What is executive profiling?
Executive profiling is the act of building a person’s professional profile, sharing their expertise, opinions, credibility and experience. The aim is to ensure your key people present a consistent, authoritative presence that reflects well on your organisation and builds trust in your audience.
Naturally, CEOs and business leaders should have strong public profiles, but the same tactics can be applied to subject matter experts and client facing teams too.
Why should you factor executive profiling into your content plan?
By now, most of us will know that content from individuals vastly outperforms content from organisations – particularly on social platforms. On average, a post shared from a personal LinkedIn profile will receive eight times the engagement of an identical post shared from the company account.
And this makes complete sense. A person is real, relatable and reciprocal. Comments on a real person’s posts are likely to be returned, and connection with a human being, even digitally, feels meaningful. Conversely, posts from a company page can feel transactional and inauthentic.
We’ve noticed it with our own LinkedIn posts. For example, we shared a post from Stratton Craig’s company profile celebrating a recent award win and it received 11 reactions. Our CEO Nina posted something similar from her own account, using an identical image, and received 65 reactions and 10 comments. The same goes for non-CEO profiles too. My post promoting our AI search eBook received 17 reactions compared to Stratton Craig’s six.
So it’s clear that people-led content is the way to go. But marketers and comms managers will know it’s not as easy as it sounds.
It’s unlikely that your fee earners will jump for joy at the prospect of diverting billable time towards your content plan. So how do you get them on board?
How to get stakeholder buy-in for marketing
Firstly, it’s part of a marketer’s role to drive the business case for marketing. Getting your stakeholders on board with your strategy is the most important thing you can do to achieve it. And you can do this by explaining the benefits, both to the company and to your executives personally.
From a company perspective, leading with your team is a great way to build trust in your audience and familiarise them with the people they’ll be working with. People-led content will drive greater engagement and visibility, improving brand awareness and sentiment.
At a personal level, authoring thought leadership content will help boost the executive’s profile and reputation as an expert in their field. It may work as a conversation starter with prospects and help advance their careers.
Once you have your executives on board with why people-led content is important, make the process as easy as possible for them. We often work with our clients to interview senior leaders and translate their thoughts into comprehensive thought leadership insights. This way, you’re only asking them for 30-minutes of their time for a quick chat.
Ahead of the conversation, ensure you’ve done all your research so you know what questions to ask and can lead a productive and efficient interview. Record and transcribe the meeting to capture all key information, then write the insight yourself or enlist a copywriter.
Once the insight is written, share it with the executive for their final review and sign-off, and then it’s good to go.
When it comes time to publishing the content, ideally it should come from the executive directly. They can share on their own social media channels, via email to their clients, or in a newsletter. You can draft the supporting content for them, so all they need to do is share it.
If you want to take it one step further, features in business magazines and participation in round tables, panels and events, provide additional executive profiling opportunities. Events can be especially valuable as they also present a chance for networking.
How we can help
For smaller marketing teams, it can be difficult to keep on top of corporate content without adding executive profiles into the mix. We can work with you to produce a content plan that factors in your company and personal profiles, ensuring all activity ladders up to your overarching messaging and objectives. We can also interview your key stakeholders to gather their thoughts and producing high-quality insights in their words. It all starts with a conversation.
