INTRODUCTION
In any business, a leader’s job is to establish a vision and motivate internal and external audiences to embrace it and enhance it. If you’re managing external communications, including speeches, blog articles and tweets, for your CEO, it’s essential to convey this vision in his/her tone of voice.
Here are tips to successfully ghostwrite for your CEO:
HOW TO TAKE YOUR CEO’S VOICE
Voice is central to content marketing and connecting with audiences. Voice also is what you say and how you say it. To sound like the CEO, you need to capture his/her tone, diction and style to make the content authentic and recognizable for your audiences.
Watch videos of past presentations and read articles in which the CEO has been quoted to familiarize yourself with your CEO’s tone. Does he/she tend to use certain terms or phrases? Is he/she more colloquial in the way they talk? How do they transition from one point to the next?
Another way to capture the voice of a top executive is to simply ask to meet one-on-one. You want to determine some “boundaries” for mimicking their voice, and make it clear that they get to review all content before it’s published.
USE COMPANY TALKING POINTS
The content that you create on behalf of your CEO should not only make an emotional connection with the audience but also keep the mission of the company alive. Another ghostwriting tactic is striving to promote an idea or take a position on an issue–after all, that is the point of thought leadership.
According to Steve Soltis, a speechwriter at The Coca-Cola Company, “It is the job of a good speechwriter to lead thought and not just rearrange or retype words. We should have the proxy to lead, stretch and empower our executives.”
You should already be familiar with your company’s main messaging strategy. Based on the content you’re creating, you’ll likely also need to create some related talking points tailored to the receiving audience. Get approval of these talking points from your CEO and then use them as an outline for the content.
For example, if you have three talking points, then your content would likely have four sections–introduction, talking point 1 + details, talking point 2 + details and talking point 3 + details.