Marketing is Not a Cost Centre

All too often marketing is classified as a cost centre. The root cause of this perception is pretty obvious - marketing spends budget whilst sales drives revenue by comparison. 

This view of marketing is especially common in a high growth company where the sales team has grown and then marketing is brought in afterwards to address a direct need. Marketing is given a budget then expected to spend it on events, collateral, PR and branding. It’s activity-based marketing that amounts to little more than tactics.

As a CMO, how can you ensure marketing is an equal partner to sales instead of merely the side arm that delivers tools and tactics for sales enablement?

1. Effectively map marketing attribution

Developing a sophisticated attribution model can be complex, but there are other strategies marketers can employ. Lead generation and lead conversion are definitely two excellent metrics for specific campaigns and are more valuable in demonstrating attribution over social engagement metrics such as likes, comments and shares.

2. Collaborate with sales

Marketing and sales need to agree about who their most valuable potential customers are, what matters to them, and how and why these prospects make buying decisions. Armed with this understanding about your ideal prospects, the problems your business help solve, and your prospect’s buying decision process, marketers are in much better shape to determine which actions actually influence revenue.

3. Consider how you talk about marketing

So often marketing can be self-defined by the tactics instead of results. For example, marketing is seen as advertising or promotion in a B2C context. Meanwhile in a B2B space, marketing is defined as events and in person activations. We need to focus the conversation on how marketing maps to and delivers on the business objectives, and highlight activities secondarily.

4. Watch the market

Understand the trends in your industry and stay in top of what is impacting the market. There are easy ways to do this by subscribing to publications and newsletters, or setting up alerts such as Google Alerts. Keep up to date using sites like LinkedIn, which tailor content based on your interests and industry. An effective CMO will be an advisor on business strategy and the direction the business should take because they add value by understanding the environmental context.

5. Set marketing objectives that map up to business priorities

If your marketing objectives are aligned with the business priorities you have a better chance of demonstrating marketing impact. Use benchmarks and be consistent with what results you are reporting on month-to-month to show upward movement over time.

Demonstrating marketing value is not a one-time thing; it’s an ongoing process. The good news is, with ever more sophisticated tools and technologies, as marketers, we can get progressively smarter in tracking and presenting the true value of marketing as a growth engine and revenue driver.

Interested to know more? Check out my another publication in this series; Target Pricing and Tata Motors’ $2,500 Car.

I am Syed Ali Ameer, CA - Finalist and also an Associate Member of PIPFA. Looking forward for more opportunities to discover, learn and share knowledge. I can be reached at [email protected]. Please share this publication for those who might benefit. Thank you!