By Linda Forrest

There’s an old adage about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes, which means the shoemaker is too busy making shoes for his customers to ensure that his own children have shoes on their feet.

There’s an unfortunate parallel in marketing: marketers are often spending so much of their time marketing to prospective buyers that they fall down promoting the virtues of marketing to their higher ups, who make the ultimate decision about whether to sign off on the proposed marketing budget.

In an agency environment, the failure to articulate the value of marketing and why it’s an investment rather than a cost centre, can spell death for the business altogether. When internal marketing resources fail to sell their marketing proposals to the C-suite, the repercussions are felt far beyond the marketing department as campaigns not fully executed result in fewer leads entering the pipeline and fewer sales down the road.

In today’s age of analytics and marketing automation tools, there’s no excuse why marketing shouldn’t be able to champion its effect on the business’s bottom line.

A recent Forbes article highlighted five ways that marketing loses credibility with the C-suite, many of which stem from poor communication. How’s that for irony?

I’ll leave it to the Forbes article to dive into the details of each of these, but here are five common mistakes marketers make:

Stumble explaining the value of marketing

Limited product, service, and customer knowledge

Can’t Dance (meaning respond quickly and effectively in the case of failures, errors)

Isolation (not integrated with other departments)

Where to invest – or cut – an incremental dollar

The remedy to these problems? As the article succinctly puts it:

The same rigour brought to external communication needs to be applied internally:

• Know the audience
• Understand their needs
• Communicate to them in their language

Seems obvious, doesn’t it? That’s what effective marketers do when it comes to communicating with their external audiences, so why the difference when it comes to internal communications?

Forbes was inspired to write its piece when the results of the 2011 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program were made public by the Fournaise Marketing Group. The Group surveyed over 600 SMB and enterprise CEOs and decision makers in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Australia to determine how CEOs felt about their CMOs and whether they were doing an effective job of demonstrating marketing’s value. The results were dismal.

Seventy-three percent of CEOs think marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be: they are still too far from being able to demonstrate how the cross-channel marketing strategies and campaigns they deploy grow their organizations’ top line in terms of more customer demand, more sales, more prospects, more conversions or more market share.

Sixty-nine percent of the marketers Fournaise talked to feel their strategies and campaigns do make an impact on the company’s business, even though they can’t precisely quantify or prove it – confirming the great CEO-marketers disconnect.

Scary stuff. But this disconnect can be overcome.

Marketo provided some tips earlier this year on selling digital marketing to the C-suite which can be applied to the marketing function as a whole. Again, I’ll leave the details to the original post, but here are the line items:

Align with company goals

Reference competitor’s success

Emphasize marketing analytics

All good points. With the proper goals set for marketing activities that support the goals of the organization, properly executed activities that take place where your industry, partners, prospects, customers and yes, competitors, reside, as well as metrics and analytics put in place to measure and assess the effectiveness of your programs, marketing can create a compelling case for itself to the decision makers that fund the program.

Image: Centre for Teaching Excellence

Technorati Tags: marketing, c-suite, CMO, CEO, credibility, goals, marketing analytics, Marketo, Fournaise,  Forbes