How to convince your boss that marketing matters

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.