Your Target Audience Is Impossible to Reach. What Now?

What do you do when your audience is sort of unimaginable to succeed in? When you serve CEOs and different prime C-suite executives at bigger corporations, you’ve in all probability requested this query your self.
Right here’s the way it goes down:

Let’s say you’re a marketing consultant who desires to work with prime management at a specific enterprise. You examine their web site, however there is no such thing as a particular person e-mail handle, telephone quantity or different means to contact them instantly. So that you look them up on LinkedIn—figuring out that you should use the platform’s InMail function to succeed in them. Solely they aren’t on LinkedIn! Nor are they on X, Fb or some other social platform.

You name the corporate’s primary line (not hoping for a lot, nevertheless it’s one thing). You’re directed to an assistant who takes a message however received’t decide to a callback. After all, you hear nothing. You take into account sending an e-mail via the web site’s primary contact type, however you know that’s going to be a lifeless letter. What do you do?

Ultimately, you surrender in frustration. You by no means even acquired a glimpse, a lot much less a shot.

Now, I’ve labored with a few of these unattainable leaders. They inform me they don’t have the time to have interaction on LinkedIn or take care of unsolicited e-mail. They don’t need advertising or gross sales pitches. The received’t ever obtain a bit of content material. That’s not how they function. Being inaccessible permits them to concentrate on the necessary issues.

Do you throw up your fingers? Are they merely unreachable?

By no means.

You see, just under the highest leaders are a cadre of executives and higher administration who work together with them daily. Leaders depend on these people to implement key choices, provide insights into the corporate’s efficiency and supply a variety of recommendation.

Briefly, this penultimate tier of administration is extremely influential. When you can catch their consideration, you’ve got a pathway to the highest. And likelihood is, these people are way more accessible.

However to succeed in your final aim—the highest executives—you want a change in technique. You could persuade these one-rung-down executives that you just or your agency has one thing particular to supply.
Whether or not you might be utilizing advertising to focus on particular executives or to succeed in a specific function or phase (for instance, VPs of Expertise and CIOs), you should use a quiver of acquainted methods to nurture them, reminiscent of social media, e-mail, promoting and networking.

Essentially the most fruitful path to your vacation spot, nonetheless, is to determine familiarity and belief in your agency. Which means exposing your (recalibrated) viewers repeatedly to your expertise. Search for alternatives to talk to them about enterprise challenges that your agency can resolve. Write knowledgeable instructional articles, weblog posts and guides. Use the ideas of search engine optimisation, AEO and GEO to make your content material and agency findable on-line.

As you write, nonetheless, understand that your final viewers is a busy chief, not a technical skilled. The aim is to supply content material that may simply be shared up the meals chain and that the CEO you need to attain (or whoever you might be concentrating on) will discover insightful.

An equally necessary aim is to show the one-rung-down executives into followers—individuals who will readily advocate your agency to the highest executives when they should rent an outdoor useful resource to resolve the sorts of issues you take care of daily. Repeated publicity to content material is a vital part. Video, webinars, podcasts and talking engagements may be nice methods to place a human face in your agency and construct a private connection that is more difficult with the written phrase alone.

On the finish of the day, advertising to ivory-tower CEOs shouldn’t be that totally different from the form of advertising I’ve written about numerous instances earlier than on this e-newsletter. All it takes is an easy shift in your audience—and the persistence for the technique to bear fruit.