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How to convince your boss that marketing matters

Jul 14, 2021

Steven Kleina

So, you’ve just landed a great in-house marketing job. It’s a newly created position and the CEO, managing director, or business owner has an accounting or engineering background and doesn’t understand marketing all that well.

The leader of the business, and their senior management team, knows that they need to up their marketing game. However, they need convincing that you need a budget and support in your new role.

This is not an uncommon scenario that in-house marketing professionals face. In-house marketing managers often struggle to convince their bosses that marketing matters, and that it is worth allocating a respectable budget to.

Here are a few surefire arguments to present to the executive team that marketing is always a worthy investment.

See it through their eyes

Your boss probably oversees multiple areas in your organisation. Marketing is only one part of a much bigger picture, so any changes or time spent learning about new marketing tactics might seem overwhelming to a manager who already has a lot on their plate. Of course, having just hired you, they want to encourage you to try new things, but if it doesn’t go well, they could be in the firing line.

You need to see things through their eyes and understand how they will perceive value. Your boss might be focusing largely on numbers like ROI, profit margin, or even market share, so you need to frame your arguments for support on boosting those numbers.

You might be focused on various metrics, but these might not obviously align with your manager’s daily goals or even pain points. In short, you need to speak their language.

“In-house marketing managers often struggle to convince their bosses that marketing matters.”

Your level of involvement in developing the company’s goals and strategy will depend on your level of seniority. If you’re in a junior role you may not have a seat at the executive table, but you should still insist on access to the broader company goals and strategies.

You need to understand the big-picture business goals and how those goals are measured. Once you know what the target is, you can use your expertise to formulate what strategies and tactics are best to employ.

As you already know, marketing works best when fully integrated into all aspects of business strategy and function. So you need to convince your senior management team to provide access to the key information and direction.

Get some ‘quick wins’ on the board

There are many things you can do on a small initial budget and experiment with to get quick evidence for success, to argue for a bigger marketing budget. For example, using organic social media content can be very cost-effective.

Often when you mention social media to non-marketers they just think of expensive video content and paid advertising campaigns. But well-crafted organic social content can be really effective and powerful. By curating and creating fantastic content using existing company assets and resources, you can get great results.

“Some marketing metrics are more important than others, but none of them should be cast aside altogether.”

Back it up with data

Marketing metrics are the most important thing in your arsenal when selling your ideas to your senior management. Metrics provide the evidence that your marketing activities really work.

There are a multitude of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your well thought out marketing campaign or marketing activities. The trick is knowing which marketing metrics matter the most.

Some marketing metrics are more important than others, but none of them should be cast aside altogether. It’s how you use them together that makes all the difference. Being able to pick the right metrics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing can be the difference between gaining true clarity and heading in the wrong direction.

Some marketing metrics may be fantastic for measuring success sometimes, and not so fantastic at other times. It all depends on your platform and the intent of your marketing campaign.

Do you need a little help with getting the leaders in your business to buy into your strategic marketing plan? Icon Visual Marketing has a team of marketing professionals who can support in-house marketers. In fact, we currently do this for many of our clients. Get in touch and let’s make great marketing moves together.

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