How to convince a stubborn CEO about thought leadership 

Many CEOs remain sceptical about the value of thought leadership. But with the right metrics, messaging and mindset, marketing professionals can turn even the most reluctant leaders into advocates for ideas that have real business impact.

“How can you overcome CEO reluctance about thought leadership?”

This was the first question asked during a thought leadership breakout session I chaired recently.  

The rest of the group of 10 marketing professionals nodded knowingly. Then each of them spoke about their own thought leadership issues, and about two-thirds mentioned this in one way or another. This, it turns out, is a common problem. 

I probed the group on the nature of CEO reluctance and there were three main issues:

• Unwillingness to invest time or money in thought leadership 
• Reluctance to talk about thought leadership in public-facing presentations and events
• Hesitancy to say anything provocative in thought leadership content
  
  

The consensus was that reluctant CEOs could be won over if a return on that investment (ROI) could be proven. The inevitable question followed: “But how can I measure the ROI of a thought leadership campaign?” 

Most marketing professionals have come across this question at some stage.  The challenge is that thought leadership builds reputation, trust and loyalty, and these are notoriously difficult to measure. It’s equally tricky to assess how these qualities improve the bottom line. 

Prove value with the metrics that matter

The marketing professionals at the breakout session knew that thought leadership works, but they said they often resort to engagement metrics such as the number of report downloads or dwell times. These might be easy to measure, but they’re not the metrics that really matter. 

Our framework for measuring the value of thought leadership specifies the need to measure a broad range of metrics:

• Alignment metrics – Every relevant function has to buy into the idea of creating thought leadership and agree on its objectives. Assess alignment by measuring intranet downloads and the number of times it’s used in pitches, proposals, speeches and presentations. 
  
• Engagement metrics – Measuring engagement across paid, shared, earned and owned channels is useful as a benchmark, but it’s a weak indicator of overall value. Metrics such as social mentions and sentiment, target media mentions and client touchpoints are more insightful.
  
• Influence and impact metrics – These are the most important metrics because they indicate brand equity and commercial impact, but they are also the most difficult ones to measure. Metrics include press coverage, meetings generated and customer life-time value. 

Each thought leadership campaign has its own objectives, so it’s important to select the measurement metrics that are relevant for that specific project.  

The problem of personal brand

Some marketers at the breakout session said their CEOs were reluctant to do thought leadership because they thought it would divert attention and resources away from their efforts to build their personal brands.

Marketers need to challenge this. For a start, the two pieces of work are not mutually exclusive: many leading brands with well-known CEOs produce compelling thought leadership. In fact, thought leadership done well can help CEOs to build their personal brand by giving them fresh data and insights to use in their speeches, blogs and presentations. Some of our clients even deliberately hold back research findings from a thought leadership campaign so that the CEO can use them exclusively. 

A few of the marketing professionals had the opposite problem: their CEOs didn’t want to carry out thought leadership because they didn’t want to promote it personally. They were worried about publicly getting behind a message that might not stand the test of time or resonate with their clients. 

Education can help here. Thought leadership is about sharing ideas that help business leaders think differently. It should be provocative, not controversial. And it doesn’t always need to make predictions. 

Everyone at the session agreed that understanding why CEOs are sceptical is crucial to addressing it. Some need data, others need explanation.        

Thought leadership is a valuable tool in the marketing mix. It’s worth investing time in proving that to the CEO.