3 Ways to Help Your CEO "Get" Marketing As budgets tighten, CEOs may wonder, "What has our marketing team done for us lately?" Here's how to convey the value of your marketing team.

A reported 80 percent of CEOs neither trust their marketers nor are impressed with their work. After 15-plus years of being a marketer, I'm shocked by how few organizations get their CEOs closely aligned with their marketing teams.

On one hand, we expect our CEOs to lead by example with their vision for where our companies belong in the market and how to best serve our customers. But on the other hand, companies have the perception that CEOs have more important responsibilities — that someone who intimately understands the business should not have to get in the trenches and actually execute on the messaging that makes or breaks the business.

The notion that CEOs shouldn't be very involved in marketing sounds ridiculous if we think of it this way. It's even truer for founder-CEOs, who live and breathe their companies' missions day in and day out.