The Rise of the Executive-Led Marketing Strategy

“How do clients find your services?” I asked.

“This is why we hired you. We only have one lead source and we’re trying to diversify.”

“What’s that source?”

“Our one sales rep plays golf with all the big bank executives.”

The foundation of B2B sales is trust. Some companies are lucky enough to build trust by sharing a tee time with their ideal customers. But for most companies, that’s not an option. 

You either play the cold sales game or invest in marketing that builds trust. Today, the most advantageous way to build trust with B2B clients is to engage in executive-led marketing.

Executive-led marketing is a strategy that centers your company’s content, authority, and reach around the public presence of your leadership team—particularly the C-suite.

Here's why this strategy is on the rise. 

Marketing is arbitrage

I tend to think about marketing as the business of arbitrage. Good marketers are constantly searching for ways to pay the lowest cost for the highest quality attention. 

In the 2010s, marketing arbitrage was found in digital ads. Facebook and Google ads were still so underutilized that savvy marketers could make a killing. Then, they became popular. The cost per lead was bid gradually upward. 

So, marketers discovered influencer marketing. For a long time this was highly cost effective. Then influencers got agents and lawyers—and their ROI to marketers became less efficient. The arbitrage of attention dried up.

Then came micro-influencers and sponsoring niche newsletters. This arguably still works today in many circles.

Micro-influencers are largely a tool for consumer brands. It’s harder for B2B brands to get the same leverage. Unless, of course, those brands look internally.

The micro-influencers of your company are the C-suite. The biggest arbitrage in B2B today is executive-led marketing.

Executives are internet attention magnets

CEOs have always been the face of their companies. To be a founder or senior executive often means that you’re a compelling salesperson and storyteller. That’s a large reason why you’ve made it to the top. You know how to sell your vision to employees and customers.

For most of entrepreneurship history, this authority was contained in social circles. You might speak at a few conferences or occasionally comment on industry news. But for the most part, your influence was within your immediate social circle—the people you knew from conferences or your MBA program.

Today, the influence of executives can extend farther and faster. Executives are becoming micro-influencers, driving most of the marketing for their organizations by showing up on social media, podcasts, newsletters, and op-eds. 

You may not have access to a country club where all your ideal clients tee off from the same green. But you do have a disproportionate influence in the world of online media.

The Financial Times recently reported that people in executive-level roles get 4X the reach of other LinkedIn members. It’s hard to know if this is a chicken or egg situation: Does the algorithm boost your reach because of your title? Or do people interact more with your post, driving up the reach of your average post, because of your influence as an executive?

It doesn’t matter. The outcome is the same: executives get outsized attention.

Building an executive-led content marketing strategy

For the past year, I’ve been working with a B2B company that wanted to go all-in on executive-led content. I’ve worked with many executives before. But this has been my first time seeing an entire team that is all-in on the executive-led marketing.

It’s not just the CEO or founder publishing their ideas. The heads of every major department are getting in on the action. 

I think this is going to become more common as companies see the obvious connection between B2B trust and marketing real people rather than empty company logos. And it's only getting easier to participate, with platforms like LinkedIn introducing influencer tools to make the platform more publisher-friendly.

Marketers have known for years that company social media profiles get a fraction of the engagement of employees at the same company. It turns out, employees only get a fraction of the social reach of the executive team.

There’s never been a better time to double down on executive-led content strategy. You can build a company on the trust people place in your company’s leadership team. 

How do you build this strategy from the ground up?

Some executives are already doing this on their own. They see the opportunity of social media and are doing the work to build an influential executive personal brand online.

This is the best-case scenario because it’s self-motivated and starts in the executive’s voice and ideas. But chances are, if your executives are regularly publishing on their own, you wouldn’t be reading this article.

So, how do you build a content strategy around executives who don’t have time to post online each day?

At the bare minimum, executing an executive-led marketing strategy comes down to one mission: Find your point person.

The point person will be someone on your marketing team who takes full ownership of the publishing process. This entails everything from meeting regularly with executives to source timely ideas, ghostwriting content in the voice of the executive, publishing content on the appropriate channels, and engaging with comments and DMs.

This will get you ahead of most B2B companies—who don’t use executive marketing at all. But it’s good to remember: there are levels to the game.

The gold standard of executive-led marketing

The best executive content marketing strategies go far beyond social media. You work backward from the question: What are the attributes of industry leaders?

Most people would say industry authority goes beyond merely posting on social media. Leading an industry looks like publicity, op-eds, book deals, speaking engagements, and TV appearances. 

I’m hinting at what I consider the gold standard of executive-led marketing. Senior executives aren’t merely participating in the industry conversation.

They’re leading it.

To me, this is still the big missed opportunity of most B2B companies. The best executive-led marketing strategy combines social media reach with traditional authority drivers like books and earned media. 

The advantage here is that both efforts—social media and PR—feed off one another: A highly engaged social media following makes it easier to land speaking engagements or book deals. Journalists are more likely to find and quote the words of an online executive. 

Plus, publicity is a form of social media strategy. Landing a book deal, being quoted in major media outlets, and speaking at conferences—all of these efforts create natural buzz on social media.

The irony of the social internet is that the most popular people tend to be effective at earning attention offline and then translating offline experiences for the web. 

Turning leadership into leverage

We’re in a moment when executives can drive the majority of their company’s marketing momentum—if they’re willing to show up and lead the conversation.

It’s not about chasing virality. It’s about building visibility, trust, and authority in a way that scales with the business.

If your executive team sees the value in this, but lacks the time or clarity to pull it off consistently, that’s where I come in.

I work with B2B leaders to turn their ideas into a consistent stream of strategic content—across LinkedIn, earned media, and thought leadership books.

When you're ready to build your executive-led marketing strategy, let’s talk.