Ask most Marketing Directors and they will tell you that one of the challenges they often come up against in their roles, is the ability to achieve buy-in to the importance of investment in marketing at Board level.
This is largely down to the continued (but slowly evolving) perception of marketing as a somewhat undesirable cost – a ‘needs must’ expenditure.
And whilst marketing has come a long way, helped both by achieving Chartered status as a profession and the increased ability to demonstrate marketing impact through analytics, there remain obstacles that need to be overcome if we are to get the necessary financial buy-in for this invaluable business and brand development tool.
One way in which this can be achieved, and it’s a pretty quick win, is to keep our language simple.
As marketers, we are forever extolling the virtues of ‘dropping the jargon’ to our internal stakeholders, so that they can market to potential clients in a straightforward, no nonsense way.
Sometimes, however, we forget to take our own advice when ‘marketing marketing’ – that is to say, trying to promote the importance of marketing internally within our organisations.
Using marketing jargon to construction complex or lengthy sentences to explain our marketing strategies, simply won’t impress our Boards.
In fact, we’re more likely to alienate them through what will appear on the face of it to be, well, a bit bullshitty.
Yes, it’s important to convey what we’re doing or trying to achieve in our marketing endeavours, but let’s try and keep it simple.
Not only will it save us a lot of time so we can actually get on with marketing delivery, but it will help to secure more buy-in at Board level to what we’re trying to achieve, whilst hopefully loosening the purse strings so we can secure more marketing investment.
So, let’s get down to some bottom-of-the-funnel internal marketing using smart content to help secure that ROI in line with our KPIs…. 🙂