As our founder, Rose Jia, mentioned in her post explaining why she’s been evangelizing the Renaissance Marketing Mindset, below are some initial ways you can help make marketing the most valuable function in business:
- Learn about marketing. Just like we’re asking our marketers to learn about other functions (see cheat sheets), if you’re a non-marketer, you should learn about marketing. We will be developing a whole series for non-marketers where we interview senior leaders from non-marketing functions on what they think of marketing and how they want to get closer to marketing. In the meantime, you can read our blog posts or join us on LinkedIn as we discuss more marketing in the lens of business impact.
- Make sure marketers are at the decision table. About to build a product, feature, or service? Make sure you’ve included your marketer at the ideation phase. They will bring with them knowledge of the customer, their needs/wants, and the current and future market conditions.
- Champion your marketers when they’re not in the room. If you notice you’re making material decisions without your marketer in the room, then be their champion. Put on their hat. Ask those critical customer-centric and market-centric questions. Why are we doing this? What’s in it for the customer? How would they perceive this info? Who are we competing with to get our customer’s attention?
- Give your marketing breathing room. Think long-term. Don’t just ask for immediate returns on investment. Have faith in the long-term plan. This means, you can’t ask marketers to pull back on awareness marketing to only impact short-term sales, only to blame them when months or a year from that decision you see a drop in the number of customers willing to buy/use your product/service.
- Trust that your marketers are smart and know what they’re doing, even if you don’t. Challenge them to think bigger but don’t dismiss their ideas. Just because you’re not interested in a new social platform, doesn’t mean your future customers won’t.
- Context switching from creative to logical takes time, so give marketers dedicated time. Have days in which marketers can just create and innovate based on a customer problem by having no meetings. Then, give them days to put together a solid measurable plan. Let them work through it and give them space. Don’t ask for a marketing plan to be delivered in a day. Quality thinking takes time. Give them time.
