CEO Marketing Challenges

One of the biggest tests for a CEO is making marketing work in their business. Those lacking marketing experience don't know how to make this enigmatic function function. Those with a marketing background can over-manage and overcommit, creating another set of problems. It's all the more difficult for technologists and other domain experts, because marketing has a rhythm that sometimes is at odds with their logical brains.

I've spent decades working with CEOs in all of these camps. Here are some hard-earned lessons from their experiences. I hope they help you avoid or shorten the pain from some or all of their missteps.

3 Signs That Your Marketing Is Broken

How is your marketing program doing? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, especially in B2B where your sales cycle can be so long and end results are so far delayed from the work you’re doing today.

Even the things you can measure are unique enough to your business that it’s hard to compare to other businesses.

I’ve found that a good sanity check for your marketing health can be found in some dysfunctional behaviors - things that you and your team are doing now.

5 CEO Marketing Misses

In marketing, it’s so easy for CEOs to over-focus on activity, when isolated activities and random acts of marketing just don’t work. And one of the key reasons this happens is a lack of clear direction and purpose for the marketing effort or marketing team.

It's understandable. Activity can be seen and felt. It gives everyone a sense of progress. But that sense is often a mirage, because confusing, conflicting and aimless motion is not impactful. In fact, it is worse than doing nothing at all.

Here are five things that CEOs often miss when it comes to their marketing.

The Marketing Inferiority Complex

I’ve been interviewing a lot of CEOs as research for my next book, and an interesting thing is coming out of that. The most common first reaction, when I ask to interview a CEO about how marketing works in their business is something like "Oh, you don’t want to talk to me. My marketing is messed up". How interesting!

There is a CEO marketing inferiority complex that CEOs are victim of. They think everybody but them has marketing figured out. The truth is that they mostly don’t.

Your marketing is better than you think. And it's messy. Here are some tips to help you overcome this inferiority complex, so you can move forward with confidence and maybe a little pride to move forward with your messy but meaningful marketing.