Beyond Creativity: 8 Strategies to Secure Company-Wide Support for Your Marketing Initiatives
Updated: Oct 6
Getting buy-in from the leadership and others within the organization can be challenging for marketers. How come? Well, it could be because a lot of people unknowingly view marketing with a limited focus, zoning in primarily on only one aspect - the creative elements. Don't get me wrong, these are important, but there is a lot more to marketing.
So how can you create value in the marketing work that you are doing while getting company-wide support and fostering champions?
Let’s look at 8 ways to do this.
1. Align with corporate goals and priorities. Demonstrate how your marketing initiatives align with corporate objectives. By doing this you are showing that the marketing planning and initiatives you are undertaking are not pulled out of the clear blue sky; that there is reason and intent behind each piece you are doing. Learn more about building a strategic marketing plan: Your Strategic Marketing Plan: A Timeframe and Guide (bluedragonflystrategies.ca)
2. Support your initiatives with data informed decisions. Collaborate with your IT team to analyze first party data. You will be amazed at how much information you may have. Utilizing these insights from your member/customer base helps tailor your marketing efforts, ensuring they are both targeted and aligned with corporate goals.
3. Do your research. Understanding what is happening in the world around you (including people's behaviors and sentiments around a certain topic) can help formulate your strategy, communications and creative pieces. Using this knowledge helps justify your chosen direction and facilitates team buy-in.
4. Set clear metrics. This is a crucial part that many are reluctant to do. Setting measurable goals gives you that “North Star” which you are working towards. Regularly review these metrics so that you can understand where you need to edit, adjust, or stoke the fire ensuring continuous alignment with your objectives. Learn more: Set marketing metrics that matter to your CEO (bluedragonflystrategies.ca)
5. Set your budget and measure against it. Allocate your budget effectively to meet your goals without over-or-under spending. Underspending on a budget can mean that you may have missed the mark on getting the message out. Overspending can affect future initiatives. Learn more: Build your Marketing Budget in 6 Steps (bluedragonflystrategies.ca)
6. Support your internal teams. Find out what nonfinancial goals your member/customer facing teams need to obtain. Integrating support for these goals into your marketing initiatives demonstrates how marketing can be a powerful ally in achieving broader company targets.
7. Evaluate and share your results. Complete an evaluation of your marketing initiatives, including feedback from your internal teams and results against set metrics and their impact on corporate goals. And don’t forget to share this with your leadership and broader teams to showcase the impact of marketing’s contribution to the organization. Learn how to complete an evaluation: 7-step Campaign Evaluation (bluedragonflystrategies.ca)
8. Cultivate communication channels. This can be done in numerous ways such as communicating the executive summary of your strategic marketing plan to your leadership group, collaborating with key stakeholders during the campaign planning process, establishing recurring monthly or quarterly meetings with representatives from each area of the organization, asking for a time spot during staff meetings, to name a few. Read more about this: Inside-Out: How Internal Alignment Powers Successful Marketing (bluedragonflystrategies.ca)
Helping the broader team understand the work you do and the impact it can make on the work they do can go a very, very long way in fostering champions and gaining company-wide support; not to mention showing how you help drive the organizations’ goals.
I hope this was enlightening for you. If you would like to chat about this, or ways that you can help gain support for marketing in your organization, I would be pleased to meet with you.
Keep on being amazing,
Lyanne
Marketing is hard enough. You shouldn’t have to figure it all out alone.
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Keep on being amazing,
Lyanne
Founder + Consultant
blue dragonfly Marketing Strategies and into the blue
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