Don't Assume Good Work Speaks for Itself: How Marketers Can Build Influence With Leadership

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about one of the questions that came up during our first Active8 Marketing Acceler8tor cohort:

How do I get leadership to understand the value of marketing?

My first answer was to start by understanding what leadership values and connecting marketing to the goals of the business.

But building a strong strategy is only part of it. We also have a responsibility to communicate what we’re doing, what we’re learning and why it matters.

Don’t Assume Good Work Speaks for Itself

There’s another practice I’ve found incredibly valuable throughout my career: frequent, meaningful updates.

And I think this is an area that marketers sometimes underestimate. We rush through the report because the actual work feels more important. We throw together a few bullets at the end of the week, send them off and assume no one is really reading them anyway.

Communicating the value of your work is part of the work.

When I was the Marketing Director at Holtz Leather, I used to spend hours on my end-of-week report to Rick, the Owner. He was busy. I knew he wasn’t going to be involved in every marketing conversation or see everything my team and I worked on throughout the week. That email was my one opportunity to tell him what I thought was important for him to know.

It would have been nice to assume that if I was doing great work, he would notice it without me having to tell him. But that’s not really fair to expect from a busy leader. Part of my job was making his job easier. So why wouldn’t I make it easy for him to understand what marketing was doing and the value it was bringing to the business? That’s very different from sending a report that says:

Posted on Facebook.
Updated the website.
Worked on Google Ads.
Created a video.

That tells a leader you’re busy. It doesn’t necessarily tell them you’re effective. Your report should help them understand what happened, what it means and what you’re doing about it.

And not all of that has to be positive. Sometimes the campaign you were excited about doesn’t perform. The post you thought would take off goes nowhere. Sometimes an audience responds completely differently than you expected. That’s part of it!

Digital marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. Good marketing involves testing, learning and optimizing.

In my experience, being able to say, “This didn’t perform the way we expected. Here’s what the data is telling us, and here’s what we’re changing,” builds more leadership confidence than trying to turn every metric into good news.

Leaders understand that business doesn’t work perfectly every week. Nothing in their own careers has worked that way either. What they want to know is whether you’re paying attention and whether you know what to do next.

You Can Grow Your Circle of Influence

I also understand the frustration behind the original question. Sometimes you’re the person doing social media or coordinating marketing, and you don’t feel like anyone is asking for your strategic opinion.

Maybe you’ve tried to bring ideas forward and didn’t feel heard. Maybe leadership really does think of you as “the person who posts on Facebook.”

You can’t control all of that. But one of the concepts from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that has stayed with me is the idea of focusing on your circle of influence rather than your circle of concern.

You may not be able to control what leadership currently thinks about marketing.

You can control how well you understand the business. You can control whether your recommendations connect to its goals. You can control whether you measure results and whether you bring insights instead of activity reports.

And you can start thinking like a strategic marketer before anyone gives you the title. That’s not a guarantee that every leader will suddenly recognize your value. Some organizations may genuinely limit what you’re able to contribute. But I’ve found that doing the job you want to be trusted with gives people a reason to begin trusting you with it.

Earlier in my career, I was hired at Holtz Leather as a marketing specialist. I eventually became the company’s CEO. There were a lot of steps, people, and circumstances between those two titles, and I certainly didn’t have everything figured out. But one thing that helped me grow was learning to think beyond the boundaries of my own department.

Marketing got better when I understood operations. My recommendations got better when I understood revenue. My communication got better when I understood what mattered to the people making the decisions. And my role grew as my understanding of the business grew.

Maybe We Don’t Need to “Convince” Leadership

That’s ultimately where I land on the question.

If you’re trying to make leadership see the value of marketing, don’t begin by trying to convince them that marketing is important. Begin with what they already know is important. Then build the bridge.

“We need better content” becomes “We need to establish credibility with this audience before our sales team approaches them.”
“We need to invest in our website” becomes “We’re generating interest, but we’re losing potential customers at this point in the buying journey.”
“We need to post more on LinkedIn” becomes “We need to build a network of the professionals we’re going to need to hire over the next three years.”
“We need video” becomes “Our customers need to understand this complicated service before they’re ready to have a sales conversation.”

Leadership doesn’t need to understand everything we know about marketing. They hired marketers for a reason. It’s our job to understand enough about the business to translate what marketing can do into outcomes that matter to them.

No, it’s not quite as easy as faxing over a commission report. But if we’re doing our jobs well, we should be able to draw a pretty clear line between the work we’re recommending and where the business is trying to go.

If we can’t draw that line yet, that’s probably the first thing we need to work on.