As a marketing geek, it’s easy to believe to believe that marketing drives the business forward and creates sales and value through the organisation. My friends in finance look at marketing in a very different way – they sometimes see my work as a discretionary spend that could be cut and added straight to the bottom line.
Finance teams are generally much more sceptical than us about a marketing teams ability to drive revenue or create new sales channels. And we’re often unrealistically confident in our ability to transform a business. Do marketers have an inflated sense of self worth and why the difference in perceptions about the value of marketing?
Marketers can be blissfully ignorant of the real RoI of their budgets and sometimes are wholly unaware of how their budgets fit in with the wider commercial and operational targets. So it’s not surprising that the eagle eyed finance departments use their own measures and metrics to asses the value of marketing.
Some stats from a recent Marketing Week report show how wide the gap is.
• 84% of marketers agree that marketing needs to grow for the business to grow, but just 47% of finance respondents agree
• 77% of marketers agree that marketing is a critical function in their business, while fewer (62% of) finance respondents agree
• 72% of marketers agree that the marketing function is becoming more important to their organization, compared to just 55% of finance respondents
• 62% of marketers agree that the marketing function takes the lead in driving innovation within the business, with only around half as many (34%) of finance respondents concurring.
Marketing departments need to work harder to build bonds with finance teams to make sure their objectives are better understood and that the extrinsic and intrinsic value of their toils are recognised, even if they can’t be measured.
Once one of the opco's flighted a billboard with no sales promotion or expected RoI. When the finance team asked why they did it the local marketing team told how the office morale had been feeling low, but now, driving past the new billboard gave the whole company a energising boost. How do you measure that?