What Are You Actually Asking Marketing to Achieve?
Marketing teams are often asked for more awareness, greater visibility, more leads, or a stronger presence in the market.
Those requests are understandable, but on their own they do not say very much about the commercial objective behind the activity. More awareness among whom? More leads of what kind? Greater visibility for which part of the company, and what should happen as a result?
The answers matter because similar requests can represent very different commercial objectives. Understanding the result the company is working toward changes what marketing needs to do, where it should focus, and how its contribution should be measured.
Start with the commercial objective
A request for more leads might come from a company trying to increase the overall volume of opportunities entering its pipeline. It could equally come from an organization that already has plenty of opportunities but wants to compete for fewer, higher-value contracts.
The first may require broader demand generation and a focus on converting interest into inquiries, while the second may need more targeted activity and closer support for a smaller number of important sales opportunities.
Awareness can be just as broad a request. Building recognition in a market the company is about to enter serves a different purpose from strengthening its reputation among existing customers or raising its profile with prospective employees.
Starting with the commercial objective makes it possible to define the job marketing needs to do.
Four objectives, four different marketing jobs
Entering a new market
A company entering a new sector or geographic market may initially need marketing to establish its relevance with an audience that has little or no familiarity with it. That could involve building recognition among a relatively small group of target customers, demonstrating relevant experience, and giving sales a reason to start conversations.
Early progress might show up in engagement from target accounts, meetings with prospective customers, invitations into relevant opportunities, or growing recognition among the people the company wants to reach. Immediate lead volume may tell very little about whether the work is doing its job.
Winning larger clients
When the objective is to increase the value of opportunities rather than their volume, marketing can become more commercially useful even if the total number of leads falls. The emphasis may move toward a smaller group of prospective customers, stronger sales support, targeted content, and the evidence needed to help higher-value opportunities progress.
Success should therefore be judged against the quality and value of opportunities entering and moving through the pipeline, rather than lead volume in isolation.
Increasing revenue from existing customers
Here, the audience already knows the company. Marketing may need to help customers understand capabilities they do not currently associate with it, support account teams with relevant content, and create opportunities to introduce additional services at the right point in the relationship.
Progress might include more customers buying across multiple service areas, engagement with specific offers, stronger account-level conversations, or an increase in the value of existing relationships.
Supporting recruitment
Growth can also create a marketing requirement that has little to do with generating customer demand. If the company needs more people, or people with different skills, marketing can help prospective employees understand the organization, the work, and the opportunities available to them.
That may involve employer messaging, employee stories, recruitment content, targeted campaigns, careers materials, or communications that give candidates a more useful picture of what it is like to work there. The relevant channels may also be very different from those used to reach customers.
Measures should follow that objective. Time to hire, the quality and relevance of applications, engagement from hard-to-reach talent, and candidates arriving at interview with a stronger understanding of the company can all provide more useful signals than general brand reach.
How the objective changes the marketing choices
Once the intended result is defined, the practical choices become easier to make. The audience follows from who needs to respond, the message needs to address what matters to them, the available evidence determines which claims can be supported, and channel choices depend on where those people can realistically be reached.
This context gives an internal team, an external partner, or a combination of both a basis for making choices about where to concentrate time and budget instead of trying to satisfy a broad request for more activity.
Decide what success looks like, and when
Website traffic, impressions, engagement, clicks, inquiries, and lead volumes can all be useful measures, but their significance depends on the commercial objective.
A company targeting a relatively small number of high-value accounts may care more about engagement from those organizations and progression into meaningful sales conversations than a large increase in general website traffic. An organization focused on existing-customer growth might want to know whether more customers are considering additional services, while one entering a new market may initially be interested in recognition and access among the right people.
The expected timeframe matters as well. Establishing a position in a market where the company has little recognition may require sustained activity before it contributes materially to the pipeline. Supporting opportunities already in progress with stronger evidence or sales materials could have an effect much sooner.
Defining both the measure and a realistic timeframe before activity begins gives marketing a more useful basis for assessing progress and gives leadership a fairer basis for judging whether the investment is working.
There is a significant difference between asking for ‘more leads’ and asking marketing to help increase the number of higher-value opportunities entering the pipeline from two priority sectors over the next 12 months.
Turn the objective into something marketing can act on
There is a significant difference between asking for “more leads” and asking marketing to help increase the number of higher-value opportunities entering the pipeline from two priority sectors over the next 12 months.
The second provides enough context to make informed recommendations about audiences, messaging, evidence, channels, investment, and measurement. It also creates a better basis for deciding what not to do.
This does not require an elaborate planning exercise every time marketing is asked to support a new priority. It requires enough definition to connect the commercial objective to the strategy and delivery that follow, whether the work is handled internally, with outside support, or through a combination of both.
Make the connection visible
A more useful starting point is to define the commercial objective marketing is expected to support before deciding what it should produce next.
That gives the work a more specific purpose, makes investment easier to prioritize, and provides a stronger basis for assessing whether marketing is contributing to the result the company needs.
If the connection between your marketing activity and commercial objectives has become difficult to see, Crown Rock can help define the objective, identify the audiences and messaging that follow from it, and develop and deliver the campaigns, content, and communications needed to support it. Get in touch.
