Chief marketing officers: Does your CEO frequently ask to produce more with fewer resources? Are your team members producing great work, but not tracking its impact on sales, revenue or brand equity? Do your counterparts in sales, product or operations think you’re just the event team?
We hear you.
CMOs are under an overwhelming amount of pressure. Uncertainty in global financial markets and mass tech layoffs is leading to tightened purse strings, which often finds marketing and communications the first target for budget cuts. But even without the impact of external market forces, marketing and communications are, by nature, high-stress functions.
As a core business activity, marketing is the captain of the lead engine. Marketers are arbiters of brand loyalty, affinity and staying power. Their counterparts in communications uphold the reputation of the organization and its leaders. Together, they are responsible for ensuring clarity, accuracy and trustworthiness both externally with customers, investors and partners as well as internally with boards of directors and employees.
Integrated marketing and communications make up the backbone of a company’s external success. Without a compelling brand story, an esteemed leadership team and irresistible lead nurturing, businesses cannot grow, scale or—quite frankly—expect customers to feel attracted to their offering. Even the greatest sales teams cannot increase their output without an ally in marketing and communications.
If you’re a marketer, we hope you just raised your fists in the air victoriously, à la John Bender in The Breakfast Club.
“Yes!” You may be exclaiming. “This is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell my CEO!”
So, why don’t they get it? Why is the success of these critical functions so difficult to characterize to senior leadership?
In many cases, other senior leaders don’t have marketing experience or aren’t marketing savvy. Their capabilities support the organization in other crucial ways: operational excellence, sales expertise, product management. Their days are measured in deal size, product roadmaps, customer support inquiries…and accomplishment is translated through dollars and decreasing dilemmas.
Because marketing (and particularly communications activities) has a perception of immeasurability, it makes communicating its value to non-marketing senior leaders tough. Let’s face it, the power of a brand is generally illustrated through anecdotes, very-long-term growth and word-of-mouth…“metrics” that are incredibly difficult to track right now.
Tracking metrics around consumer behavior or customer response is important. Those data sets are what have made some of the world’s biggest, most recognizable and beloved brands who they are—they made Apple, Apple.
But those brands also got to where they are by putting the “integrated” into integrated marketing and communications. They tied marketing and communications functions together and then built a sturdy bridge out to sales. They positioned the marketing organization into the indisputable champion of the organization’s growth and the engine for the metrics leaders to closely track.
As you’re building your next quarterly report, designing a campaign strategy or setting new yearly KPIs, consider these best practices for spelling out the value of marketing and communications to your C-suite.
A is for Awareness: Meaningful top-of-funnel action
Many of our prospective clients approach us with a singular goal: “I need people to know we exist.” Constructing a robust top-of-funnel program ties directly to brand awareness—bringing air cover to your sales team, attracting top talent and bolstering your company’s reputation among customers, investors and potential partners.
If your digital, advertising or PR teams are only tracking impressions…red flag. Top-of-funnel tracking tools have evolved considerably. Digital and advertising teams should be integrated with your CRM, matching clicks, views, web traffic and conversions with form fills and marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Modern PR teams are tracking share of voice (SoV) and PR referral traffic to the website, which allows you to tie news coverage with website activity such as page visits, bounce rates, cumulative time spent on the site and more.
B is for Benchmarking: Make it real, make it achievable
Clicks, views and shares can be important pieces of the puzzle in measuring performance—but they mean very little out of context. Reporting 5,000 page views, 100 likes or a 10% SoV means very little unless those numbers have some grounding in company performance.
Every marketing team should set clear, measurable objectives at the start of every year and per each major campaign. Your yearly departmental objectives should map directly to business goals. For example, 100 MQLs and 50 sales-qualified leads per month support a revenue goal of $X million. A 5% increase in SoV maps to increasing MQLs and a boost in recruitment.
For tactical metrics such as page views, press mentions or social media engagements: always track movement over time. Measurement over time sets reasonable benchmarks to track against and is an important tool to contextualize marketing performance to the rest of the organization.
C is for Customer Journey: Uniting marketing and sales
Highly effective leaders create shared goals, drive accountability and ensure the marketing team has a seat at the sales table. Sales-marketing collaborations can optimize every step of the customer journey, not just top-of-funnel lead generation. Once a potential customer is in your pipeline, inviting them to a speaking engagement featuring one of your thought leaders or sending them a highly relevant piece of news coverage can be the exact push a sales executive needs to close a deal. And you know who landed that speaking engagement and that piece of coverage…that’s right: the marketing team.
When strategizing with our clients, we encourage a consistent feedback loop between marketing, communications and sales. We want to understand your five latest sales wins and how you got there. Did they come through the website, or did they mention a product launch release during the closing process? If you don’t know the answer to those questions, you are likely missing an effective way for sales to nurture prospects and, most importantly, communicate valuable feedback to marketing—a golden opportunity to highlight the relevance of your marketing team’s work.
At Red Fan, we believe in the power of being militantly data-backed. Our strategic marketing and communications activities are planned in detail and diligently tracked. Every client receives at least a monthly report with metrics that reflect pacing against business goals, yearly benchmarks and vital qualitative feedback from sales. We know how to make your investments spell out “s-u-c-c-e-s-s” to every level of the organization.
Interested in meeting with our team to discuss how to better align the stakeholders behind your organization’s marketing strategy? Book your free 20-minute consult here!
