CEO branding is all about shaping and managing the public image, reputation, and personal narrative of a CEO.
For a startup, it is essential.
This article explores why while providing you with the insight, tools, and real-world examples to help you build a powerful CEO brand yourself.
No matter the industry, whenever a startup launches the first thing anyone does is look to its leadership. Quite often, this is the founder, who initially also acts as CEO.
People want to gain an incline into why the company was launched, what they can expect from its culture, and what its objectives are.
If the CEO isn’t convincing, audiences will have a poor perception of the business, impacting its ability to attract talent, investment, and partnerships to help it scale and grow.
As the startup continues to grapple with reputational issues and future crises, its leadership may even be forced to resign.
This makes CEO branding essential. When done right, it establishes trust, inspires confidence, and differentiates a startup in a competitive market, ensuring long-term success.
So, if you’re a CEO wondering how to build your brand, you need to start with storytelling to connect with audiences and humanise your startup.
Usually, this begins with your professional and life experiences, where you outline your journey, the challenges you may have faced, your successes, and any other relevant anecdotes to prove you are authentic.
You can share this information across your company website, online bios, and your social pages.
Ensure that you always have your startup's vision in mind to ensure you craft a narrative that connects with its mission and aspirations.
For instance, life experiences with social anxiety as a child might be a good, emotional hook for a tech startup specialising in accessible meditation and therapy.
But an anecdote about your love for extreme sports might not relate directly to this context, no matter how much it suggests you’re a risk-taker.
Whatever you do, though, ensure that you stay truthful. All it takes is for one person to object to your claims for your reputation to be tarnished.
After you have crafted an initial brand for yourself, you need to improve your credibility with thought leadership.
What is thought leadership? Essentially, it positions you as an expert within your industry through insights, opinions, and innovative ideas you share with your audiences.
This can take place through social media posts, written articles, speaking at events, or engaging in media interviews.
For startups with a promising business model, perspectives from up-and-coming CEOs are nearly always in high demand.
So, even if you struggle with confidence, your ideas are more valuable than you think, particularly if you’re knowledgeable about a topic that is generating significant public interest.
Over time, as you develop a track record of securing media coverage and sharing social posts, you'll benefit from an increase in traffic where potential customers start to discover you more online.
Since CEO branding is a process that takes place across different platforms, it's incredibly important that you maintain consistency with your values, messaging, and tone.
This isn’t necessarily limited to social media posts and media interviews, but internal communications too.
For instance, signposting everywhere that you’re committed to instilling a thriving employee culture without evaluating the temperature of your team’s morale is a one-way ticket to an internal conflict.
Worse still, if your company treats staff particularly poorly, you run the risk of whistleblowers bringing your business to its knees.
In this sense, the best way to stay consistent across platforms, is to not only present yourself as a good, professional, insightful, and caring leader, but to always act as one.
Then, everything else across your different channels will naturally fall into place.
Though prefacing words with action is key to upkeep trust, what really makes a difference is when CEOs go above and beyond what they are expected to do.
For instance, by engaging in philanthropy, supporting CSR initiatives, or taking bold stances on important issues, CEOs can benefit from what experts term a reputational bank.
Effectively, deposits of positive action can later be withdrawn to help a CEO reach a favourable outcome such as securing a client or limiting the damage of a crisis.
Moreover, when CEOs have this upper hand, they often earn positive media coverage and social media mentions without actively seeking it.
As an alternative to passively earning media coverage, CEOs can attract the public spotlight with a communications strategy called newsjacking.
Quite simply, newsjacking involves piggybacking a trend with your own thoughts and ideas to reframe a story in a way that brings visibility to your brand.
Some CEOs use creative humour.
Others offer genuinely novel insights.
But you should never ever exploit a tragedy, connect yourself to an unrelated topic, or aim to attack another.
There’s a difference between reiterating your company’s mission and newsjacking out of desperation for attention.
Newsjacking should always offer value, seem natural, and never be forced.
While maintaining a visible presence is crucial to mark your stamp, overexposure only risks diluting your message and creating fatigue among your audience.
So, it's crucial that you focus on finding the right balance.
You want your presence to maintain its impact rather than distract from your business or give audiences the impression that your social posts are insincere.
Though quantity is crucial when you initially launch your startup, as it matures, prioritising high-quality content should be your focus to keep audiences engaged.
Imagine you're a VC firm facing an uncertain economic climate and thousands of similar startups vying for funding. Before you decide whom to invest in, you'll naturally want to scrutinise every CEO.
At a basic level, each CEO will be questioned on their competency to lead a sustainable long-term business.
But more importantly, you'll assess their character to determine whether you can work cohesively with them, trust them to network independently, source partnerships, and guide the company through future challenges.
With this in mind, CEOs with clear, aligned messaging and a robust online following will always stand out.
Just like securing investment, the war for talent is intensely competitive.
Today’s employees expect more than just a fair paycheck, they seek a community where they can work, learn, and grow over the long term.
Startups, often constrained by limited resources, can struggle to compete with larger corporations that boast the budget, reputation, and stability to meet and exceed these expectations.
This is where strong CEO branding becomes critical to showcase how empowering and transformative joining a startup can be.
Startups offer a unique, fast-paced environment that fosters rapid learning and personal growth.
Unlike larger companies, startups are able to address employee needs and suggestions much faster.
As the startup grows, employees gain immense satisfaction from contributing to its early successes.
When employees move on, their experience becomes a valuable asset for future opportunities.
This is nearly always the case no matter the industry, of which each brings additional perks CEOs must communicate.
Before a potential partner decides to work with a startup, they need to determine whether there is any reputational risk, build trust, and ensure mutual benefit.
A strong CEO brand helps mitigate these concerns by presenting the CEO and their startup as credible, transparent, and aligned with the partner's values.
Moreover, through thought leadership, the CEO can play up the startup's vast potential, demonstrating how a potential partnership will create value for both parties.
This not only reduces perceived risks but increases the likelihood of potential partners competing with each other.
Above all, CEO branding is a never-ending process.
The public's perception is ever changing, even among well-established figures, which is why you always need to maintain your visibility and influence, even if you think you don’t.
Neglecting this can lead to stagnation, erode trust, and create missed opportunities, while staying proactive with your CEO brand ensures continued relevance, strengthens relationships with stakeholders, and keeps your business ahead of the curve.