Table of Contents
- ✍️ How to get wider business buy-in with Helen Edwards
- 🗣️ Marketing is so much more than communications
- 🤝 Why do you need the rest of the organisation to buy into what you need to do?
- 🕴️ How can you get organisational buy-in?
✍️ How to get wider business buy-in with Helen Edwards
Read time: 2 minutes
She’s an award-winning columnist, brand strategist, business owner, author and Adjunct Associate Professor at London Business School. This webinar’s presenter is Helen Edwards from Marketing Week’s Mini MBA.
Helen took to the stage to share her experience on how to get Marketing a seat at the table and encourage decision-makers to buy into our ideas. She covered:
🗣️ Why Marketing is more than just communications
🤝 Why it’s important to get cross-organisational buy-in
🕴️ 5 principles to help you achieve exactly that
Watch the full webinar back above, or read on for the key takeaways below.
🗣️ Marketing is so much more than communications
Marketing is how you go about understanding your customer’s point of view and delivering value to them. It is so much more than just communications. Good Marketing should entail:
- Insight
- Strategy
- Product
- Innovation
- Distribution
- Pricing
- Service ethos
- Internal engagement
- Customer journey
- Data and analytics
- Communications
In order to get anything done in your Marketing role, you’re going to have to get the rest of the organisation to buy into what you need to do.
🤝 Why do you need the rest of the organisation to buy into what you need to do?
If you’re pulling all the Marketing levers in a business then you are going to impact other disciplines and the leaders of those other disciplines can either enable you or they can block you. If you get them on board with your ideas, they’re more likely to enable you.
🧑🏫 So, how?
Helen shared 5 principles that have helped her to get internal engagement and ultimately, to get stuff done aka:
🕴️ How can you get organisational buy-in?
- Be more inclusive
It’s all about getting the right people involved at the right time. Who is going to be involved in executing the project further down the line? Bring them in early. Get them involved in the development and make sure they’re involved in the conversation early on.
- Keep the marketing metrics for Marketing
The rest of your organisation don’t know what your metrics are and probably aren’t that interested. You need to convert your marketing metrics into business metrics which people do understand. Translating your marketing metrics into real business effects will mean focusing on revenue, profit or some combination of the two.
- Get familiar with the business strategy
You should be familiar with your brand/communications/product strategies, but do you know what the overarching business strategy is? Where do the strategic business leaders want the business to go? Great Marketing should serve that overarching leadership ambition, and should even input into it.
- Learn the essentials of every discipline
Mark Ritson
When you understand the essentials of every discipline, you understand which questions to ask, and you know how your decisions will affect every discipline.
Everything you learn about how organisational culture works or what it means to be a great leader can be applied within your Marketing efforts. So take the time to learn the essentials of every discipline. Marketing Week’s Mini MBA in Management is a good place to look for more information on this.
- Be the customer expert
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realise it themselves.” – Steve Jobs
Sometimes we forget that our real job as marketers is to know our customers so well that we can anticipate what they might want or what might be relevant to them. You should strive to be the customer expert within your organisation. By doing this, you will make your voice and your role essential and will then find it easier to get buy-in across different parts of the organisation.