How Tend turned their C-Suite into thought leaders — and saved 24 hours per week
With Tend, we implemented a six-month thought leadership ghostwriting strategy and executive communication plan.
The healthcare startup needed thought leadership to build brand awareness, communicate with investors, and attract top talent. The best way to do that was with insights from their executives.
Key wins
Built and executed full thought leadership motion
Focused on four executives; included eight team members total
24 hours saved per week
Feature in Inc. Magazine
TLDR
"Producing content directly from our founders’ brains made us much easier to pitch to media outlets, “ says Helen Zhang, Director of Communications at Tend. “Our C-Suite has a demanding schedule, but Dan’s process was seamless, intuitive, and powered by his newsroom background. Like any good reporter, he found the story.”
Drilling down
Tend is a venture-backed healthcare company redefining how people go to the dentist, positioning itself as the first dentist people actually look forward to visiting. Three themes drove their decision to ramp up their content offering:
Producing content directly from their C-Suite.
Tend wanted content flowing directly from their top executives who understood the vision and strategy best. However, the executives didn't have time to produce this thought leadership content themselves.
Not sapping their executives’ time.
Their C-Suite was busy. They needed to dig in to key tactics and strategy and produce intellectually powerful thought leadership on a tight
Powering brand awareness and recruitment.
This executive thought leadership needed to also drive awareness in the market and among investors, highlight their talented leadership team, and support recruitment of new hires buying into their vision.
The game plan
We implemented a six-month thought leadership strategy and executive communication plan in conjunction with Tend's C-suite.
Capturing streams of consciousness from busy people.
Dan conducted a series of thought leadership interviews with Tend's CEO, chief development officer, chief marketing officer, and chief dental officer. Each executive offered hard-won insights into the market’s pain points — and how Tend would solve for those pain points.
The key challenge was transforming these busy executives' insights into compelling thought leadership content without burdening them with the writing process. Dan's journalistic framework enabled him to rapidly conduct interviews and transform the executives' thoughts into first-person articles in their authentic voices, efficiently and precisely.
Transforming these streams of consciousness into smart content.
These executive insights articulated a strategic vision for the company that was attractive to investors, delved into the companies’ real estate strategy, and highlighted their agile pandemic response of expanding into areas closer to where people were working remotely. The execs also shared on-the-ground marketing tactics and clinical thought leadership that attracted dental talent to Tend’s studios.
The results
A scalable thought leadership motion with minimal investment.
Dan provided Tend with a flexible executive communications strategy, allowing them to outsource content creation and scale resources as needed without hiring a full-time employee. His work helped articulate Tend's strategic vision across four key business areas and raised the thought leadership profile of their executives.
Increased brand awareness and goodwill, “firepower” for comms positioning, content for investor relations, and pieces that attracted talent in a highly specialized and competitive labor pool.
In addition to getting organic traction on LinkedIn, Tend’s thought leadership content was used to communicate strategic initiatives to employees, providing them a window into the company’s direction — directly from the C-Suite, in an authentic, engaging way.
This content also armed Tend’s director of communications with more ways to pitch outside publications, and led to a first-person feature for their CEO in Inc. Magazine. The pieces also established Tend as an intellectual force in its market, leading to increased brand awareness among C-Suite peers, and increasing interest in the company from a talent perspective. It had the added benefit of keeping current benefits up-to-date on what the C-Suite was thinking.
“Producing content directly from our founders’ brains made us much easier to pitch to media outlets. Our C-Suite has a demanding schedule, but Dan’s process was seamless, intuitive, and powered by his newsroom background.”
Helen Zhang, Director of Communications @ Tend
