why marketing departments need a rebrand

As marketers, we’ve all been there.

You’re hard at work on your marketing plan for the next six months based on the budget Finance so graciously allocated to you. The team has their marching orders. The vendors are working to execute your grand vision. You’ve set realistic but aggressive goals, with lots of testing and iteration cycles baked in. You’re just about to kick up your feet and wait for the revenue dollars to roll in, when you see a dreaded meeting invitation from Finance pop up on your calendar.

You accept the invite, hopeful at first. Maybe finance found a few more coins under the sofa cushions and they want to give that surplus to YOU. Maybe they were so impressed with the last campaign that they thought you deserved a bigger budget!

These are the lies we tell ourselves.

Turns out, Finance is asking you, nay, telling you to cut $200,000 from your budget. The same budget that’s been slashed by 25% year over year. You had a marketing plan…PLANNED. And now the Excel-loving number crunchers from the finance department want to swoop in and take a machete to it?

Why does this always happen to us?

Why marketers get a bad rap

When I first moved from my agency job to an in-house, corporate gig, I didn’t understand why marketing organizations were viewed this way. Didn’t the executive team, the finance team, anyone outside of the marketing bubble, understand how important marketing is to an organization?

Quick answer: No. But why?

After spending more than 10 years in the corporate world, I’ve found the problem with marketing orgs is that, to many, the discipline is seen as an art, something that has an indirect impact on a business. And if I’m being honest, their perceptions aren’t completely off. Before marketing tactics became trackable and measurable, marketing was more of a dart toss. A guess about what may work, only to find out what did (and didn’t) pan out once your company sunk a lot of time and money into the campaign.

But, over time, many marketing organizations have evolved. While some teams still have the luxury of racking up impressions and clicks and calling it a day, the rest of us have become more data-driven and ROI-obsessed. We’re tracking the performance of our social content, our PPC campaigns, our email marketing revenue, and how that ladders up to business metrics. We’re meeting with sales teams to ensure our campaigns capture meaningful leads. We’re working with supply chain to understand our inventory levels and to make sure we’re marketing the right mix of products so we don’t stock out.

The best marketing teams? They’re embedded in the business.

So, why doesn’t the rest of the organization understand that marketing isn’t about chasing vanity metrics? Today, marketers are data-driven, revenue generating machines who are integral to a business’ success, not a cost center.

After scratching my head at our dwindling marketing budget quarter after quarter, it hit me.

Marketing departments need a rebrand.*
*It’s important to note that if you’re proclaiming you’re data-driven and everything you’re doing is inextricably linked to business metrics to the powers that be, you have to actually…do that. No amount of positioning and branding is going to help you if you’re not delivering meaningful results for the business, with the stats to back it up. I mean, I’m 5’2” with no coordination so while I could call myself a professional basketball player, the facts don’t add up.

How can we change the narrative?

We’re so good at promoting the business and delivering results, that we weren’t focused on how our teams are being portrayed. We advocate for the company all day, but we don’t advocate for our discipline? Hogwash! Relying on other parts of the business to fully understand the importance of your role is a mistake. It’s the same advice we give colleagues and direct reports; you’re your own best advocate. Expecting someone to advocate on your behalf puts the power in someone else’s hands.

So, what can we as marketers do to change the narrative within their organization? Here are three steps you can get started on today.

1. Be more visible among interdisciplinary teams. If your marketing team is truly data-driven and embedded in the business, then you’re already working with multiple departments to ensure what you’re doing is actually helping the business. For some organizations, the finance and the executive teams may not be privy to that cross-functional activity. And that’s on you. How can you proactively present to teams who hold the purse strings? How can you help them see what other parts of the organization already see?
2. Educate the greater organization about what you’re doing. Do people outside of marketing know what “ROAS” means? Do they understand what your KPIs are? Does finance know what “PPC” stands for? How about Google Analytics? In our experience, they don’t. When the people who make decisions about your budget don’t understand what you’re doing, it’s much easier to slash it. You can’t expect people outside of the marketing team to know how the sausage is made and why it’s important if you don’t explain it. Proving that you have the finger on the pulse of how your marketing campaigns are tied to revenue can make a huge difference when it comes to your budget.
3. How often are you pressure testing your own assumptions? This isn’t a groundbreaking statement, but when you’re running a data-driven marketing organization, consistently testing and iterating based on what you’ve learned is not only imperative to running a successful and meaningful marketing campaign, but it could help justify your marketing efforts. For example, we were recently working with a marketing team who was performing consistent holdout tests of their direct mail campaigns. When finance threatened to pull spend for a quarter, the marketing team was able to explain the potential loss of revenue by leveraging the results of their holdout tests. Finance had to look elsewhere to trim budgets. Having a consistent testing strategy not only helps you be more effective with your budget, but it can save it, too.

Alright, cool. Do you have anything that can help me?

Implementing Agile methodology into marketing teams can not only help make teams more data-driven and transparent to a greater organization, it can help get twice as much work done in half the time. And what finance department doesn’t like the sound of those words? We wrote a free guide that explains what Agile is and how you can quickly implement it into your own teams to see some pretty great results. Download it here.