How CEOs Lead Marketing without a Marketing Leader

If you're a CEO and you don't have a marketing leader on your executive team, you more likely fall into one of three camps.

One: You're doing well, you've got this marketing thing figured out. That's great! We're not going to talk about that today.

Number two: You're trying to do too much. Maybe you're passionate about marketing. Maybe you you see all the things you should be doing, and you've added on too many programs, and you're not executing well.

Third, you aren't comfortable with marketing, and you're doing too little. You may be doing one big tactic that consultant or vendor convinced you is the right thing to do, but you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what else you should be doing.

In both the second and the third case, I have a solution to suggest for you:

You need to start marketing on purpose.

You don't need to spend a lot of effort upfront, but spend enough time to come up with a plan for your marketing, a simple plan and then follow that plan. Let's go through those three steps in that plan.

Step 1: Know your ideal customer

First know who your ideal customer is. That means go beyond just a target market and understand exactly who those people are, what it is that they need and what you're going to provide for them that they're willing to pay you for.

Litmus test: You'll know if you're being specific enough if you know enough about this target to create a specific list of prospect companies.

The second part of this step is knowing what your message is for these ideal customers and making sure all of your team understands that message. Not just the marketing and sales people, but everybody in your company.

Step 2: Know what you want them to do

The second step: Know what you want those target customers to do. You should think through the six stages of the customer journey, what you expect the customer to experience, and how you want them to behave at each stage for you to be successful.

Those six stages are

1. Awareness - how they first hear about you, learn about you

2. Interest - how they raise their hand and say, "I want to connect with you"

3. Purchase

4. Satisfaction in their purchase

5. Purchasing again

6. Becoming a champion for you and your business.

Write those things down. Take the time to document your expectations. It doesn't have to take a lot of time, but document what you expect your customer to do or what you want your customer to do in each of those six stages.

Step 3: Use marketing to help you do that

The third step is use marketing to help you achieve that experience.

Start with looking at that journey and comparing it to reality, to today, and see where the biggest gaps are in your customers journey.

That should be the priority for you to select marketing tactics to solve those issues or fill those gaps in your customers journey.

To keep you from over committing, have a reason for every marketing program that you sign up to do. It should be a reason related to that customer journey experience. Only do those marketing tactics that have that reason defined -- and how you will measure that they deliver on that purpose.

I've created a guide to help you lead your marketing without spending too much time on it. It helps you go through these three steps with some great tips to make it easier.

Click here for your free copy.

And I hope you comment below on how you're making your marketing work today without a marketing later.