How Do You Make Leadership See the Value of Marketing?

My Papa used to tell me a story about a friend of his who worked in sales. The guy was interviewing for a job at a new company, and they asked him to send over his resume. Instead, he faxed them his commission report.

Cocky? Absolutely. But I always understood why my Papa liked the story. When you’re good at sales, the value can be pretty easy to explain. Here’s what I sold. Here’s how much revenue I generated.

Marketing isn’t always that simple.

This month, at our Active8 Marketing Acceler8tor cohort meeting, one of the questions that came up was:

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

It’s a fair question. Some leaders naturally understand marketing and are willing to invest in it. Others have built successful businesses primarily through relationships, referrals, networking and one-on-one sales. They know those things work because they’ve experienced the results firsthand.

Then someone comes along asking for money for social media, video, digital advertising, content, SEO, brand development or any number of other things. To them, it can feel a lot less tangible.

Modern marketing gives us more data than we’ve ever had before, but it has also become more complicated. There are more channels, more tactics, more metrics and more opportunities to test and optimize.

Unfortunately, we can’t just fax over our commission report. So how do we make the value clear?

Before Asking What Leadership Doesn’t Understand, Ask What You Understand About Leadership

When someone tells me their leadership team doesn’t understand the value of marketing, one of my first questions is:

Do you understand what they value?

• What is the business trying to accomplish?
• How does it make money?
• Where does it need to grow?
• What problems keep the leadership team up at night?
• What are they trying to accomplish this year that they haven’t been able to accomplish before?

If we don’t understand those things, we’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone to invest in our ideas. And, more importantly, we’re going to have a hard time building marketing strategies that actually move the needle for the business.

It’s easy as marketers to get excited about the things we know. We see an opportunity to improve social media, create better video, launch a campaign or refresh a brand. But imagine walking into a leadership meeting and starting with:

“We really need to be posting more on social media. Here are all these creative ideas I have.”

You may have great ideas, but you’ve skipped an important step.

Why should the business care?

Start With the Business Goal, not the Marketing Tactic

One of our clients at Active8 is Gregory Construction, a large civil construction company that has grown rapidly across the United States.

We post on social media for Gregory five days a week. We’ve helped grow their LinkedIn audience from a few hundred followers to nearly 10,000.

Those numbers are exciting, but “grow our LinkedIn following” isn’t the real business objective. Gregory has grown to more than 700 employees, and continued growth means continuing to attract great people across multiple markets. But they don’t want growth at any cost. Protecting their culture, standards and core values matters.

Now, social media has a different purpose. We’re building an audience of construction professionals who know Gregory before they ever see a job opening. We’re showing what the culture looks like, telling stories about the people who thrive there, highlighting employees who have built careers and advanced within the company, and showing the type of work Gregory does and the standards its teams are expected to meet.

Sure, posting job listings on platforms like Indeed will brings in resumes. But the goal isn’t simply more applicants. The goal is helping the company attract the right people as it grows. And you can’t communicate the same depth of who Gregory is, what they value, and what it’s actually like to work there in an Indeed listing.

That’s a very different conversation than, “We need to post more because social media is important.”

• The tactic is social media.
• The strategy is employer brand.
• The business objective is supporting growth without compromising the culture that helped make that growth possible.

That’s the connection leadership needs us to make.

Connecting marketing to the goals of the business is the first step, but there’s another side to this conversation. Even when you’re doing great work, you can’t assume leadership sees everything you’re doing or understands the value behind it.

In Part 2, I talk about why communicating the value of your work is part of the work, and how learning to think beyond your marketing role can grow your influence within an organization.