Thought Leadership on Thought Leadership: It's Value, Stupid

It’s been a harrowing year so far for marketers and comms teams.?

VC firms pressure their portfolio companies to trim costs. PR agencies get their budgets slashed; marketers get laid off; lead flow dries up for creative agencies. When executives realize they need to get lean, one of the first places they look — without fail — is marketing and communications.

No one wants to get laid off, and this consistent focus on marketing and PR during a tight economy can be demoralizing. I often see people complaining about how business leaders don’t understand or appreciate the value of marketing and PR.?

“They’re shooting themselves in the foot!”?

And I’m sympathetic, but I have to admit it… the business leaders kind of have a point.

Over the course of my career, I’ve seen marketing and PR pros invest tremendous resources in metrics — trying to quantify their impact and justify their efforts. Comms agencies will measure things like share of voice, message pull-through, sentiment, and quality of coverage. The theory is that by showing progress in these figures, we demonstrate the value we bring to the organization.

But in tracking these metrics and sharing them with the client, we’re actually achieving the opposite effect: we’re making it clear how expendable we are.

The issue with PR and marketing metrics is that they reveal, in their essence, how little connection they have to revenue and profits. (And I invite anyone to explain to me in under 50 words how message pull-through directly impacts the bottom line.) We’re paying attention to signals that don’t have any effect on the one thing business decision-makers care about: making more money.

Or, to paraphrase James Carville: It’s value, stupid.

Want to Be Indispensable? Help the Company Make Money

Marketers and comms professionals are not doomed to a lifetime of boom-and-bust and reductions in force. We can be just as indispensable as sales executives and engineering leaders, but the only way to do so is by connecting our work directly to business outcomes. It’s not enough to write an exceptional piece of thought leadership or develop a slick promotional video. We need to do the legwork to ensure that collateral reaches the right decision-maker at the right time for it to have a chance of making an actual impact on revenues and profits.

We live in a data-driven world, and I can understand why many teams have been tempted to invest heavily in metrics. But the nature of our work is to communicate and persuade. This is qualitative work, not quantitative. Being able to say you got 15,000 unique pageviews on a blog post sounds impressive, but if none of those pageviews was a potential purchase decision-maker, you’ve wasted your time. Again, if you invested your time and effort into an activity that didn’t influence someone with the power to purchase your product, you might as well have taken the day off.

We should be measuring marketing and PR efforts in terms of their qualitative influence. Did we make sure a decision-maker read our white paper? Did we ensure our prospects saw the interview the CEO did on Bloomberg TV? Did these efforts make a difference?

This type of measurement will never be as black-and-white or scientific as the metrics marketing and comms teams are using today. But that’s the point. The metrics we’re using today are leading us to our demise. We need to focus instead on our strengths: influence, persuasion, communication, and value.

Work Backwards and Keep It Simple

It sounds like I’m telling my marketing and communications colleagues to scrap everything they know and start from scratch. But this shift is simpler than it seems.

Don’t overcomplicate it. Who is buying your product or service? What does it look like when they make that purchase, and how can you influence that moment? How do we work backwards from the purchase decision and then build our marketing and communications strategies around it?

In a world of AI and SEO and metrics and data, the assignment is actually pretty straightforward. We need to influence people to buy our products. The prospects have legitimate questions and concerns. An effective comms team will focus on answering those questions as persuasively as possible, and then use those answers to inform every aspect of their efforts — PR, social media, content marketing. In a down economy, anything else — literally any comms or marketing activity that doesn’t influence sales — is a waste of time.

Here’s the hard truth. If our work isn’t helping the line go up and to the right, we deserve to get the axe.