Yes, CMOs should build a personal brand and post on LinkedIn under their own name. When I analyzed the LinkedIn activity of 21 CMOs, most of them mainly reshared company content, which earned almost no engagement, while their rare original posts and career stories earned many times more. Marketing leaders usually stall for two reasons: perfectionism about their own content, and worry that the CEO will read it as self-promotion. Both are solvable.
A CMO personal brand is the reputation a marketing leader builds under their own name, mostly on LinkedIn, by sharing what they think and what they've learned. Should CMOs post on LinkedIn? Yes. A marketing leader with a visible point of view makes the company easier to trust, makes hiring easier, and gives the market a human to follow instead of a logo.
The irony is that CMOs are the people most likely to know this, and among the least likely to do it. They build everyone's brand except their own. I wanted to know how big that gap really was, so I looked.
What I found when I analyzed 21 CMOs on LinkedIn
I scraped and went through the LinkedIn activity of 21 CMOs, most of them at B2B tech companies, eight of them in cybersecurity. Across them: 552 posts, 2,035 reactions and 846 comments.
The pattern was consistent. Most of these CMOs act as company amplifiers. They reshare the company page's announcements, product launches and event promos. They rarely write something original. All eight of the cybersecurity CMOs in the set fit that description.
Here's what the engagement looked like:
| What the CMO posted | Typical engagement I saw |
|---|---|
| Reshare of a company post | 0 to 5 likes |
| Regular original post | A few dozen likes, sometimes up to a couple of hundred |
| Career or personal story | Hundreds of likes, up to 1,700 |
Two examples, anonymized. One cybersecurity CMO had more than 20 reshares of company content in the period I looked at, each with somewhere between 0 and 5 likes. The same person's single original post got 46. Another CMO's post announcing they'd joined a new company got 1,707 likes, when their regular posts landed around 40 to 200.
This is a small sample and my own analysis, so don't treat it as a study. The direction is still hard to miss. The people responsible for their company's brand are ignoring the most powerful branding tool they personally have, and the thing they do post instead, reshares, is the format their network ignores most.
One more detail that stuck with me: for the cybersecurity CMOs, the posts that got them engaging were ones that named companies in their space. Their audience wants the market, the players and the stories. A reshared press release gives them none of it.
The marketer's paradox: why CMOs don't post
When I talk to marketing leaders about this, I hear the same two reasons again and again. A speaker at a marketing conference I attended laid out the same two.
They know what good looks like. Marketers are trained to be critical of content. They've reviewed hundreds of posts, briefs and campaigns. So when they write something themselves, nothing feels good enough. They want it perfect, and perfect never ships. The best content marketers I know don't post on LinkedIn, and this is why.
They're afraid of how it looks internally. The fear sounds like this: "Why is the CMO promoting themselves instead of the company?" Nobody wants the CEO or the board to think the marketing budget is funding a personal fan club. So they stay behind the logo and reshare.
Both are real. Both also get the math backwards. A CMO who never posts leaves the company without a voice it already pays for.
Should CMOs post on LinkedIn? The case from inside a company
I've seen this from the employee side. When I was at Optibus, I had what I think was the most active LinkedIn account in the company. I wasn't in marketing. I just posted about the work, the industry and what I was learning.
What I noticed: when I did post something about the company, it helped. Company news came with a person attached, someone clearly close to the work, and it reached my network on top of the company page's followers. Having an active personal account made promoting the company easier.
That's the argument for a marketing leader personal brand, and it's stronger for CMOs than for anyone else:
- People follow people. The career-story numbers above say it plainly. Audiences react to humans far more than to announcements.
- The CMO is the company's voice on the market. Buyers, analysts and future hires want to know how the marketing leader thinks about the category. A logo can't have an opinion. That's what thought leadership looks like in practice.
- It's a hiring asset. Good marketers want to work for a marketing leader they can see thinking in public.
- It compounds with the company's content. Your posts give company announcements a warm audience to land on.
- It's the equity you keep. Roles change. The audience that follows your thinking comes with you. I wrote more about this in LinkedIn personal branding.
What a CMO personal brand looks like in practice
A CMO personal brand is your own voice, with the company visible in it. If your feed is 90% reshares, your network learns to scroll past you.
Here's the mix I'd suggest for a marketing leader:
- Your view of the market. What's changing in your category, what buyers are asking now, which players are doing something interesting. Name names when it's fair. That was the top engagement trigger in the cybersecurity set.
- Lessons from the job. A campaign that failed and why. A budget decision you'd make differently. How you structured the team. Marketers love reading how other marketers think.
- Your career story, in pieces. Joining a company, leaving one, a promotion, a hard year. These posts are the biggest outliers in the data, and they don't need to wait for a job change.
- The company, from your angle. Launches and milestones, written in your words, with what you personally think matters about them. Occasional, never the whole feed.
Notice what's missing: the plain reshare. If a company post matters, write two sentences about why it matters to you. If you have nothing to add, skip it. If you need a starting point, a content ideas generator can give you angles to react to.
How to start when you're a perfectionist
Perfectionism is the harder barrier for most CMOs, so here's how I'd get around it.
- Lower the bar on purpose. Your posts are not campaigns. They don't need a brief, a designer or three rounds of review. A clear opinion in plain words beats a polished post that never ships.
- Start from what you already said. You make sharp points every week in meetings, on calls with the agency, in Slack. Capture those. A voice memo after a meeting is a better first draft than a blank page.
- Pick a cadence you can keep. Two or three posts a week is plenty to start. Consistency does more than any single great post.
- Treat each post as an experiment. You'd never judge a campaign on one ad. Don't judge your LinkedIn on one post.
- Stay the approval gate. Get help with drafting if you need it, from your team, a ghostwriter or AI, but keep the final call. The words have to sound like you, because the whole point is that people get to know you.
Getting the CEO on board
The internal fear deserves a direct answer, because it's often valid. Here's how I'd handle it:
- Frame it as company reach. Your personal network is a distribution channel the company doesn't have to pay for. Share the numbers: company-page reach versus your own.
- Make the company visible in your posts. You're a marketing leader at a specific company, and that's obvious in what you write. Your credibility becomes the company's credibility.
- Invite the CEO in. The best version has both the CEO and the CMO posting, each from their own angle. A CEO who posts too is much less likely to see your posting as competition.
- Agree on the lines. No confidential numbers, no customer names without permission, no surprises about the roadmap. Clear rules make the whole thing safer.
The budget question is its own mess: the person who feels the pain of an invisible brand often isn't the one who can pay to fix it. I dug into that in who owns the personal branding budget. If you're a marketer thinking about your own presence, there's also a page on how this works for marketers.
The best leaders in the AI age are hands-on. You can't lead what you've never touched. A CMO who runs the company's brand without ever building their own is managing a channel they don't understand from the inside.