Everything is marketing. But just because everything is marketing, doesn’t mean marketers can do everything, try as they might. Marketers need to make sure all of the work they do is getting results. They cannot hope to micro-manage every interaction within a business; even if they could, it would be a colossal waste of effort. They need to focus efforts on what’s going to get results and prove their contribution; everywhere else, they need to lose control.
In the third of three Lose control features, Will Green argues: You can’t control your business, but you can help it go in the right direction.
B2B marketers aren’t at the centre of business gravity
The topic of marketer’s influence at board level is an increasingly important issue, with CMOs and marketing heads evermore eager to make sure the marketing department’s voice is heard. That’s undeniably a good thing: but in the B2B space, most marketers will have to accept the fact that marketing is not as close to the centre of business gravity as it is in the B2C world.
While it might be nice to imagine a world where B2B marketers were leading their businesses, in truth it is not practically possible – or even desirable – that marketing should make such a land-grab.
This does not mean marketers should be shying away from engagement at the highest levels of their organisations, though. The difference is one of mindset: it’s not about marketing leading business strategy, but making sure that the department, along with every other department, is contributing to the overall business.
It’s not marketing against the world.
As Lynn Morrison, head of business engagement at Opus Energy puts it: “One of the biggest mistakes we make when trying to prove our value is going it alone. To maximise our impact and prove ourselves worthy of a seat at the big kids’ table, we need to start viewing the world through the lens of the rest of the business, and find ways to use our creativity and strategic thinking to add value where it will be noticed.”
Marketing strategy starts with business strategy
The first point of a marketing strategy simply has to be the overall business strategy. If the business goal is sales growth, marketers need to demonstrate how they will use their content marketing and social media skills to make the sales team more effective. If the business is going through an efficiency drive, marketing has to work with operations to find cost-saving opportunities in customer communications.
Thomas Peschken, programme leader MSc global marketing at GCU London, argues this is a maturity issue: “The marketing department needs to properly reflect on where it can add most business value. There’s still too much time and resource spent on acquisition, for instance, where activities to promote retention and upselling would create more revenue more cheaply. It’s maybe not as exciting as on-boarding a big new client, but it does align more closely with business needs.”
Marketers are influencers
While marketers may not be able to control the business, they are better placed than ever before to influence their organisation’s direction of travel. The digital revolution has completely transformed the marketing function by providing greater opportunities to make data-driven decisions about what a business should be doing and how marketing can help achieve those ends.
Making sure they are measuring the right things and tying all marketing activity to strategic business metrics is a start; but in terms of real influence, the sheer quantity of available customer data and the proliferation of tools for analysing and using that data, means that marketers have the opportunity to truly know their marketing.
Currently only half of marketers are using their customer data to build customer personas and profiles based on their customer data. This number will have to rise over the coming years as it is the essential starting point of more efficient and effective marketing. And the benefits of doing so, can be extremely powerful.
Rishi Dave provides a salutary example of how marketing can influence the business with his work at Dun and Bradstreet: “We organised the whole company around marketing personas. We used to have a large product-focused organisation that operated as a single monolithic entity. So, what we did was break up the organisation into lines of businesses which targeted our marketing defined personas, meaning we could create a singular customer experience in each segment.”
This is a fine case study in how marketing can strategically use data to drive transformative change. And as the power of methodologies based on predictive insights become more widely understood and accessible, marketing’s ability to proactively shape business focus will only increase.
Lose control, get results
B2B marketing is still in a period of transition. The age of product-focused technical brochures and dull-as-ditchwater product demos may be in rapid retreat, but in some ways its legacy still shackles modern B2B marketers from fully embracing the creative, data-driven high-tech age. Overleaf, we have defined our four pillars of marketing, the areas that must be at the heart of every marketer’s thinking if they want to succeed. They speak of a mature industry, fully aware of its function and confident in talking the language of the business. With these pillars at the core of marketing, the future is bright. For everything else that marketing is doing, it’s time to lose control.
