Get Leadership Buy-In for Your Marketing Plan

Your marketing strategy is an integral part of your organization’s overall success - so much so that you can't afford to keep it in a silo. When marketing is kept separate from the rest of the organization, the resulting disconnect can weaken overall efforts.

It's crucial for marketing and the overall business strategy to be in tight alignment. And to get this ideal scenario, you'll need top leadership figures to sign off on and buy into your marketing ideas. But how does this type of integrated strategy come together? And what are the specific benefits you should look for?

High-level marketing strategies are simply worth more to organizations when they have the approval and support of upper management. But it can be hard to get sufficient resources for ambitious strategies unless you win over the right people.

According to Marketing Insider, the key to getting this approval is to use your marketing acumen to create a presentation to internal stakeholders. Just as you would win over customers by generating educational materials targeted at their needs and requirements, you can do the same for upper management. When presenting the benefits of your marketing strategy, you should do some research - what are the proven effects of campaigns like yours?

When you're creating a convincing argument in favor of marketing, it pays to find out which metrics leaders are most interested in improving, then show how your strategy addresses those numbers. This process can help you sharpen and mold your plan: Before you can convince leadership your marketing approach is valuable, you have to prove it to yourself.

The Harvard Business Review added that when trying to sell a plan to upper management, departmental leadership should gather their allies, so the message comes from many people, not a lone voice. As a marketer, you have a natural alignment with the sales team - who can use your content - and potentially the customer care section, who can share client data with you throughout the customer journey. 

If your planned improvements to marketing, such as a technology investment, will have advantages to other departments, the leaders of these sections can prove to be influential in your pitch. For instance, if you want to create a single source of data truth and unified records for each customer across teams, the advantages will reach numerous departments.

Once leadership has seen the advantages of your strategy and accordingly increased your budget, your responsibilities, or both, it's time to take that approval and turn it into results. There are a few important checklist items to focus on when launching a new and approved approach to marketing. For instance, do you have the right technology to create an adequate customer experience? And, as an essential follow-up, do the members of your team know how to use this technology effectively and strategically?

In today's deeply digital business climate, online marketing and marketing are essentially the same thing. Every campaign you undertake rests on technology, and having ideal systems in place can have positive ripple effects outside of your marketing team. Integration between the tools used by marketing, sales, and customer care, for instance, can create an unbroken customer journey with shared, consistent data that allows you to deliver the best possible experience at every touchpoint.

The effectiveness of a modern marketing strategy can represent a massive and positive change for a company that has been held back by too much legacy technology or outdated thinking. When you get the go-ahead to revolutionize your approach, contact the experts at GeekHive to capitalize on the opportunity.