPs, you’re going to go further and get to know each individual on your list personally.

Think about your research as investing time in a one-on-one conversation. Listening intently to each person's interests, goals, and challenges is what will allow you to understand their specific needs. From there, you can communicate more effectively and create successful content marketing that speaks directly to your prospect, not just an avatar of someone like them.

Start by reviewing the industry press and industry organisations to get a top-level understanding of the topic areas likely to excite the interests of people in your target sector. 

What, for example, are the hot button topics for executives in the automotive industry? What are their biggest challenges? What emerging technologies are they focused on? What new legislation or regulations are going to have an impact on their industry?

Then, zoom in. Look at each target company (e.g. Ford or Tesla) and get a sense of its current priorities, challenges and ambitions.

Go back to your previous sources with this focus in mind. Scour the company website for values in mission statements, points of view in blog posts, and announcements in press releases. Follow links from the site to corporate social accounts, and jot down the themes you come across there. Search Google and pull up articles and speeches from across the senior leadership.

Finally, zoom in even further and focus on the influential people you have identified. These insights are what will allow you to hyper-personalise your content marketing campaigns for the people you’d like to make deals with.

What topics are they writing about or giving interviews on? What are they offering an opinion on or reaction to? And how are they quoted on particular subjects? 

Go back to the search engines and look up your target contacts, using search operators to tighten your focus on the results you need. For example, you can limit your search to the dates they've been in post to filter out results from previous positions.

Dig into articles, search YouTube for videos of TV interviews and keynote speeches. Don’t forget other types of media, like podcasts. Services like OwlTail can help you to discover podcasts by searching for topics or specific people.

The amount of mileage you’ll get from an individual’s social profiles will vary, but it's worth having a look. Give yourself a time budget for your initial investigations on social media. If you’re not getting much from an individual’s social presence, don’t waste too much time pursuing it.

Some people aren’t very active online. Senior people in particular often have a more limited digital footprint. Another limitation you might encounter is that the handling of their profile is staffed out, or reflects corporate messaging more than their interests.

Where this is the case, paying attention to other aspects of the social profile can help. Looking at who they are following, and what they are replying to and liking can sometimes reveal more about what aspect of the role they’re personally interested in.

Step 3: Identify Content Pillars

If you’ve done a thorough job on your research, you will have a wealth of information on your target organisations and the decision makers within them.

The next step is to sift through this broad range of topics to identify natural points of connection where their interests and your offer intersect. 

These are your potential conversation starters and the content pillars you should build your marketing strategy around.

If, for example, you’re targeting execs in the automotive industry, your research may have turned up the following (among many others): business growth, internet of things, sustainability and environment, mobility and accessibility, semiconductors, electric vehicles, politics and policy, racing, personal performance and entrepreneurship.

Some topics will have a greater affinity with your product offering than others. However, don’t discard options at this point. You don’t know exactly what it is you’re going to create. The broader your creative inputs at this stage, the better.

Step 4: What Do You Want to Say?

Imagine your prospect picks up the phone next week and invites you to come in and talk to them about what you can offer their company. 

What would you say?

The answer to this question is the key to unlocking a content strategy that links your offer to the interests and needs of your target audience.

A successful pitch is an art, not a science. To be most effective, your message must be tailored to meet the needs and concerns of your specific prospect. 

Use your knowledge of that person to identify the key problem or opportunity on which you can provide insight or advice. Then, craft a narrative that paints a picture of the challenges they face and how you can provide solutions.

Do you have a strong point of view, or something interesting and distinctive to say about one of the topics they are interested in? Help them to see things from a new perspective.

What is it that you know that their company would benefit from knowing too? What expertise do you possess that would give them a competitive edge in the market? Help to educate them on solutions that are aligned with their needs.

This is not the place for a hard sell. People are interested in what you can offer, but only when it is relevant to what they want to accomplish. Instead of selling, position yourself as an ally, an expert who has the best interests of your prospect at heart.

Step 5: How Do You Want to Say It?

So, now you know what you want to say and why. But how are you going to deliver the message to have the greatest possible impact?  

The first step is to decide your approach.

This depends on how well your prospect knows your company, as well as how interested they are. Do you need to create awareness? Do you need to educate them? Are they ready for a more direct approach?

This will help you to decide on the tactics and channels to use to support the content you create. Is the best delivery mechanism an email marketing or retargeting campaign? Should you make an initial approach with an invitation to a webinar on LinkedIn InMail?

A longer-term approach might see you creating a new strand of publicly available but hyper-targeted content around the themes you’ve identified. 

You can use your blog and social channels to demonstrate your credibility and understanding of the space you wish to enter. Use your thought leadership content as breadcrumbs, inviting prospects to connect and nurturing the relationship. 

By the time your prospect is ready for a sales conversation, they will be able to look back and see that you have a track record of having a genuine interest in areas that speak directly to them.

At the other end of the scale, you might decide to make a more direct approach and create a specific piece of content to support it. This could be a piece of original research or an online event tailored to the prospect’s business issues and goals. 

In this case, your opening gambit could be to approach them by email to ask for their comment on the piece, or to add context to a quote of theirs you’ve used. You might invite them to take part in a panel discussion on their area of expertise, or offer their company the opportunity to sponsor an event. 

Alternatively, if you've created a piece of on-spec analysis, you could approach them to ask for a meeting to discuss the proposals your report lays out.

As you can see, there’s no right or wrong way to taking the next step in your prospecting. The key is to be creative and take action so that you can continue a conversation.

Hyper-Personalisation is Hyper-Effective

In conclusion, in-depth customer research is critical for creating hyper-personalised content that is capable of connecting with high-value prospects. 

Getting to know people well enough to craft communications that connect with them is not a complicated strategy. But doing simple things well takes time and thought.

However, the payoff is worth it. When you know your audience well enough to speak directly to their needs and interests, they'll listen. And when they listen, they're more likely to act.

If you’d like to have a conversation about how our B2B marketing experts can support your business’ content marketing strategies, we'd love to talk.