Marketers are being urged to launch their own internal marketing campaigns to persuade their C-suite colleagues of the true value of the discipline or risk losing influence at the top table.
That is according to the next instalment of Gartner’s “Building the Marketing Function of Tomorrow” report, which argues that proving the value of marketing is one of the key challenges many CMOs face.
The report maintains that not only do marketing chiefs’ C-suite peers rarely have experience in the profession, most of its impact is often intangible — a few degrees of separation from revenue and the bottom line. And conventional wisdom makes this worse by linking marketing metrics to revenue.
Gartner states: “The fundamental mistake that everyone makes about proving the value of marketing is believing that it is a maths exercise. Treating it like a persuasion exercise instead of a maths exercise offers many benefits — specifically, persuasion exercises build solutions that use influence and psychology, provide multiple approaches and can be dynamic to fit different contexts.”
Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, CMOs should start by identifying stakeholders’ attitudes towards marketing, and group them into champions, neutrals and sceptics.
The report adds: “Treat the programme of proving marketing’s value like a marketing campaign with internal audiences. Enroll your champions to help get the word out by giving them specific stories and messages that they can share with others. Starting with champions helps you get the most out of your early efforts, because everyone else will start hearing the same consistent message from a larger group of people.”
CMOs should work with the neutrals second because they can reuse some of the work they have already put in with the champions. By their very nature, neutrals have not decided whether they believe in marketing’s value or not so they are more open to evidence and logic that explains marketing’s contribution to profitable growth.
The report continues: “To persuade neutrals, you need to understand their priorities and then connect what you’ve done to those priorities. The most effective method for persuading neutrals is return on objectives.”
Finally, Gartner says, CMOs should tackle the sceptics, who are the most difficult group to persuade.
The report states: “The only way to make progress with sceptics is to embrace them by developing a partnership that starts from a point of common ground by finding a business-related topic that you both agree on and coordinate with them on a regular basis.
“Next, gradually expand the partnership. Once you’ve developed enough trust and a stronger relationship, explore the idea of specific pilots to test the potential impact of marketing. The pilots must be codesigned by you and the skeptic. Use incrementality methods in the design so that marketing’s contribution can be clearly identified by all parties.”
However, as Gartner concedes this campaign could take months or even years before the message finally hits home, concluding: “This approach will require humility, risk-taking and willingness to adjust strategy.”
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