How to Communicate Marketing's Value to Internal Stakeholders

If there's one thing you can't ignore as marketing leader, it's internal marketing. Whether you want to get promoted, gain more influence with your peers, or simply be invited to more strategic conversations, you need a plan to share you (and your team's) results with the rest of the organization.

You may be tempted to believe that the results will speak for themselves, but that is actually not a good motto to follow if you're a B2B marketer. Sales cycles can be long, which means the results may not be forthcoming for quite some time.

Unfortunately, there isn't one magical pill to take for instant success as a marketing leader within your company. And let's face it, most companies will attribute results to sales, not marketing!

What can you do to promote yourself as a confident marketing leader? Follow these three steps. They will help you get better at owning your brand's narrative, showing up as a leader, and staying top of mind.

3 Ways To Promote Your Success Internally

It's one thing to be a marketing leader in your company and another thing to be recognized for your leadership. To ensure marketing is getting the credit it deserves, think in terms of numbers, updates, and creativity.

1. Evaluate program success

Take the time to collect sales and customer success feedback as a way to evaluate your program's success. Get your hands on all the data available. Marketers must have access to the full customer lifecycle. Where are there gaps and holes? If you only have access to awareness tactics, such as social media followers and website followers, you are at a disadvantage. You need to get the big picture for an accurate program evaluation.

Win-loss analysis is a great tool to help you understand what happened to a lead and why. It's a methodical, organized method of analyzing why customers purchased the way they did. Win-loss analysis involves a lot of data collection, making a win/loss ratio calculation, and using the numbers to define your outcomes. You could look at win rates by marketing interactions or win rates for different customer profiles. The win-loss analysis system is very customizable, and it can help you isolate certain variables that are positively (or negatively) affecting success.

2. Create a Dashboard

A marketing dashboard for your program displays milestones and progress related to your marketing goals. Of course everyone wants to know how much revenue was generated from a marketing investment, but when you have sales cycles that last 6-18 months, it can take awhile to see the results. Your dashboard can show current progress and indicators like these:

• Attended a webinar at [dream account]
• Had 3 'first' meetings with sales
• Sales meetings turned into seven opportunities
• Had meeting with C-level contact (or C-level read our email, visited our website, engaged on social media, etc.)
• Submitted proposals to [accounts]

Marketing is a long game. Remind everyone of your marketing strategy and focus areas every time you present. This will help keep the strategy fresh in the minds of everyone involved. Your dashboard can be a single source of true analytics and updates that people from your company return to again and again. It can also give people the option to dig deeper into the data for more specifics.

Another great idea is to keep a brag book of anecdotal feedback you receive from customers, salespeople, and executives. This feedback could be about marketing tools or activities that are working. You can then share this feedback in your dashboard.

Check out this list of digital marketing dashboard tools that can help you visualize your marketing goals and progress easily and beautifully. As you can see, marketing dashboards can be high interest, including charts, graphs, timelines, and much more. Some tools will provide you with a bird's-eye view of the program while others will help you report data of all types in many interesting ways. Think about ways your company will be viewing the dashboard. Should it be mobile-friendly? Will you want to make it real-time? There are any number of ways you can customize your marketing dashboard to your needs.

3. Internal Marketing Plan

Internal marketing may require some careful planning. You'll need to come up with a communications plan. You could try one or all of these suggestions:

• Weekly communications: Use email or Slack to share new content and trending content with your customers and salespeople. Share reminders about your marketing goals and focus. When you do this, it tells everyone that you have a plan, and you are not currently taking any more orders.
• Monthly communications: Keep a progress dashboard on campaigns and initiatives against goals. Remember to include indicators that things are working. Point out key milestones, like scoring a first meeting with your dream prospects.
• Quarterly communications: Share updates on big initiatives and key learnings. These could be customer insights, what's working and what's not, and any strategy changes you are making.

When you plan your communications, make sure you don't focus only on leads. I have seen several leadership team readouts that only focus on leads, which basically tells the leadership team that the marketing team doesn't understand the customer lifecycle and how to convert/keep customers.

Once you have an internal communications plan, you need to figure out who to send it to. Ask your C-suite team, sales team, customer success team, product team, and whomever else you can think of to give you feedback on how often they want to receive marketing communications, or which communications they want to receive.

Make it fun!

Make your communications fun! Status updates don't have to be boring. We are in marketing, after all! Use your creativity to draw people into your dashboard and other internal communications. Here are some fun ways to add a little spice to your updates:

• Include trivia or a quick quiz to see who is paying attention.
• Spotlight a sales rep who had a nice win (and be sure to explain how marketing helped).
• Throw in a video or a meme.
• Show a "goals vs. progress" bar, and come up with a way to celebrate when you hit your goals.

The point is to get your stakeholders watching or reading whatever you are sharing. If nobody know what you are doing in marketing, then there will be lots of assumptions. As we all know, assumptions can be good and they can be bad. Make sure your company knows how hard you're working!

How Confident Do You Feel About Your Marketing Abilities?

Now that you are reading the end of this final module in the Confident Marketer's Playbook, you should have some ideas of how to display your confidence to the rest of your company. Let your little marketing light shine, so people know you are pulling your weight.

To review, internal marketing should include:

• Using analysis of data to evaluate your program's progress.
• Creating a marketing dashboard as a place to display progress and milestones reached.
• Developing a fun, interactive marketing communications plan for internal purposes.

Find a good balance between data, numbers, and creativity to let your company know what marketing has been doing to drive success. Soon, people will know you are an authoritative marketing leader who deserves some recognition for what you have done!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do you measure the impact of your internal marketing efforts on the overall business outcomes, beyond just engagement metrics?
   To measure the impact of internal marketing efforts on overall business outcomes, marketing leaders should focus on aligning their strategies with the company's key performance indicators (KPIs), such as revenue growth, customer retention rates, and market share expansion. This approach ensures that marketing initiatives are directly contributing to the organization's primary objectives.
2. What specific challenges might a marketing leader face when trying to implement these strategies in a highly resistant or traditional company culture, and how can they be overcome?
   When facing resistance within a traditional company culture, marketing leaders need to build strong cases for their strategies by demonstrating potential ROI and aligning initiatives with the company's broader goals. Open communication, education, and obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders through small, successful pilots can also help in overcoming these challenges.
3. How can marketing leaders effectively communicate the value of their strategies to stakeholders who are unfamiliar with marketing concepts?
   When you work with a team of non-marketing leaders, you need to prioritize simplicity and clarity in your communications. Avoid using marketing jargon and acronyms and instead communicate using language that resonates with stakeholders' interests and concerns. Emphasizing how marketing strategies align with the company's broader objectives and demonstrating potential impact through data and relevant metrics can also aid in bridging the gap. Be sure to use examples or analogies related to the stakeholders' own experiences to make the concepts more accessible and compelling, fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of the marketing team's efforts.

Want some instant feedback about your marketing strategies? Complete the Confident Marketer Scorecard to see how your marketing strategies score. It's free and is designed to help you in the real world.