Why a highly successful Tech CEO has maintained investment in building his company’s thought leadership over more than 20 years
For my latest blog post, I decided to interview another inspirational leader of a technology firm who I know has bucked an oft seen self-defeating pattern of cutting marketing and PR spend as markets begin to look tighter. Indeed, this CEO of a major fintech firm has consistently invested in content marketing and PR for more than 20 years. And there is no denying he made the right call.
The business he built up was recently acquired for over £27m! Again, I’ve kept it anonymous, so my interviewee could talk more freely. Below is a shortened write up of a few of the questions I put to him and the answers he gave. I’ve published fuller write ups of the interview across two blog posts which were recently published on my agency’s site at www.AgilityPR.co.uk. But I hope this piece captures some of the gold dust which he gave me.
Q1. What are the key reasons you’ve consistently invested in building your company’s thought leadership positioning over more than 20 years?
A1. For much of our time we’ve been serving a relatively small number of high value customers. We aim to hold onto our clients for many years.
As we’ve widened and deepened our offerings, our consultative-selling approach has become increasingly important. We’ve always strived to share with our customers our take on where their market is heading.
Q2. Do you think this sort of work (building reputation and thought leadership) is done well by many companies in your market?
As our market knowledge increased, it made increasing sense to share our thinking with a larger audience as part of our marketing — to build our brand awareness and reputation simultaneously.
This is where you (Agility PR) came in to take the sweat out of the process of building brand authority by taking briefs from our key people, executing market research, submitting industry award entries and helping us produce vlogs to communicate our views and insights more widely.
A2. For years, as a tech provider to the big pension providers, we were pretty much on our own in terms of sharing our views and expertise in applying system changes to remain compliant with new regulation which came thick and fast.
We also offered our customers early warning of changes that would have to be made to their systems because of imminent regulatory changes. Naturally, the IFA and pensions trade media were also interested in our views and summaries of these changes.
Four years ago, we extended Miles’ brief — asking him to design and conduct a series of consumer market research exercises to deliver insight into the market about how savings behaviour and retirement income prospects were changing through the generations.
These pieces of research have given us a platform to talk much more widely about how the market which our customers are serving is changing. This is knowledge and insight which has opened doors for us over recent years.
This sort of work has proved vital in setting us apart from our rivals. They help position us as a potential partner rather than just another would be supplier. As such, we don’t have to be the cheapest to win those great contracts and we are more likely to win the more wide-ranging briefs and strategically important ones.
However, there is no doubt that committing resources to doing this work is not for everyone. You must be committed to offering advice to customers — you must have ambitions to advise them as well as sell to them.
I’m absolutely positive that focusing on maintaining our profile over the years got us on more RFPs (Requests for Proposal) than would have been the case if we had not done this thought leadership work consistently and to a high quality.
You also have to be willing to stick your neck out occasionally and spark a debate. Sometimes you will be challenged on your views. However, I’d rather that than remaining under the radar and relatively unknown.
Q3. Do you have any tips for tech firms exploring how to raise their profile in a specific market?
A3. Building trust in your opinion is key. After all, you’ll need to deliver your views into the market consistently and regularly. It’s also worth thinking about the different levels of your prospects’ organisation from CEO, through operations heads, technology development teams and users of the systems you hope to deliver.
Try to produce content which is designed to engage every layer of the prospect organisation. For example, I’m currently writing pieces on topics linked to running a sizeable company through the current pandemic. Agility PR has helped get these pieces regularly carried in key trade publications. We also publish these pieces on our website and in our eNewsletters going out to clients.
They really talk to the C-suite, providing reassurance that we are navigating the difficult issues of trading through a pandemic — we are innovating and anticipating issues like combatting mental health for our remote workers.
In addition, our work with a charity I set up in Uganda is also helpful in engaging C-suite executives. They may be less interested in some of the more technical content we produce. However, we all connect with the human stories which come out of helping people less fortunate than ourselves.
Does any of the 5 statements below describe your business today or describe where you want to be within the next 2 years?
1. Selling products and services to other businesses, and/or
2. Striving to add value to customers through consultative-selling
3. Looking to take your skills and technology into new, adjacent markets
4. Seeking to reach C-suite decision-makers, as well as integrators, partners, and/or operational staff
5. Wanting to keep growing your business consistently through this and future recessions then….
….You need to be differentiating yourself through building and maintaining a thought leadership position in the market(s) you serve.
I’m running a 1 hour webinar on the ‘Value of Thought Leadership for Differentiation’ from 4–5PM on 12th November. Please click here to register for this free event.
I will publish the second half of this CEO interview here here early next week.
#techpr #differentiation #contentmarketing
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com
