SMB CEO tiptoes into marketing

As the CEO of a small to medium sized business or school, what do you need to know about marketing? It’s about knowing where to go, where not to go and how far to go and not go. I have business service experience in advertising, public relations, marketing research and investment advising, but more to the point is my 23 years of experience leading schools with budgets from $5 to $20 MM, staffs from 30 to 165, and enrollments from 250 to 1240.

Depending on your particular situation, you may have anywhere from part of person to a substantial team of people strategizing and executing your marketing efforts. As the leader, though, what do you need to know something about, care a lot about, and stay involved in to the right extent?

I’ll keep it to five key priorities:

* Corporate identity – I think this one is obvious, but essential. You may delegate or retain veto power over specific campaign slogans or themes or logos. But as the leader, you can’t delegate identification and ‘buck stops here’ communication of the fundamental values and vision of your company or school. You will clarify those with some shared process of stakeholders, and then you will be the touchstone of message, culture, enduring values, and even appropriate style, form and function to fit with that identity.

You want to ‘ring true’ to your customer and ‘penetrate’ with your identity into the community’s mind and heart. That doesn’t come primarily from an emotion-stirring video or the perfect commercial (though they are great supportive tools), but from values and vision which folks inside and outside your place recognize and relate to. Through many occasions of strategic planning, strategic visioning, marketing strategy, communication audit, culture analysis and all other sorts of work on ‘who we are’, ‘who we are perceived to be’ and ‘who we want to be’, I’ve been blessed with staff and consultants and volunteers who served vital functions including task group director or facilitator at times. I never, though, considered organization-wide efforts in these areas as occasions to let pass without my passionate participation. We all grew stronger together each time, and many times these were inflection points of success for the work we did together. And, as you make these identity efforts clear, your marketing team has what they need to craft and deliver a message and meaning that is true to who you are together.

* Digital footprint -- I’ve been at this for three decades so it seems really weird to place this second. It’s different to have it in the priority list at all. Yet, there it is. The order might move a place or two, but this is core, vital, fundamental for leading an organization today, especially a small to medium sized one. Here, your bang for the buck can be incredible for being known by those you want to serve.

I’ll offer a specific example. In a school turnaround leadership role I had several years ago, we had to work on everything at once not to slip away into oblivion. Financial management, morale, process effectiveness, customer loyalty, firing, hiring, values, vision, you name it. We also had to get known – broadly and consistently. Our website received 200 unique visits per month and I can’t for the life of me figure why that many folks found a worthwhile reason to go there. It was static, unfocused, unhelpful, etc. We yielded an average of one enrollment inquiry per month from this moribund communication channel. I got hugely gifted and invested help from two alumni who consulted in social media. It had to be an effort the whole school began to join in, though, from the leader all the way through school family participation in social media postings and excitement to share about what was being shown about their school.

Reviewing our competition and identifying social media opportunities we had to flank their standard efforts, expanding Facebook likes and regularly fresh content, producing over 200 ‘real school life’ short videos over the course of a year for a YouTube presence, and a frugal but effective website redesign along with communication commitments to share the habit of sharing our wonderful school brought a digital footprint turnaround that exemplified the school’s turnaround as a whole. After a three month transition putting several efforts in place at once, we began to average 8000 unique visits per month to the website and receive 2 enrollment inquiries per day. 200 to 8000. 4000%. 1 per 30 to 60 per 30. 6000%. And that became the new normal.

* Values consistency – Why is this in marketing? Because you can’t sell, at least not for the long haul, what isn’t real in the first place. Why doesn’t this immediately follow Corporate Identity which includes Values? Because the Consistency part means that this is the day after day, leavening the whole loaf, exploring the entirety of your process and product, “sticktoitiveness” that has to have your ‘turning point’ day commitment but then takes your daily growth in discipline to lead through values that hold you accountable and change your place over the long run. The necessity of the leader leading in this effort is obvious, as I hope the necessity of it for marketing success is as well. This, perhaps more than any other priority, shows why your absolute need for the talent and experience of others to make your marketing a success is matched in absoluteness by the need for you as the leader to be immersed in these marketing priorities.

* Attention to the Optics – Borrowing from the political campaigns, this one matters so much to the non-verbal communication that gets most of our message across. I’ll cheat a bit and include more than the visual in this because what we’re talking about is the impression and experience of an occasion and of your organization which your current families or customers and your potential ones get time and again when you gather together. You need other, expert eyes and hearts to help here, but as leader you have to be taking this pulse habitually and asking others about it and making clear that your school or business will help folks feel certain ways about things. That’s so far from superficial, it’s not funny. This is the depth impact on real people of what you do as your main thing.

Are you willing to show a wart or two to show what you really do for real people? Are you just as willing to put the work into planning, preparing, practicing and producing so that the experience you offer is intentional and deeply affecting? How do those go together? Like this: Will you let people see for real what you do? It means that rough edges will show. Will you also put in the backbreaking work of holding your team and yourself accountable for influencing people in accord with your vision and values? Be real and do the really hard stuff to make the difference you can make.

* Listen! – To your marketing folks who have the expertise. To your entire employee team to learn what they know about how folks are experiencing what you do as an organization. To your customers to learn directly what they want and feel so you might even anticipate a want or two that they don’t yet know that they want but which is entirely true to who they are and what makes a difference for them. To yourself so you save yourself an embarrassment or two when folks have to tell you how you’ve left the message behind (and sometimes – sadly – the values, too). To trusted, close advisors so you get a read on how you are coming across in ways that you just can’t listen for from the inside.