Get to know your Vice President of Communications

This blog series explores the roles and responsibilities of every member of the VP-suite to help leaders understand their executive peers.

In today’s 24-hour news and content cycle, how does a company become a thought leader in its corresponding industry? The most effective way is to have a great VP of Communications (VPC). The VPC plays a key role within a company’s marketing organization by helping to raise the company’s profile and increase awareness of its products.

Understanding your Vice President of Communication

I have usually seen VPCs report directly to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) but in some cases they can report directly to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), depending on the nature of the business and players involved. For VPCs to be effective they must orchestrate their activities around identifying key influencers, leveraging the media and focusing on the right set deliverables.

To appreciate the VPC’s activities, let’s dig into these functions in more detail.

Influencers

Establishing thought leadership first requires knowing the audiences (buyers, users, influencers, blockers and advocates) that your Vice President of Product Marketing (VP PM) should have well defined.

Secondly, it is important to raise awareness with the influencers that can reach your key audiences. The VPC influencer list includes:

• Media. trade (e.g. InfoWorld), mainstream media (e.gx., Forbes), and bloggers that publish information pertaining to your business.
• Analysts. General analysts (e.g., Gartner) and niche-industry analysts(e.g., Javelin) that cover your corresponding industry in detail and tend to influence purchasing decisions with your future customers.
• Experts. Typically former industry analysts and/or well-known practitioners who may have large followers within their community and influence purchasing decisions with your future customers.
• Community. A community of your advocates, typically users of your product, who can have a strong, material impact on your ability to drive awareness. Online and offline venues are best for managing this community.

Ideally, your VPC will hire the right internal resources and/or agencies who have strong relationships with key influencers so that you can determine the best way to raise awareness with them for your company and product.

Promotion

Identifying the best avenues of promotion requires understanding how your key audiences get information on the type of product you sell. Different types of promotion include:

• Earned. This when your company spokespeople can be included in broader stories published by journalists. It’s important for the VPC to be responsive and spokespeople well-trained to capitalize on these opportunities when they surface.
• Press Releases. This is a controlled and mature medium with a periodic cadence. It is best utilized when promoting major announcements about products, customers, industry research and milestones.
• Briefings. These are meetings with industry analysts with the goal of sharing product vision, use cases, market momentum and case studies that prove the value of your offering.
• Content. This is a controlled medium with a regular cadence that follows a content calendar and acts as your own online publication. Content be prescriptive to your target audience.

Your VPC is responsible for deciding which forms of promotion to use and how much investment to make in each one that will work best for your company. Variables like resources, competitive landscape and maturation of your business or industry will help the VPC determine the correct course of action.

Deliverables

The effective use of influencers and promotion should generate deliverables or results that you can track and measure. These deliverables can include things like:

• Coverage. Encompasses the quantity of media coverage on your company, products and team within trade and mainstream publications.
• Quality. Contextualizes the amount of positive sentiment of your company, product and team across all your media.
• Authority. Qualifies the thought leadership position you have in your industry relative to your competitors and adjacent industry peers.
• Voice. Determines your “share of voice” across all types of promotion, specifically relative to your competition. Be sure to measure this across traditional media, analysts’ reports and online communities.

Continuous tracking of these deliverables will show that the VPC is focusing on the right things to drive brand awareness and purchase preferences with potential customers.

Summary

The VPC is responsible for increasing your company and product awareness. They do that by leveraging the right set of influencers and selecting the most suitable forms of promotion to effectively reach your future customers. So be sure to find the right VPC that can help make a difference for your business.

Here are ten questions to help you better collaborate with your VP of Communications.

1. Who are our top three influencers?
2. What do we want influencers to know about us?
3. What forms of promotion should we use?
4. Do we need to hire an agencies?
5. What are our top three deliverables?
6. What is our current share of voice position?
7. Who is our business spokesperson?
8. Who is our technical spokesperson?
9. Who are our top three industry analysts?
10. What are the current top three messages we want to convey?

Freddy Mangum has held various C-level roles in high-growth companies that have experienced successful exits. The intent of this blog is to help the fellow leaders better understand one another so that they can execute more effectively and build great businesses. Freddy currently advises C-suite staff on go-to-market and mentors founders through programs like the Stanford Incubator (StartX).

Want to read other blog posts in this series? See Freddy Mangum’s articles on Medium here.