Whatever you think you might know about your marketing team and your company’s marketing strategies, think again. As a CEO, it’s crucial to stay in the loop with ever-changing marketing initiatives and tools. Follow these 10 CEO marketing questions to learn more about your team’s marketing efforts—and how you can stay educated and involved as to how your marketing team’s initiatives play out.
10 CEO Marketing Questions You Should Be Asking
Take a look at these guidelines to learn how your marketing department is driving results and connecting with your customers.
How does your team measure success?
Find out the metrics your marketing team uses. Whether it’s through SEO, pay per click advertising, social media curation, email marketing, looking at site visits or other marketing strategies, it’s important to know how the department measures success and drives revenue.
What’s our customer value proposition?
One of the best CEO marketing questions involves a value proposition. What is the marketing team providing for your customers? How are we promoting our product, and how have customers responded?
Who are our best customers, and how do they want us to communicate with them? Furthermore, how are we personalizing their experience?
One of the primary tenets of marketing is “KYA”—Know Your Audience. From looking at current customer data and doing some thorough research, then it’s easier to discover prospects. Does the marketing team successfully personalize their marketing campaigns to provide value for their audience? A great marketing team must know how to communicate with the best customers so that two things happen: they keep coming back, and new customers follow suit.
What systems, tools, processes, analytical and data management skills will you need in order to build your success measurement capabilities?
Are there programs or tools the marketing team can take advantage of to boost success? Get feedback from the team regarding what resources they could put to good use.
How are you marketing to current customers as well as new, prospective and even former customers?
Different marketing tactics may mesh well with different kinds of customers. Has the marketing team segmented email lists to different customer demographics, for instance? Thus, you should inquire as to how the marketing team reaches out to various types of customers.
As a CEO, why should I care about our marketing department’s efforts?
Knowing your business means staying in the loop with marketing. This is one of the strongest CEO marketing questions, as it opens the door for the team you hired to describe the value they bring to the company and to the customers.
Should we outsource a marketing agency or hire a marketing manager?
Something you’ll have to decide as CEO is if you’ll want to enlist an in-house team or a SEO company. This decision means you’ll have to weigh several factors: cost, manageability, physical proximity, size of the team, etc. Hiring a digital marketing agency like Markitors may be the more affordable option, with less maintenance required (such as employee training or
Where should we be doubling our marketing efforts?
Is the marketing team venturing into the lesser-explored platforms? Perhaps the team needs to boost email marketing efforts, or restructure a social media campaign. Find out if the team sees room for improvement, as well as if they need more resources to do so.
How do you plan to foster collaboration between your marketing team and other departments?
In general, a great business (and a great CEO) will ensure no single team is acting as an island. Collaborating with other teams, such as sales or PR, is a
Give me a timeline—when will the implementation of our marketing strategy pay off?
Time is of the essence in marketing, of course. This is one of the best CEO marketing questions—since it highlights how much your team values time when moving forward with a marketing initiative.
What CEO marketing questions would you add to this list? Let us know! For all your digital marketing needs, contact Markitors to help drive your business forward.
Markitors is a digital marketing company that moves small businesses forward online. We offer full service digital marketing services including SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, pay per click management, and website development.
