As a confident marketing leader who has learned and applied all the various steps we have covered in the Confident Marketer's Playbook, you should feel proud of yourself! You are taking on new challenges and creating effective marketing strategies that set your product or service apart from the rest of the crowd. Now it's time to market yourself. You have become an authority for your brand, and you have to let others know about it!
To get promoted to a marketing leadership role, you cannot ignore internal marketing. 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 are 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.
It's one thing to be a marketing leader in your company and another thing to be recognized for the leadership work you are performing. To ensure marketing is getting the credit it deserves for your successful marketing execution, impress your people with numbers, updates, and creativity.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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 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:
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 are working!
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 can include:
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!
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.
