The primary stakeholders within a business hold the key to success for most projects. If you don’t get buy-in from the top, it generally makes life pretty challenging. From conversations with candidates and clients alike, there seems to be a common theme that marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to get business leaders to understand their role, especially as the marketing profession evolves. Without that understanding, engagement in marketing projects can be low. Another common challenge is the perceived impact of marketing on the commercial objectives of the business. All too often, traditional business leaders might not see that marketing can feed directly into the bottom line.
Getting your stakeholders on side, both in terms of understanding the responsibilities and value of marketing, will inevitably lead to a far more successful marketing role. How should you go about doing this?
Identify your stakeholders
Who are the key decision makers within the business? Once identified, make sure you’re getting face time with them. If there are a number of different stakeholders, particularly with varying motivations, put in time at the start of a project or when formulating a marketing strategy to establish common goals. If you’re in an organisation where you feel that the role of marketing, or its value, is really misunderstood, try to find a ‘marketing champion’ at the senior end of the business. That’s just one person who can advocate your cause and then bring others on board.
Wipe the slate clean
Especially when entering a new role, but also when implementing a new strategy in your current role, be forward-looking when you engage with stakeholders. Steer the conversation away from what happened last year, to a blank slate that begins with the commercial objectives of the business. What is the team trying to grow its revenue by? What clients or targets is the business trying to grow or maintain? What does success look like? Business leaders respond to marketers with commercial acumen; it’s a key skill that’s identified in the rising stars within marketing.
Enter every meeting with focus, take the lead and plan carefully. Set a clear agenda for each meeting, define key objectives and set benchmarks for all activities.
Demonstrate ROI
What was traditionally seen as an events-focussed and client relationship led profession, has evolved into a commercial part of the business that, as mentioned, can genuinely feed into the bottom line. So – show evidence of this. Teams that are able to demonstrate return on investment not only gain more buy-in internally, but generally tend to be able to ask for bigger marketing budgets. Your role is of huge value to the business, so demonstrate that value. Establish early on what metrics you will measure, set objectives and report back. This will not only manage expectations from the start, but will also show your worth within the business. Constantly re-evaluate what you have done well and what you could have done better.
Conclusion
Marketers need to do a better job of marketing themselves. Those close to or within the profession know that the role and value of marketing has evolved and steadily risen. By the very fact that we now see the role of Chief Marketing Officer as a board level position, we know that marketing has a place at the table, but not all businesses are there yet. Those that aren’t simply need to be shown how engaging with marketing and investing in it can have excellent results for a business.
