Influencing the other functions\across your business
Marketing is uniquely placed in the business. It's the cross-section for internal employees and customers and prospects. This needs to be exploited. You need to start viewing yourself as advisors to the business. Too many marketing teams react. React to demands of the business instead of being at the forefront of business strategy.
When I started my career marketing was purely a comms function. PR, communications and campaigns. We didn't have the tools to provide actionable insight to the business.
Now it's changed. My advice is to build strong relationships with your C-Suite. Advise the sales team on demand generation, advise the HR Director on talent acquisition through social media, advise the CFO on driving cost-efficiencies through digital marketing, advise the CEO on the growth agenda, advise the CIO on leveraging digital tools.
Gartner predicts the CMO will spend more on tech than the CIO by 2018. That's 13 months away! The point is, Marketing can influence the entire business and if you're not in this day and age, with the tools we have at our disposal, you're not doing your job.
The time is now. Do you want to be referred to as the colouring in department? Or the team that pulls pop-up banners up at events? Or do you want to be integral to your businesses success? To succeed you must be brave. But not as brave as we would have needed to be even 5 years ago. Technology means our risks today are calculated. The days of gut feel are well and truly over. There really is no excuse...
When starting in a new role, or after deploying new technology, it's vital that you demonstrate some quick wins.
At Xchanging we used Turtl and Marketo to execute a campaign, presenting results of a survey that 830 senior procurement professionals took part in. The results were phenomenal. The combination of a new presentation tool, an enhanced reading experience and our ability to monitor customer interaction resulted in 63 new leads from a single piece of content, generating more than £100M in qualified pipeline.
This campaign demonstrated the value that technology platforms like Turtl can bring to a business and it helped me position marketing as a strategic advisor to the business.
This resulted in a step-change in interaction between marketing and the other business functions at Xchanging. Suddenly marketing was where is should be: in the limelight, and all key stakeholders wanted a piece of the action.