'What DOES Marketing do all day?’ Why building relationships across the wider business is important for marketing teams.

For some context, this is me: In 2010, after working at a small translation agency in Tokyo as a Japanese > English translation checker, I began working for a Japanese sewing machine manufacturer in its marketing department. Finally, I had landed my dream job…I was a Japanese translator!

It turned out, though, that this line of work was not for me.

It’s hard to read a press release in Japanese and then write it in English. You get a hundred words in and notice that your English is starting to sound suspiciously Japanese in its structure. That kind of writing style rarely inspires stakeholders. I was pretty good at copywriting in English, though, for the catalogues and for the website, and so it was there that the marketing adventure began.

To begin with, the marketing team needs to get itself in order.

I sometimes refer to marketing as a ‘beast’ (or, on a really dark day, I’ll e-mail our International Marketing Manager with this photo of an old woman sitting at a slot machine, a cigarette hanging from her lips. There are days like that. You thought you had the winning ticket. But the results tell you different).

The scope of it is huge: website management, social media management, PR, paid search and analytics, the customer journey, brand awareness, building backlinks...I could go on. And I work for a company that operates across Europe and the US, which further broadens this scope. Local markets require a different approach and, with three working languages across the business, our marketing team has to manage content localisation for a trilingual presence, as well as complex challenges like different data protection regulations between Europe and the US.

It takes a lot of different skills and collaboration within the marketing team to make it work cohesively. Rolling out all the different parts in an organised way takes careful management, and drawing on the best and different strengths of the team is important, too. And we've got to come together as a team if we're going to make sense to anyone else.

But we don't exist in a bubble.

We need to build on our relationships with the wider business as we work along the length of the customer journey, from building brand awareness to building loyalty. The wider teams have insight and expertise that we need to call on at many stages.

The best collaboration comes when the wider teams see the value of marketing.

As marketers, we know that the role of our department may sometimes seem a little...vague. The company website or social media channels are clearly visible to everyone, so it might be easy to conclude that blogs and social media posts (while very important) make up the bulk of the marketing workload. The reality is, though, we're spending a sizeable budget across different digital channels, campaigns and offline media, so we need to show results.

Senior management, of course, needs to understand results on spend, but does it really matter if the wider business teams aren’t really clear on what we’re doing? To an extent, I think it does.

We can’t guess at customer problems and deliver empty messages in the hope that something will stick.

When we understand real customer problems and deliver something meaningful, we can create a positive impact for the business and our customers, alike. Our activity has to be grounded in real insight. Part of that (though by no means all) comes from the wider team’s input and experience, so collaboration is key, but that's easier said than done.

For businesses that are interested in us, they want the right information at the right time (when a UK business decides to visit our social media channel via an English paid ad campaign, they don't want to scroll through three German posts to find the English content. And they won't; they'll just click away from the page.)?For the sales teams, we can deliver warm leads through paid campaigns, we can help our account managers to build customer loyalty, and we can support our technical teams as we engage and educate customers on technical topics. It takes a lot of work and there are many dots to connect.

It’s easier to foster good relationships across the business, if people see the value of marketing.

Unlocking the knowledge of the wider team

I feel like requests from Marketing used to get lost at the bottom of a pile marked 'busy.'

Last year, we ran some paid advertising campaigns on social media. In this scenario, it's easier to connect campaign activity to certain kinds of results e.g. form fills.

But to highlight the expertise of our translation technology team, we also created a series of social media pieces, then wrote a thought-piece for a trade magazine, which highlighted the role of machine learning in translation (one of the tasks of our technology team).

I had to bug the team (a lot) for insight because I knew they had a lot of technical knowledge and client insight that would help us to create great content. When I knocked on their doors, I would explain the wider objectives for the task and also show the results afterwards (e.g. analytics and content rankings). I wanted to convey the broader objective and provide clear context for results. Marketing needs to show that it's operating with purpose.

I feel like requests from Marketing used to get lost at the bottom of a pile marked 'busy.' But I think last year, the Marketing and Translation Technology teams enjoyed collaborating together.

My Friday sales calls

Part of the challenge to create a value-led and seamless customer experience, is aligning the work of the sales and marketing teams.

Every Friday our Head of Sales and Marketing brings the UK and US teams together for an overview of the week. Problems are shared, advice is given. In the early days, it was very tempting for many of us to say, ‘I’m too busy this morning,’ but I don’t think any of us would expect anything less now. I'm not suggesting that this alone ticks the 'aligning sales & marketing' box, but, having a space to come together and share insight has been great. Sometimes marketing teams tread a fine line between real-world understanding and getting stuck behind things like digital data, automations or the latest tools. We need to remember that the human connection is vital, too. It's great to check-in regularly with our sales team and account managers.

(Pre-COVID, I was lucky enough to get out of the office from time to time for meetings with clients and new businesses. It helps to bring that human connection back into the marketing work. Here's me in Tokyo for meetings. Home from home.)

Well, that’s it in a nutshell. And it’s a very big nutshell.

Building relationships with the wider business is so important to the success of marketing, and this collaboration and knowledge sharing has such a positive impact on the business.

I am such an over-thinker, but sometimes I do just enjoy philosophising about these things to clear my head and to discover new ideas along the way. I always feel very fortunate to do the job that I do. The variety of tasks means that I never wake up struggling to find motivation for the day. And I have wonderful colleagues, too. We have our ups and downs together, but we also have a lot of fun and learn a lot along the way.

I hope other marketers out there can relate.

Read my slightly 'quirkier' article about language and the business of communication here:

?Or if you want to go full quirky, go here: