How to Communicate the Value of Marketing to Non-Marketers
How do you explain the science of marketing to non-believers? It’s a common challenge for B2B marketers to clearly articulate marketing’s purpose and business value to non-marketers in their organization.
B2B marketing teams are highly collaborative and are required to work closely with cross-functional teams to get their jobs done. The ability to market marketing to non-marketers and foster positive relationships with other functions in the organization is critical to a marketing team’s success. But sometimes getting buy-in from internal stakeholders can feel like explaining snapchat to your grandmother.
Over the course of my career, I have been hired in to organizations that had very traditional views of marketing. In these organizations, marketing played a very administrative role, supporting events, producing sales collateral, and being seen as the department that “made things look pretty”. My prerogative in these organizations was to launch an inbound marketing strategy and transition the marketing team from a cost center to a value generator. This was achieved by focusing on tactics that drove business growth and having the data to back marketing’s contribution to business results.
Grandma Finds the Internet. Imgflip, 29 April 2019, https://imgflip.com/i/2la18f
But to get the time and space to effectively reposition marketing to an inbound, revenue engine requires building trust with external teams – which is not always an easy task. The marketing organization transformation meant that marketing would be working differently with other groups and marketing would need to:
Establish a new working relationship with sales,
Need budget and buy-in for new marketing initiatives,
Drop less business-critical tasks off the marketing team’s to do list.
To make the shift, B2B marketing leaders need to campaign the value of marketing internally in order to grow their influence and attain support. If you are looking for help on how to sell the benefits of marketing in your organization then read on for five tips.
5 Tips to Effectively Communicate the Value of Marketing to Non-Marketers
Speak in terms your audience understands. What language is universal in the business world? Results (ie. lead numbers, pipeline creation, customers, business value!). When selling a new concept or idea, focus on the results that will be achieved rather than the tactics that will be deployed. Getting bogged down in marketing lingo will not only lose the attention of external stakeholders but it’s also not their job to understand how modern marketing techniques work. Instead, focus on the outcomes of your marketing initiative.
Marketers are infamous for leading with the how not the what when communicating their results. For example, at a quarterly business review, the head of finance leads with the cash balance for the quarter – omitting details about the process of collecting accounts receivable, calls made, dealing with the bank, and so on. Marketers, on the other hand, will often get caught up in the weeds of the trade shows attended, the details of campaigns, and kick their QBR presentation off with pretty pictures not with the bottom-line business metrics. If you are asked for the details, provide them but only after you share your team’s results.
To illustrate this, If you are selling the idea of investing in content marketing and lead nurturing, keep your communication high-level, call it “lead generation work”. Communicate that shifting to a new approach will result in a percentage increase in leads in a specified time frame. To external stakeholders, the tactics don’t matter but the message that you are generating [higher quality] leads [at a lower cost per lead] will resonate. This makes your message much more tangible to C-suite and sales teams.
Personalize your message to your audience. You know the saying ‘a marketing message directed at everyone will appeal to no one?’ – well, this advice rings true for selling ideas internally as well. Identify the different stakeholder groups you need to get buy-in from and tailor your message to the benefits that are most relevant to their roles in the organization. For instance, your message to the C-suite will differ from the message you will want to tell your peers in sales or the message you will want to convey to the product team.
Share monthly marketing performance reports. To improve marketing’s visibility in your organization, track your team’s wins and regularly circulate reports that showcase marketing’s business impact. This can easily be achieved by sharing a monthly marketing report – and since every B2B marketer should already be regularly evaluating their marketing performance, this is just a matter of creating a version that has a narrative you can share with non-marketers.
And don’t worry if your marketing report isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, if your team is focused on the right elements there is always a logical explanation for shortcomings. For example, a drop in lead number may be due to a change in lead scoring that has resulted in improved lead quality – provide context for your report to make it easy for non-marketers to make sense of the data.
Establish a proactive communication cadence. In B2B, sales is often seen as the antithesis to marketing, despite the fact that marketing and sales are after the same goals organizational tension is often highest between these two teams. One of the best ways to overcome this challenge is to have weekly meetings to update progress towards shared metrics. Proactive transparency of campaign performance, highest (and lowest) performing lead generation channels, and updates on highlights and lowlights of the week will help to overcome barriers between the two groups. This proactive cadence will demonstrate your willingness to work together, a desire to collaborate and lead to a more productive sales and marketing relationship. If this is done well, your sales team can turn into your biggest supporter and advocate!
Use logic and invest in operational processes to prove your value. So what if you’re sitting there saying, “hey this is all great but we are one step behind all this – we don’t have the data!’’ Without the data, it might feel like you’re asking your peers to take a leap of faith. So how do you put the horse before the cart? It is important to convey your marketing approach using logic. Leverage rationalized industry standards for marketing return on investments to build your case. Then ensure that all of your marketing efforts can be measured and tracked to KPIs that matter to the business. If you can’t measure it, don’t do it. You need to be laser-focused on building marketing data that helps you show influence through astute insights and analytics.
It’s common for marketers to be talented at marketing the businesses they work for and not so good at marketing ourselves. Put these five tips into practice so you can grow in your career and help your marketing team members shine within your company.