The Four Pillars of Marketing Leadership

Marketing is a marvelous industry that unites individuals with diverse skills. Marketers adapt to the audience’s perspective while remaining responsive to trends, the tech stack, and the ever-faithful data. 

Together, we’re design creatives, philosophers, writers, researchers, strategists, data analysts, and so on. This skillset uniquely qualifies marketers to become not just involved but leaders in cross-company initiatives.  Now, more than ever, it’s important that marketers are cross-industry leaders supporting overall corporate strategy. 

Here is a four-step approach toward establishing yourself as a leader – bringing your unique perspective and skillset to the broader company or organization.

Educate about marketing every chance you get

We face a lot of misconceptions about marketing. It’s something many people feel is easy due to their familiarity with B2C-based advertising. People are familiar with social media, TV commercials, websites, and more. 

The marketing secret sauce isn’t in the channels themselves, it’s in the content and how marketers drive its development strategically.  Recently, I presented this chart to our company at an annual all-hands meeting:

(SME: Subject Matter Expert)

Reasons to present this kind of information outside of the marketing department:

1. You can drive an understanding of your department’s role within the organization. Everyone is busy, often taking on more and more projects.  It’s rare that we truly have a moment to understand how departments integrate.
2. Sharing what marketing does helps tell the story that marketing is “more than just…” Marketing is more than the department’s visible output. It’s more than just social media, YouTube, a commercial, or a website. We must tell the story that marketing is instrumental to company success.
3. This builds your professional narrative.  Presenting what marketing is about establishes that you know your stuff. 

Collaborate with an “Everyone is in Marketing” content approach 

I’ll be the first to say that it’s easy to become territorial as a marketer. Marketing is a highly misunderstood field, often wearing many hats and communicating tremendous amounts of information. When you mix the lack of understanding about marketing’s role with coworkers or executives who don’t know marketing channel best practices or trends, it’s easy to say, “It’s okay, I’ll handle this.”

Conversely, taking the risk to include subject matter experts, or SMEs, from across your corporate environment can and will ultimately change the overall perception of marketing. 

How do we set up an “everyone is in marketing” approach while protecting the integrity of your message?

1. Lead with curiosity. Seek to understand more of your coworker’s or executive’s roles and how their nuanced experiences can positively impact your overall content.
2. Trust that your colleagues want to be seen.  Brand identity isn’t anything without thought leadership, and creating a space for your SMEs to co-create content with you will build confidence in marketing as a leader. Additionally, it lightens the load for you as a marketer – utilizing SME-developed content gives you even more to pull from for your cross-channel approach.
3. Set expectations: Tell people they have a stake in marketing. Encourage them to share published content anywhere they can, whether it’s email or social media.  Create an environment where people contribute content ideas while establishing that marketing has the final say in what comes to light.
4. Show you’re a sincere collaborator. Most organizations have very lean marketing teams, and your colleagues may not know or understand the brand, processes, or how to manage basic design features within your existing tools. There are currently three generations in the workplace trying to come together and communicate your corporate message in various ways.  Let people know that you’re there to help and that you’ve built tools to support them. 

Clarify expectations and processes for successful collaboration

When you take the “Everyone is in Marketing” approach, the most valuable thing you can do is create a framework within your existing marketing or overall corporate tech stacks that supports the “ask” for content.

1. When in doubt, diagram it. Whether your organization has a tool like Microsoft Visio or LucidChart, or you’re simply using your document editing tools – communicate processes with a visual.  No one wants to read a paragraph description of how to work together.
2. Keep your agendas short and to the point. Do as much as you can to share agendas or objectives before you meet. If you aren’t meeting but you’re managing content collaboration in writing, it’s no different. Out of respect for everyone’s time and crazy workloads, people need to understand:
   1. Why are we collaborating on something in the first place?
   2. What do we need to accomplish?
   3. What is our timeline?
   4. What are our next steps?
3. Task management matters. If your team has project management tools, great, use them. If not, something as simple as your calendar is a great way to keep track of how you’re working together.  
4. Reminders are respectful. Your colleagues genuinely care about being a part of your process, but it’s not their process. Do what you can to support your collaborative content development with the willingness to nudge people along the way. 
5. Forms are your friends. As marketers we want collaboration, but we don’t want suggestions bleeding across our communication channels. Utilize forms as a way for your peers to submit content ideas, submit materials for marketing and compliance review, and more. Forms also create a window of opportunity for tracking internal data about collaborative efforts within your organization. 
6. Establish your boundaries. Clearly define for others what your role is within your department and organization by communicating with an “internal marketing” perspective. To be successful you need cross-team buy-in for bigger goals and ideas. It’s valuable to approach your colleagues with succinct language and visuals. Additionally, the visuals can help when you have to say “no”.

Break Down the Strategy Silos

Every organization has some sort of annual strategic planning cycle. Additionally, different environments can have multiple types of strategic planning from micro to macro levels. Due to the wide scope of roles within an organization, it’s very easy to hyper-focus on departmental outcomes. It’s sometimes even more comfortable to stay within the parameters of what marketing is about. 

It’s a lot of work to do the internal marketing that paints the picture that marketing overlaps many places organizationally. Successfully establishing yourself as a leader within your organization means taking the steps to break down the siloed strategy approach.

Here are some considerations for a more comprehensive strategic approach:

1. Interview your collaborators to find out what is important to them. What are their key performance indicators (KPIs), goals and objectives? Is there a way you can support each other to make things easier that helps you both have successful outcomes?
   1. Example: The research department has lists of publications where they’ve collaborated with clients. Their goal is to share the publications with sales prospects and existing clients to help communicate both the value of the product and the strength of your existing client relationships.  This is a great opportunity to help your research team organize the research in a visually compelling way that you can then repurpose into your content pipeline. 
2. Find a common language. Very few workplaces have one universal language. Each team that brings value to the organization frames their communication from the perspective of their education and experience. As marketers, we have the skills to extend beyond the marketing language to translate our strategies into other corporate languages.
   1. Example: In a company of engineers or scientists, there is a high value in data aggregation, analysis, process, and testing. As you frame your strategy, incorporate visuals about how you aggregate and analyze your departmental data, and then explain why that data is important to the organization as a whole. Make sure when you use marketing terminology, you define it for other people.  
3. Tie strategy and data together. Data means something different at every level of your organization.  The strategy is the same. Using the common language idea, when you outline your strategies it’s important to communicate them with the internal marketing approach at the appropriate level.   Additionally, marketers must validate their budgets with any metrics necessary. Marketers work hard to ensure that the data they collect supports return on investment (ROI). 

Establishing that marketing is a leader within your organization is an investment, but it is worthwhile. You’ll be investing time in building processes and managing data. You’re committing to learn more about your organization and the subcultures that drive overall corporate success. You’re taking a risk by incorporating more voices into your content.  

Taking the “Everyone is in Marketing” approach better establishes marketing as an integral voice in the conversation about your organization’s products and services. Remember that your diverse marketing skillset is an asset to your organization.

Jennifer Lazarz, Director of Marketing, Medical Informatics Corp.