As a business executive, you’re under no obligation to be public-facing. But, if well-managed, content published by a senior leader – whether a CEO, founder, or other C-suite exec – can be a powerful marketing asset for a business.

There are some CEOs who demonstrably should not enter the public eye. Mark Vadon, co-founder of $4.5bn ecommerce startup Zulily, for example, lasted only a few weeks in his public-facing role before telling the press that his growing hordes of happy customers were “like zombies…they just keep on coming!”

Other businesses arguably would never have reached the same heights without their magnetic leaders. Apple rode on Steve Jobs’ cult-like following and still does to an extent; Tesla’s fundamentals as a car manufacturer are worrying, yet customers and investors continue to back brand Musk.

These are extreme examples. Most business leaders neither expect or want a cult-like following; yet their knowledge, network and personality can still be leveraged by the marketing team as a highly useful growth asset.

Hearing yourself described as a ‘marketing asset’ may feel uncomfortable. But there are various ways to approach this. At Navigate B2B, we offer ghost-writing and ghost-social media management alongside broader content marketing packages. For this article, we also spoke to PR expert Bhavna Mistry whose agency, Velvet PR, has extensive experience in this area. Amongst the various options, it’s usually possible to find a formula that works for every business leader who’s interested in this kind of work.

In this article we cover:

• why a business leaders’ personality makes such a useful marketing asset
• the different forms of marketing and PR via which this asset can be deployed – and why a combination of multiple channels should yield the best results
• some best practices when publishing as (or for) a business leader.

The bottom line is that people buy from people. Customers are emotionally inclined to trust and invest in people they know and like, so you will often find that marketing investment in a personality – as opposed to a faceless brand – delivers outsized returns.

Business leaders – founders and CEOs in particular – tend to know this and often do a pretty good job as networkers. Yet these efforts can be supported or amplified with the right approach. And if, as a CEO, you’re less enthusiastic about the limelight (as many are), you can potentially still lend your voice and your image to your marcomms team and let them work their magic.

Why a business executive’s personality makes such a useful marketing asset

For everyday purchasing needs in established business categories, like cans of Coke or CRM SaaS subscriptions, having a publicly active CEO may not be necessary, but rather just a beneficial addition to your overall marketing mix.

But in some more people-centered, or highly-technical industries, investing in this area can have a more significant impact on your commercial success. These could include:

• Businesses with long enterprise cycles where relationship building is key to commercial success.
• Innovative offerings where customer awareness is poor and so trust needs to be earned. Many businesspeople don’t appreciate being told how their legacy working practices are wrong (even if they know they are). But they might be more inclined to pay attention to a well-informed and respected leader who’s advocating positive change.
• ‘People businesses’, where differentiation between value-propositions is relatively low, such as recruitment and marcomms. In cases like this, personal networks, and emotional factors such as branding, can be bigger differentiators.

Whatever the case in your business, there are a few key factors which make an executive’s profile such a potent asset for marketing.

Building trust and emotional engagement

In many industries, potential customers have both practical and emotional needs. On the practical side, they are looking for knowledge and understanding of the market and product. On the emotional side, they are hoping to feel confident in their buying decisions by going to someone they can personally trust. They may even be looking to buy into a brand or a personality with celebrity status, as this may be more emotionally rewarding.

A member of the C-suite could meet both of these needs – both as a human personality and a voice of authority. As a business leader, you know more about your business than anyone else, and may even know more about a particular area of your customers’ industries than the customers themselves.

B2B International’s yearly Superpowers Index recently looked into the drivers behind B2B purchasing decisions.

In 2025, being ‘active thought leaders in their category’ and ‘providing the support, information, and expertise we need’ were two of the top three drivers said to make a difference when incumbent suppliers retain their business.

The study also noted that brands that performed well in thought leadership were twice as likely to score highly for the statement, ‘I feel safe signing a contract with them’ – which was the top decision driver.

This demonstrates a salient point: that putting out content isn’t enough; it has to be authentic and high-quality content rooted in the business leader’s experience.

As Bhavna puts it: 

“…people are so media savvy now, they are so content-saturated, that really quickly their inner radar picks out somebody that’s got something new, different, intelligent to say, and is authentic, is participating in the conversation as it is now, and isn’t telling and selling.”

As an extension of peer-to-peer networking

B2Bs at every phase of growth close a large share of their new business via personal networks. “We’re still in an era where people buy people”, says Bhavna.

‘I think reputationally, if you use the CEO or the C-suite in the right way, it can completely help you punch above your weight… It doesn’t matter what it is that you’re selling, [customers] want to know that there is a person behind the shop door, and that they can liaise with that personality.”

For “punch above your weight”, read: get greater ROI on your executives’ salaries.

A major advantage of executive thought leadership is that – if it’s genuinely useful and interesting to customers – it continues to make audience impressions long after it’s been published. This effectively means your thought leaders’ personalities, experience and authority can be in more places, over a longer period of time.

Do this at scale, and you should expect to attract more leads and close more deals (or close the same deals more quickly).

You can scale this across the leadership team. Bhavna explains Velvet PR’s approach:

“Essentially, it’s a peer-to-peer conversation, and that’s when it works well, because the CEO will understand the pain points and the business challenges of other CEOs. Meanwhile we’ll have the FD talking to the financial media, we’ll have the head of growth talking to more business-to-business titles, we’ll have the head of tech talking to the more technical titles… The fact that you know what you’re talking about gives you an automatic sense of authority and credibility.”

And if you include senior colleagues in your executive thought leadership program, you also shouldn’t worry too much about whether they might leave. Yes: work with loyal teammates where possible. But if they do leave, ‘their’ content stays on your channels and should keep hauling visitors into your business long after they’ve gone.

Incorporating executive profiling into your wider content marketing strategy

A business leader’s thought leadership can also be extremely useful as content marketing material for publishing on your company blog. This content should rank in Google and AI search and lend all the same commercial benefits as any other marketing content – with the additional benefits that derive from profiling a named business leader.

This isn’t really an article about AI search, but it’s hard to avoid the topic in an age where generative search is taking over much of the buyer journey. From our client analytics, we’re seeing people visit company websites less often, and later in their buyer journeys, since the generative search tools are so effective at fulfilling customer search needs.

A popular executive profile can create a kind of moat against the vagaries of search algorithms (both conventional and AI search) and give a reason to visit your brand channels. But ideally, your senior leaders’ content should help your business rank highly in these environments as well and maximise the reach of these assets.

Different approaches to executive thought leadership & PR

Successful content can come in any form.

Seth Godin’s short daily newsletter has been running since 2002, and provides insights on many aspects of marketing, including tech like AI and LLMs, alongside more whimsical musings. The audience he’s built over time, by providing valuable tips and advice, means that the blog is also a useful vehicle to support and promote whatever projects he’s working on at the time.

Another success story in a different format was ‘Whiteboard Fridays’, a YouTube video series on content marketing best practices. It was originally run by marketing influencer Rand Fishkin, and probably took off thanks to his personality. But it retained momentum and continues to this day under the brand of Moz (which Fishkin founded).

You might prefer podcasts, a company blog, LinkedIn, or PR. No single channel or format is essential for leveraging a leader’s personality as a marketing asset, but all can be effective and all the more so when used in combination.

Here’s a brief overview of the benefits and limitations of 3 of the most widely-used channels for executive thought leadership.

PR (or ‘earned media’)

PR coverage is ‘earned media’, whereby the press considers an individual important enough to invite them to comment on stories they’re publishing anyway (or occasionally when they decide to profile an industry celebrity or rising star).

The major benefit of PR is reach, scale, and also credibility to some degree. It’s often said that a customer must see a brand seven times before they consider it a viable option in the market; if someone sees your business in the press, especially multiple times in succession, that can accelerate that process.

The drawback of ‘earned media’ is that you’re limited to what the press are interested in publishing and so you need some base of mass appeal. You’re also limited to the capacity of the editorial team to understand your message; for highly innovative or technical solutions, it could go straight over peoples’ heads.

Nonetheless, PR works. In 2016-17 I worked at a creative agency which climbed from £60m to £100m fee income in 18 months with PR driving the majority of inbound leads. So, most businesses with the budget for PR should at least consult with an agency and see if there’s a good prospect of picking up momentum in the press.

Thought leadership publishing on your website or other owned channels

Content marketing, or ‘owned content’, is more of a precision tool than PR. You’re restricted to the smaller audience that you can build organically, but you can optimise for very direct language which addresses your customers’ research needs.

Your control over your data also means that you can continually optimise your approach using your marketing analytics. The content which you create and publish under your own domain, on your own terms and in your own language, means you can give people a full sense of who you are and what people will get from you.

Content marketing can also be more capital-efficient because a good article might rank in search tools for years, producing accumulating ROI over time. By contrast, fame is notoriously fickle. Most PR will be out of date a month or two after it’s released, making it more of a pay-to-play investment.

Social media including LinkedIn

Social media combines some of the benefits and drawbacks of both PR and marketing. We strongly advocate proper use of LinkedIn by CEOs, founders and sales leaders in particular because it has a tangible impact on commercial KPIs.

Social media channels are, technically, media publishers. You may feel you ‘own’ your profile and your company page, but actually, somebody else owns the environment – and if you want to win, you have to play by the social channel’s rules.

When we were simultaneously posting content on clients’ company pages and CEOs’ personal profiles, posts on the personal profiles nearly always performed better in terms of reach, engagement, and website traffic.

We aggregated data from 3 different clients and found equivalent correlations across each: a spike in social media impressions on a business leader’s post was associated with a 2:1 probability of a spike in visitors to the company’s website. This trend didn’t exist when only using company LinkedIn pages; only the personal profile.

 

Of course, the drawback of social media is that it’s arguably too cheap and easy, and a minefield for vanity metrics. Some business leaders do well by posting a lot of selfies and if that works for you then great – but the one thing a selfie can’t do is demonstrate anything about your product or service differentiation.

Ultimately any owned media channel can be used badly or well; it’s down to you and your PR/marketing team to understand your customer’s priorities and tailor the messaging accordingly.

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With any marcomms messaging, there is a balance to strike between scale and precision. And the most powerful results will come from a combination of both. As Bhavna puts it – “the real art of earned and owned media is how you mix it up.”

Varying up the format of your content can help to hit both the emotional and practical drivers for your customers – offering a balance between information and personality. Some may prefer information received via PR placements, LinkedIn posts, thought leadership articles, podcasts, or even speaking at events.

Having a suite of content across various platforms, connected touchpoints that form a cohesive message, will work together to improve reach, brand recognition, and credibility.

Although content published under your business leader’s profile may just form one part of this multi-faceted approach, we have consistently found that the KPIs from publishing as a named individual delivers a greater impact than publishing under a faceless brand – so it’s arguably one of the most important parts of the mix.

Some best practices when publishing as (or for) a business leader

Whatever your mix of channels, your executive thought leadership should be underpinned by the same strategy as any other content marketing: i.e., written from the perspective of deep customer insight, with an expectation of a direct impact on sales.

Use your sales strategy as the starting point for your content calendar

A lot of companies’ marketing efforts seem totally detached from sales.

Anecdotally, this misalignment seems to be worse at larger organisations, which may employ multiple marketing managers who have a remit to produce content, but have little to no direct interaction with the sales team. In most cases these teams produce substandard blogs with short shelf lives and no real customer value – such as write-ups on recent events, or self-serving content about the company’s own products or services.

Tellingly: a survey of 50 corporate heads of sales by McKinsey, in 2022, found that 57% of commercial leaders “don’t pay much attention to content produced by their marketing teams, feeling it is generic and unresponsive.”

There’s an easy solution to this: stop doing it.

If you have 10 marketing managers each wasting 10% of their time on mediocre content, that’s effectively one FTE (or equivalent salary) which could be shifted onto a PR or marketing partner who you’d expect to produce meaningful ROI. This ‘partner’ (supplier, colleague, whoever) should probably not spend most of their time with your marketing team, but should work side-by-side with the sales leadership and/or the business leaders for whom they’re ghost-writing, as a direct extension of that growth function.

Of course, this side-by-side collaboration is also an opportunity for the marcomms professionals to advise the senior team on what is and isn’t likely to work.

One podcast we created and ran for a client, a few years ago, was successful in building an audience and profiling the charismatic CEO. But he was never interested in being briefed on what to say, and so the podcast tended to revolve around the common interests of himself and his guests, rather than his business category (recruitment). This misalignment meant that although the content was ‘fun’ and produced a lift in certain KPIs, it never had the desired impact on search visibility or lead generation.

In other cases, we’ve had years-long productive relationships with clients who were enthusiastic collaborators, and where we’ve learned a lot from each other, collaborating around the common goals of helping to educate potential customers in their solution/service category.

Publish quality content, consistently, over time

Senior buyers often make big-money decisions, in some cases worth millions. They’re spending other peoples’ money, and their careers may hinge on the outcome of those decisions – so they take the time to read and learn.

Illustratively: Edelman’s recent B2B thought leadership impact report demonstrated that senior people in many businesses are willing to take the time to seek out high quality content.

This study looked into ‘hidden buyers’ – senior stakeholders within businesses who you won’t necessarily meet during the sales process, but who hold a certain degree of authority over buying decisions. Of these hidden buyers:

• ‘95% of hidden buyers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach. It earns trust and creates credibility before a salesperson ever gets in the door.’
• ‘53% of hidden decision-makers agree that if thought leadership is high quality, then brand recognition matters less.’

Unfortunately, this message seems to be lost on some businesses, which seem to view content publishing like blogging, LinkedIn, or podcasting as simply a functional requirement of the business that can be offset to non-specialists, or even to AI.

Highly educated senior people often take pride in their choice of reading material, opting for quality publications, be it Harvard Business Review, The Economist, or more technical trade publications. So, use these as the model for the types of information you release under your personal brand.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me, ‘Nobody reads a 2,000+ word blog, I just don’t have the time.’ All these people were not senior buyers so they may lack the perspective needed for an informed opinion. Anyway, the analytics on our clients’ website demonstrate these assets are well-read by large numbers of people, if they’re pitched correctly.

If in-depth thought leadership isn’t up your street, it can be podcasts, infographics, films – whatever. The point is you need to maintain consistently high quality over a long period of time to build trust, reputation and an audience around your profile.

Brief properly; manage risks accordingly

After joining a leading payments startup in 2015, I was soon asked to include a senior exec in our content program because he “wouldn’t stop blogging.” This was seen as a way to contain his less helpful energies.

Broadly speaking, the risks of an over-eager, public-facing business leader can be overstated. Most CEOs would struggle to make a mistake as big as, for example, that of Gerald Ratner, who called his own products ‘crap’ in a very public speech and consequently depreciated his own company’s value by around £500 million.

Bhavna advises that anyone public-facing should always be ‘properly prepped…advised by experts’ – and PR agencies such as hers offer media training.

In our ghost-writing capacity at Navigate B2B, we can usually collect or show data within the first three months of a relationship which show the client what works and what doesn’t, and they tend to grasp it pretty quickly. Successful people are quick learners, after all.

As they’re adequately briefed and you maintain ongoing dialogue, there should be little to worry about as they work their magic. And if you can’t trust your team to use your profile responsibly and in a way that supports your commercial goals, it might be time for a new team.

Aspiring thought leaders: how to get started

Some C-suite executives may be apprehensive to enter the public eye; for others, it comes naturally.

Whatever the case, above all else, we would emphasise the importance of preparation and working to a proper content strategy.

On the strategy side: prove ‘search intent’ before you publish anything. If you’re a highly disruptive or innovative business, there will likely be little customer awareness around your solution – but you’re probably already an expert on the customer problems that you solve. That’s the place to start.

Once that strategy is in place and you’ve listed the top 20-30 problems that you can authoritatively discuss for customers, you can start considering practical questions such as…

• Which business leaders in our business could lend their profiles as marketing assets?
• Who can own which topics?
• Who will be easiest to manage? Could trying to work on this with certain members of the executive team possibly be more trouble than they’re worth?
• What type of content is your customer looking for? Buyers in certain industries are more predisposed to certain formats across certain channels
• Who on your team is more suited to customers’ favourite content channels? Some people love social media posting; others are better on stage.

If you’re a solo entrepreneur, working through these questions with a PR or marketing partner would be an excellent start to a new relationship.

If you’re a marketing professional in a larger business, working through them on your own might be a sensible precursor to bringing in your senior colleagues, as it could really help you figure out whose help will be most valuable.

As we’ve discussed, high-quality information for your customers, that’s aligned with your commercial strategy, is the single most important factor in making these efforts productive. That’s the same for executive profiling, and any other type of marketing and PR.

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Bhavna Mistry is partner at Velvet PR, specialising in PR and comms for B2B brands in marcoms, martech and digital experience.

Navigate B2B is a marketing agency which specialises in martech and B2B SaaS and augments sales with high-quality thought leadership and digital marketing.