Is Your Business Missing Out on Digital Marketing Leadership?

It’s all too common a sight to see marketing not getting the attention it deserves at the top levels of businesses. You often find that the Board has a Sales Director in charge of the business’s marketing, but is missing a Marketing Director. Sometimes there is a Marketing Director, but one with very few digital skills.

This can work up to a point, but misses out on so much of marketing’s potential. A dedicated Marketing Director, especially one with digital expertise, can bring a lot of value to your business. Digital marketing deserves an expert in charge who can manage the face of your business and keep it up to date in this digital age.

Sales isn’t marketing

Sales and marketing do have crossover, so a Sales Director can manage, but they aren’t necessarily the same. This is why, at Boardroom Advisors, we have an elite lineup of Part-time Marketing Directors whose focuses on Marketing beyond the Sales aspect in businesses. The kind of leads that sales wants is all a sales led marketing strategy will focus on. While this will generate sales, it’s not actually the most efficient way to generate leads.

A strong marketing effort will look beyond easy to convert leads and consider the whole market. Having someone on your Board who understands marketing theory means you can access a larger market share, build a stronger community, and strengthen your brand.

When marketing your business, you need more than just a handful of strong leads. Drawing customers’ attention to your business, even at a low level, will still bring in sales as you increase awareness.

The marketing funnel

An example of a common difference between sales and marketing specialists is the shape of their marketing efforts. The marketing funnel suggests a funnel shape with a wide, shallow top and a narrow but deep bottom.

The bottom is where the strongest leads are found. They’re people who know they want to buy and only need to be convinced to buy from you, so they’re the people that a sales team cares about.

This can lead to there not being anywhere near enough attention given to the top and middle of the funnel. The top is only about creating awareness, so often won’t directly generate a lead without further work. A marketing expert understands the importance of devoting the time to the whole process, where sales may just focus on the end.

Your marketing team is also responsible for keeping your customers coming back. A return customer is more valuable than a new one, as they tend to cost less to market to and be more willing to spend larger amounts. But this group can get forgotten about without proper attention.

The more people you reach with the same efforts, the more efficient your marketing will be. A well designed funnel can improve your sales to cost ratio and make your business growth much easier to maintain.

Try and keep up to date

Marketing has benefitted massively from the advent of the internet and digital technology. The more they both develop, the more sales and marketing separate. With the wide variety of communications channels and tools available, marketing requires its own skills and expertise.

Your marketing department is one that can benefit greatly from automation, from emails to linked social media. Data can be used to automatically personalise communications. There are even AI bots that can take over part of the writing process.

When running a business, you need to keep up to date with all of these new developments. Keeping up your personal training and knowledge is part of being a business leader, but is ever more difficult when trying to keep up with multiple areas of the business.

If you’re staying up to date with your sales expertise, you’ll have much less time to study marketing. When you factor in the digital skills required for marketing, this training requirement could easily take over your whole life. It’s no use understanding something if you never get the chance to actually use it.

This is one of the most important reasons to have dedicated marketing leadership instead of sharing it. If they focus on their original job, marketing will suffer, while if they try to give marketing more attention, their actual job in sales will suffer instead.

Instead of trying to balance training between two different fields, having two people do the work will lead to both jobs getting done better. Another director may be more expensive, but the growth potential of digital marketing will more than pay for itself.

The benefits of expertise

Marketing growth strategies are incredibly important to any business as explained by Innovation Vista IT consultants. Your brand strategy is your public face, how your business presents itself to its customers. You can’t make sales to people who don’t know you exist or don’t trust your business.

With so much to know about both marketing theory and digital tools, having someone who knows what they’re doing is key. If you want to be making the most of your business, you want an expert who really understands what they’re doing.

While someone else can handle much of the basics, they won’t have the expertise to analyse your brand’s effectiveness in depth. They also won’t have the experience to use even a fraction of the tools available to them without devoting a substantial amount of time to get themselves up to date.

Instead of trying to balance training between two different fields, having two people do the work will lead to both jobs getting done better. Another director may be more expensive, but the growth potential of digital marketing will more than pay for itself.

An expert at the highest levels

Returning to the starting point, expert marketing leadership is often missing from businesses. Your Board of Directors could greatly benefit from taking such an expert into its ranks.

What does a Marketing Director do? Having a dedicated Marketing Director on the Board means that marketing can become part of your strategic thinking. It allows you to build a plan that aligns well with the rest of your business’s objectives, but also informs your planning with regards to getting your name out there.

This advice applies not only to marketing being run by sales, but in general too. The expertise involved can make it hard to share the job. If you already have a Marketing Director, adding an IT Director could provide the digital support you need as well.