Five Questions Every CEO Must Answer to Maximize Customer Engagement

Five Questions Every CEO Must Answer to Maximize Customer Engagement.

Here are five questions every CEO should answer to determine if their corporate story is maximizing engagement and growth opportunities throughout the customer journey.

1. Is your corporate message clear, compelling and consistent?
   Most executives think if they have a snappy corporate tagline and value proposition, the corporate story is complete. But the reality is, that will only go so far with respect to engaging and converting prospects to customers. There has to be more to the story. That’s why executive teams need to ensure there is a comprehensive corporate messaging platform in place and embraced across the organization. This complete version of your story serves as the foundation for clear, compelling and consistent communication throughout the customer experience. A corporate messaging platform goes well beyond a simple, one-page messaging document for the marketing department. It includes a broad range of actionable messaging content and tools for every customer-facing area of your business and drives messaging continuity throughout the customer journey.

   73% of CMOs indicate that their teams are not on message. (CMO Council)

2. Are employees able to bring your story to life?
   To bring your corporate story to life and cultivate lasting change in the customer experience, every employee must buy into and be armed with the key messages that can be delivered consistently across critical touchpoints in the customer journey. From casual conversations over the phone to customer-facing presentations, your employees must be able to deliver clear, compelling elements of the story with every connection they make. For this to happen, executives must ensure formal processes are in place that enable employees to internalize, personalize and activate the corporate story in daily work activities.

   70% of brand perception is driven by employees. (Enterprise IG)

3. Are you capitalizing on every customer conversation?
   In this self-service age of the customer, buyers consume a large percentage of your corporate story before ever speaking with a salesperson. That’s why messaging continuity and connectivity is essential between the self-service and sales phases of the customer journey. Executive teams must ensure clear, compelling and consistent corporate messaging is infused into sales tools and selling situations if they want to ignite trusted conversations with buyers and improve sales results.

   53% of sales executives say that consistent messaging in sales is a significant challenge. (SAVO Group)

4. Is your thought leadership strategy aligned with your corporate story?
   According to the Pedowitz Group, “Content is not a nice to have. It’s your voice and direct link to customers and prospects … companies must make sure it aligns with their marketing message.” So, needless to say, thought leadership is critical when it comes to engaging today’s buyer. To maximize engagement throughout the buyer journey, your company’s content strategy must be intentionally designed to extend and amplify critical elements of your corporate story. This will ensure the story buyers consume from one phase of the customer journey to the next is clear, compelling and connected.

   56% of companies do not have a documented thought leadership strategy. (Content Marketing Institute)

5. Does your story and visual brand align?
   While your corporate story is the foundation of business success, it must be wrapped in memorable creative to achieve maximum audience engagement. That’s why brand integration — creative execution that is aligned with your messaging strategy — is so important. Your visual brand (colors, images, photography, etc.) must be intentionally designed to bring the corporate story to life if you want maximum engagement throughout the customer experience.

So, are you maximizing the return on every connection you make?

The days of marketing owning the voice of your company are over. Today, every employee and touchpoint a buyer interacts with can make or break the customer connection. That’s why your organization’s ability to deliver a clear, compelling and consistent message is so important.

Remember, consistency and connectivity in your story won’t happen by chance.