It’s no secret that organizations flow from the top down. Depending on the organization, CEOs can often be likened to mythical creatures in the lower ranks of an organization. The CEO 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. Looking at it from the point of the worker, it’s easy to feel like a cog in the machine, with no real connection to the purpose of what you’re doing. In this article, we’ll explore ways CEOs can engage employees 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 that 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 to 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 it will reach customers and the market too. If your brand’s vision, mission, and values are a mystery to you, you should start there. Understanding and articulating the vision & dream of your brand, and 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 crucial step is crafting a communication strategy centered around engaging your employees. Directing your focus towards the fundamental tenets of your brand enables consistent and impactful communication with your team, reinforcing brand standards and fostering unity. It’s imperative to view your organization as a dynamic entity, driven by its workforce. Establishing a sense of connection between employees and the brand is pivotal in promoting engagement and cohesion. By effectively communicating the core principles of the brand, leaders 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. As an employee, dedicating a significant portion of their life to the company, seeing the company, it’s leaders in the public eye engaging the brand in the market and communicating success and confidence through the bran to the market will envigorate employees and make them proud of the work they are doing. As a CEO, if you can make the organization’s wins feel like the employees wins too, you’ll effectively be leveraging the brand to lead the organization from the front lines rather than seeming like a dictator pushing your workforce 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 in the market to speak, make public appearances and statements, and engage with key stakeholders in their industry to build credibility. Create content and amplity that content through a number of third party channels that go beyond the reach of your brands 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 and 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, but setting some goals and measuring success can help you determine the effectiveness of your communications for future planning. The long-term benefits of content though is that it will build a digital foundation that begins to support your brand and build credibility with algorithms and search engines across the web. As we live in an age of ever more served content, by regularly distributing clear communications for your brand in reputable places will continue to unify the mission of the organization. This gives employees something to dig into and it gives them a window to you the CEO as a means of understanding the brand from the top down.
📰Paid Media
Paid media is simple. It’s 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
