You Ask, I Answer: Leveraging Senior Executives for Content Marketing?

In today's video, Sandra asks, how do I leverage the senior leaders from our company, many of whom are not socially or digital media savvy and pressed for time doing you know leadership things uh for content marketing. This is a great question. It's a very common question, especially in the public relations space, because what tends to happen is you'll get some initial interest because somebody read something on an airline magazine, right? Uh, or uh a leadership showcase piece in Harvard Business Review, and they're like, we gotta do this, and then a week later they're like, nope, too busy. And so there are a couple different ways to handle this.

Now, for the leaders who really want to jump in, a really good template for that is the work that uh John Ledger at the CEO of Team Mobile does. He is all in all the time. Uh and for him, that's his thing. Like he's responding on Twitter, and he's got a team that helps respond on Twitter to monitor it. Uh he is creating content like crazy.

He built a cooking show, uh Slow Cooker Sundays, um, on Facebook Live and and a variety of other platforms, because that's just the kind of thing that that fits his personality. So part of that is determining if any of your executives have the kind of personality where they do want to be uh all in, where they do want to have um uh exposure to their personal brand, and they're willing to put in a lot of time for it. If I had to guess, based on what I can see and what I I have known from working with T Mobile in the past, uh for John Ledger, it's probably about eight hours a week, uh, which for a CEO of a major corporation is a heck of a lot of time. Probably a better model to look at would be the way that Bill Marriott uh and his team do it at the at the Marriott Hotel chain. Um, Bill is a more uh senior executive and he's not technologically savvy at all.

But what his team has figured out to do is to have him leave he leaves them voicemails uh when he's on the road, when he's traveling or whatever, and the team takes those, transcribes them, and turns them into to written content. And so they're able to make use of his experience and his points of view without making him do a whole lot of work. And for him, leaving a voicemail as he's you know wandering through an airport or whatever is a is a great use of his time. Uh in today's world, video is king. Uh so I would start with video.

And the way I would do that is do it as QA sessions with your executives. Depending on how many of them there are, there's typically any given company, there's two or three at least. Um bring a smartphone, because it's a decent camera these days, most phones. If it's a phone that's less than a year old, it's probably got a pretty good camera. Bring a um a really good microphone for that smartphone, or alternately.

A pocket digital recorder, something like this, and you know, you literally park it right in front of the executive, um, just below them. There are inexpensive microphones you can use as well. And what you want to do is you want to record video QA with that executive about your industry. So if you are, you know, industrial plastics, for example, what are some of the major issues that are happening in the industry right now? How, how is the company approaching sustainability?

You'll wanna come up with a list of questions and get them to the executives or their assistants or whoever uh in advance to vet them and to make sure that like, oh, we're not gonna answer that one. Uh you know at a like in an industrial plastics company. They're like, no, we know that this the product's destroying the environment, but we're not gonna talk about that because we don't have a plan to address it yet. Um so you'll wanna have those lists of questions and then do 30 minutes of QA, maybe do one interview a month with the executives to say, like, yeah, it's another 30-minute meeting on your calendar. We're gonna record it, uh, it's gonna go straight through, and then what you've got is a piece of gold there that uh uses um what uh we call uh at Trust Insights the uh transmedia framework.

So you take a piece of video, and now that piece of video, you uh you split out the audio. Guess what? Now you've got audio that you can chop up into podcasts. Uh take that video, chop that up. Now you've got little things for Instagram stories or your Instagram news feed.

Uh you've got video for YouTube uh that you can split up, you can put headers and footers and you know you can do the intros and outros, uh explaining like in today's video we're talking about industrial plastics. Um then you can take the MP3 file and send it to a transcription service. I use otter.ai, the O-T-T-E-R dot AI, and it will transcribe your audio and turn it into written raw content, and then you'll take that, edit that, slice that up. That becomes blog posts, uh that becomes uh email newsletter content. If you're really uh blessed to have executives who like to talk a lot, uh and and say things that are valuable, uh you can even potentially take all the transcripts and and bundle them together as an ebook or a white paper or things like that.

And by doing this, that one video becomes many, many pieces of content that you can use that you can promote, that you can uh load up with keywords and things, and really build out a huge library of uh valuable content that's on topic on brand in the voice of the people who are speaking it, um, and it's them, especially in the videos. You know, you you and you can assure them, like, look, we're we're not gonna post the whole thing uncut uh unless they want to, but more than anything, we're gonna post the the the chunks, the one or two-minute chunks, so that people can hear, oh, these folks really know what they're talking about. They seem to know their business pretty well. Um what kinds of questions? You want to ask questions that your customers are asking.

So go into your customer service inbox, go into their your comments on social media, go into uh the industry forum for your industry on Reddit, pull out questions that people actually have, and then get your executives' point of view on how to on how those questions should be answered. So, for example, in in machine learning, uh I answer questions all the time. Uh some of them are in uh in these videos, some of them are in newsletters and stuff, but we know the questions people are gonna ask. We know the questions that people want to know more about, answer those questions, and that way you and your executives never run out of content, right? You never ever run out of content.

If you just say, Hey, we're gonna shoot a video this month, and then you're like, Oh, we don't know what to shoot, you know, that's gonna frustrate executives pretty quickly. If you say, Hey, these are the top 20 questions that our customers have asked us, how do you want to answer them? That's interesting to an executive, and it even has a side benefit of helping the executive become more customer focused than they already are because they're literally hearing the voice of the customer. So make sure that you're pulling your these questions from real customers that have uh that have in that have a a need for answers and that you have the answers for them. So that's my recommendation for how you would leverage senior leaders from your company.

Video them one 30-minute meeting per month per executive. Do it separately, do not do it in a group unless they you know tell you to. Um give them the option of also things like voicemails if they want, uh, you know, or MP3 recordings, voice memos, whatever, if they want to do that, and base it all on what customers are asking so that you never run out of content. If you have follow up questions, leave them below. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon.

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