With my background in both corporate marketing teams and heading up the marketing team in small-medium sized businesses I have seen marketing teams succeed and fail based on the integration of marketing within the whole organization.
See the job of the marketing team is to work intimately with every single department within your organization. Why? Because marketing is as much an external message and brand appearance as much as it is internal.
Also every single team within your organization has key information that can be useful to your marketing team and help attract more customers, as well as keep customer satisfaction high. Remembering customer service and customer retention are also core components of a marketing teams role.
So how do you cultivate the culture in your business where marketing works harmoniously with every other department to ensure you customers and potential new customers are the winners?
I know this may seem a little bit counterproductive to have someone from your marketing team sit in most of your meetings because it’s taking someone out of the team, it’s not letting them be efficient, it’s maybe a meeting for a meeting, and all of those things that people in large organizations complain about.
But my reason for marketing being included in a lot of the process meetings or a lot of meetings within your different departments is it gives marketing a chance to see where they can add value and where they can have another touch point with the customer. This also helps cultivate that sharing company culture rather than the us vs them we see way too often in large corporates.
The other option of keeping your marketing team out of meetings and letting them find out about different processes and different touch points with customers after the fact is really detrimental to your organization, because you may miss out on key points where they need and they can add value for your customer.
Let’s remember this just doesn’t extend to marketing, often the more heads you have together working on one project from different parts of the organization the more the teams will begin to collaborate, and all feel seen and heard and equally important.
The more people we have in those meetings, the better it can be, the more ideas you get flowing, and you never know, they could be much more productive and only turn into one meeting instead of potentially being two or three because someone wasn’t included.
This then ties in with the whole other side of marketing, the branding. Do you want employees to come looking to work for your brand, because you’ve set it up so beautifully, and you have this amazing online presence, or your staff are just so happy at work?
Because let’s not forget, marketing is not just external. Marketing is internal, as well. And the internal culture we create reflects heavily on the external image of the brand.
So, just like marketing can be included across your whole business, your whole team can be included in marketing and understand the journey. This can help grow the brand and will help with staff engagement, which is key especially in a social media strategy!
So even when it comes to goal setting (see the article on this!) don’t neglect the internal side of marketing if you have a team:
Do you want internal newsletters?
How are you speaking to your people internally, as well as, how you’re speaking to your customers, or potential customers?
Are your people across your goals, your vision and the key parts they play in getting the company there?
So making all your teams feel like they’re on the marketing journey, and letting marketing get involved with key projects will help create the best outcome not only for your people, but for your brand and your customers!
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