It’s no secret that organizations flow from the top down. Being at the bottom of an organization, the CEO can seem like a mythical creature. They can be someone you rarely see or encounter, let alone, communicate with. Think about your organization for a minute. How much face time is a low-ranking employee getting with upper management? In many cases, the answer is none. Look at it from the point of the worker. It can be easy to feel like a cog in the machine, with no real connection to the mission of what you’re doing. We’ll explore ways CEOs can engage employees throughout the organization by building the brand and communicating it effectively to the organization.
🧑💼 A CEO’s Mission
Every company is different, and every CEO is different. What works for one company may be absurd for another, but there are core tenants of the job that remain consistent. As a leader of the organization, it’s your role to oversee the mission and set the tone. Although many CEOs may have a clear vision of what they want of the brand, they often face an uphill battle in communicating that vision to employees and the market. Leading an organization through effective brand communication is an art. It motivates and envigorates at its best and demoralizes and demotivates at its worst. So how can a CEO engage employees to ensure he’s communicating positively with employees?
🎯 Brand Engagement
If you’re a mythical creature, embrace it. Shoot for the moon, be a power player, and by all means, focus on the brand. Your brand’s vision, mission, and values will not only engage employees but they will reach your customers and the market too. If your brand’s vision, mission, and values are a mystery to you, you should start here. Understanding and articulating the vision & dream of your brand is essential. Also, the organization’s mission and values are the core tenets that will fuel your company culture.
✍️ Engage Employees With The Brand
Once a clear vision, mission, and set of values are established for your brand, the next step is crafting a communication strategy. Center it around engaging both employees and the market with your brand. Direct your focus toward the fundamental tenets of your brand. Consistent and impactful communication from the brand will reinforce brand standards and foster unity among employees. View your organization as a dynamic entity, driven by its workforce. Establishing a core connection between employees and the brand should be the core component of a CEO’s comms strategy. It should center around effectively communicating the core principles of the brand. By doing this, a CEO will empower employees to grasp their integral role in realizing the brand’s overarching mission. This cultivates a collective mindset among the team, guided by the brand’s values and inspired by its vision.
🏗️ Build Brand Notoriety
A good marketing team will have a communications & PR strategy associated with the brand. This strategy should incorporate public-facing opportunities for the CEO to communicate the Brand’s mission and vision to the market while adhering to the brand’s core values. It’s oftentimes understated the benefits that opportunities have like this for the organization’s employees. Employees dedicate a significant portion of their lives to the company. So for an employee, it’s important to feel like you belong to something that’s gaining in success. Seeing the company’s management in the public representing the brand’s mission is a great way to do this. As a CEO, if you can make the organization’s wins feel like the employees win too, you’ll win. You’ll be leveraging the brand to lead the organization from the front rather than from behind.
📣 Amplifying Communications
Not every CEO has a comms team, so how can CEOs build their brand and communicate more effectively in the market without echoing the same message to the same social media following? This is a problem many business owners and CEOs face as they go to market. Building brand awareness isn’t easy, and it requires a CEO to branch out and build opportunities. Do this by speaking, making public appearances and statements, and engaging with key stakeholders in their industry to build credibility. Create content and amplify that content through a number of third-party channels that go beyond the reach of your brand’s current network. Growing the brand requires branching out into new territory, and as the CEO this is on you to be the leader and see this through.
📋 Set Goals And Measure Success
To execute a communications strategy effectively, it is good to have a good set of goals. Set key performance indicators to know that what you are doing is working or successful. Defining success through your comms strategy isn’t always easy or clear. Setting some goals and measuring success can help you determine the effectiveness of your communications for future planning. The long-term benefit of content is that it will build a digital foundation. It begins to support your brand and build credibility with algorithms and search engines across the web. We live in an age of ever more served content. By regularly distributing clear communications about your brand in reputable places, you’ll naturally engage employees who are following the brand’s story. This gives employees something to dig into. And by leveraging paid media, CEOs can spread this message even further.
📰 Paid Media
Paid media is a means of leveraging opportunities created by platforms to place content. If you don’t have a team of skilled PR people with contact books or the money to pay some PR firm a retainer to maybe get you features, what else are your choices? At the Profound Agency, we understand the challenges CEOs face developing their brands and communicating that to the world. That’s why we’ve developed a retainer free publishing model that aggregates hundreds of publishing and media opportunities from News, TV, and Print and make that available to clients for free. We price each publication individually. This means you can select what publication you’d like to be published in, at any time, without retaining an agency to be on standby. You can browse a full list of digital publications directly on our website at: TheProfoundAgency.com
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