Making it to the marketing show

Got the opportunity this week to really flex my marketing strategy muscles. Our team has been working for several years to really illustrate the value of marketing to our management, in an effort to increase our budgets and driver greater awareness and revenue.

I don’t know if you have ever worked for a company that is cynical about the value of marketing. It really keeps you on your toes to show that you are adding value—through metrics, ROMI analysis, etc.

One thing I’ve begun to observe is that it is really hard to show this with small, decentralized budgets focused on low tier audiences. In fact, often times, each of the small groups who have budgets end up underspending. That amount may not add up to a lot for that team, but across all the teams, it can be quite significant. Which leads to problems of showing marketing value and growing budget. “If you can’t even spend what we gave you, why do you need more?”

So it was quite a treat to be brought in to take part in an exercise of “If we got x huge amount more money, how would you spend it?” In this case, it was a big centralized bucket to promote our highest level message to our most sought after targets. We had made it to the show.

We had to be fierce. This savvy team wasn’t going to be persuaded by lists of the same old tactics. They want to know the how’s and why’s, and where elements are working together.

So we spent some time thinking of all the potential tactical elements (including some that sometimes get overlooked like AR, PR, customer education, etc. as well as the traditional big dogs like hospitality events, advertising and direct marketing), then hooking them into the sales cycle, and showing how all the elements work together to carry customers through the sales cycle.

Basically, we are developing a customer nurturing stream on steroids – we will do this, then if they do that, we will do this other thing, and so on. For each phase, we defined an objective and end of phase milestones. For each tactical element, we defined why we recommended doing it and the percentage of spend.

So often we are just fighting fires. This is an opportunity to really do the thing right, and hopefully see the sales pipeline bloat up throughout the rest of the year. Then we’ll really be positioned to show the value of marketing.