How to market “marketing” internally
Advice for educating your company on marketing and getting buy-in on your marketing work
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Educating the rest of your company on marketing is often the hardest part of doing marketing.
This is ironic (don’t you think?). Marketing’s actual job is to understand an audience and communicate to that audience in a value-add way. Yet, when it comes to doing this internally, marketers often fall short–very, very short.
If I could turn back time to my marketing roles, I wish I had recognized these truths sooner:
Marketing is misunderstood and often under-leveraged as a function.
Everyone has an opinion on what marketing should and shouldn’t be doing.
It's hard to know exactly how marketing is impacting revenue–and no one will agree on attribution ever.
Marketing is often thought of as an extension of sales, when it’s actually more like a product org.
These factors lead to scrutiny, recommendations coming at you left and right, the feeling that no one really gets what you do at your company, and a whole lot of tension between marketing teams, founders, sales, product, etc.
This tension holds you back from making an impact. Without getting buy-in and support from other teams, you won’t get the resources, collaboration, or results you need.
All that said, you’ll never get everyone at your company to stop asking you questions, sending requests, weighing in with opinions, etc. Nor should you. Some of these contributions can be really helpful. You, as a marketer, need to take control of the situation. You need to spend more time on “internal marketing” than you may think. And the sooner you accept and embrace this reality as a marketer, the faster you’ll succeed.
In this newsletter:
This newsletter is a companion to “Intro the MKT1 Method”, an overview of our core principles for building B2B marketing teams. The MKT1 Method is a great primer for how to communicate about marketing in a high-level, first principles way with other teams. Find the newsletter, video, and slides here.
This newsletter helps marketers market marketing internally (tongue twister intentional), and we’ll cover 3 main topics:
Finding common ground with other teams
Educating your company on marketing
Sharing marketing’s priorities—to get buy-in and prevent last minute requests from dominating your marketing to do list
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Back to the post…
1. Finding common ground with other teams
The first step to better cross-functional relationships: recognizing you’re all on the same team. Cheesy? Yes. But helpful to remember? Also yes.
The second step: Understand your target audience. Sound familiar to how you do external marketing? Not a coincidence, it’s pretty much the same concept.
Much like you’d understand your ICP and their jobs to be done, you need to apply the same thinking to your internal stakeholders. Figure out what you and other teams both care about and what your shared goals are. Once you know what the other team or person cares about, it’s much easier to speak the same language.
It’s also helpful to recognize problem areas that come up between teams. Most of the time cross-functional relationships with marketing and other teams fail for the same set of reasons.
Finally, don’t bother other teams about stuff they don’t care about. Don’t give every last detail. Much like you should think of communicating with prospects and customers as a value exchange (if you don't have anything useful to say to them specifically, don’t say it), apply the same principle internally. Share the stuff that’s in the venn diagram of things you both care about and need to know.
At the risk of stereotyping teams, I summed all this up for you in this diagram…
Beyond what’s in the chart, here are a few things we’ve learned over the years:
Founders usually care more about a couple of specific areas of marketing, not all areas. Some care only about the “fuel” (brand, content, etc), some care just about the engine (KPIs). Some think marketing is just paid acquisition. Figure out what that thing is, ideally in the interview process.
Marketers often forget they need to be friends with finance (or whoever owns the budget if you’re at an early-stage company). You need to spend a lot of time with finance, so they don’t think you are just like sales and so you can get the headcount and budget needed.
Attribution issues plague relationships between marketing, sales, finance, and even founders. Remember in these conversations, you all want to drive revenue and grow. Marketing and finance might care about efficiency more than quota-carrying reps. And attribution is not a perfect science. More on this topic in this newsletter.
There are some ownership gray areas between product and marketing, especially at startups with self-serve and product-led growth motions. Recognize what they are and make sure there are clear owners and clear stakeholders when changes are needed. These areas include: sign up flows, onboarding, product adoption, monetization goals, in-product announcements, help content, etc.
Be a human and act genuinely curious whenever possible: When you have an opportunity, ask about challenges people are facing, priorities, blockers, what’s up next, etc. If you take an interest in what others are working on, you’ll get the same thing back in most cases. This additional context will also help you better understand your audience and tailor your “internal marketing” to them.
Marketing will also work closely with teams not in the diagram, like recruiting (on hiring and employer brand), design (sometimes sharing resources), customer success (customer experience, enablement content, lifecycle marketing). The same principles apply: find the common ground and speak in terms of shared goals.
2. Educating your company on marketing
While a lot of people try to be “marketers” and pretend to understand how marketing works, most of your coworkers have no idea what you do and what your marketing jargon means. That’s not meant as an insult to them, but instead as a reminder to you to zoom out when talking to other teams.
Sure, your co-workers see some of the content you put out, glance at reports that show progress, and may know their main point of contact on the team, “I go to the product marketer, not the growth marketer”. But if you ask everyone for a rough job description for people on the marketing team most can’t give it to you. If you ask them what marketing does, everyone will have a different answer.
The rest of your company doesn’t need to know all the details, acronyms, and distinctions. But it’s really helpful when they understand what marketing does at a high-level. This allows you to move faster on the day to day work, set goals and priorities with less pushback, and collaborate more effectively.
Here are the 3 concepts I explain most often to founders and non-marketing leaders—the concepts usually cause lightbulb moments. Almost everyone in your company can benefit from understanding these things. For more on these principles, check out our MKT1 Method newsletter.
Concept 1: Marketing needs fuel and engine
Most people in your company don’t care about the nuances of what product marketing, content marketing, demand gen, etc do. And as I mentioned, most of your co-workers probably think marketing is mostly just fuel or mostly just engine (meaning they care more about one side of marketing).
One of the most valuable ways you can explain what marketing does to the rest of the company is to explain the fuel & engine framework.
To build a successful marketing function you need to produce great fuel and craft a well-running engine.
Your fuel needs to be custom-made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom-made for your fuel.
You are probably over-indexing on fuel or engine, so understanding and explaining this imbalance can go a long way in explaining why your priorities are set the way they are.
Concept 2: Marketing isn’t sales, it’s actually more like a product org
Marketing makes it possible to drive step-change growth and efficiency across your entire GTM org.
Sales orgs grow relatively linearly with revenue, while marketing can be exponential.
If you build a marketing org as simply a service organization to the sales org, you're limiting your company’s potential.
It’s also hard to get great marketers to join and stay at the company when marketing isn’t valued.
Marketing orgs and sales orgs actually look and operate quite differently. A better mental model for building a marketing org is building a product org (by that I mean eng, product, and design).
Like product, marketing should be multidisciplinary (fuel & engine!).
Marketing should think in terms of short-term goals and long-term projects.
Marketing also builds “products” for a specific audience (your website and your content are products too!) More on these differences in this newsletter.
Concept 3: Marketing must prioritize impact–which means not completing every request
Marketing simply can’t keep doing the same things or make incremental improvements and expect to have breakout growth.
Marketing needs to determine the best way to drive growth, set goals to hit that, and then follow these plans.
Marketing needs to educate the company on how they are planning and prioritizing, so it doesn’t seem like you’re always saying “no”.
You should only break from your marketing goal for a random act of marketing when it truly makes sense—not because your founder heard about something on a podcast, your sales team begged you to do it, your investors saw a competitor do something, or you got a Slack request at midnight.
More from MKT1
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👁️ Related newsletters: Marketing advantages, Fuel and engine, Scaling your marketing org
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how to set marketing strategy & goals, and share them effectively with the entire org.