How to gain C-suite buy-in for your marketing strategy

Having uninterrupted time and space to dedicate to creative thinking is a luxury in today’s world, and the idea of doing just one task at a time feels like a thing of the past. The reality is that today’s marketers spend so much of their energy on administrative tasks, leaving them with little time to focus on creative thinking and accurately communicating the impact of their marketing efforts.

Another reality of marketing today is that the C-suite often sees marketing as the first place to cut when times get tough. Almost 50% of chief marketing officers are seen as cost centers, not profit centers, per research from consulting firm Gartner. And that attitude radiates within a given company, so only about 5% of those CMOs feel highly confident in their ability to impact strategic decision-making and find support for their initiatives, according to the Harvard Business Review.

The good news? With the right tools and processes, marketers can show that smart campaigns reap both short-term gains and lifetime customer loyalty, uniting stakeholders with one source of truth that provides transparency of progress and process.

“The right tools help marketers show leadership exactly how their time and efforts impact business outcomes, while also highlighting opportunities like workflow inefficiencies,” said Christian Austin, senior director of brand and advertising at Smartsheet.

This empowers marketers to understand the impact they’re driving, which can help their team gain more unity, funding, and support in the long term. Proving clear business impact allows marketing teams to gain more budget and buy-in, which means more space for creative and thought-provoking concepts and campaigns.

3 steps to get executive buy-in

So, how can marketers shift this perception and gain the support they need? Here are three strategies to achieve executive buy-in.

1. Show them the money—and the impact. 

The vast majority (94%) of marketing and creative professionals say they face challenges when they need to demonstrate the business impact of their work according to research by Smartsheet. Not being able to show your impact to the C-suite can have major setbacks to the continuation and progress of work being done. 

If there’s one thing we know about the C-suite, it’s that they like to see impact in the form of data. “You need to have an aligned framework to show how your campaign contributes to your business goals. That framework should link the activity/expenditure to the desired outcome and be measured with an appropriate KPI,” said John Newall, senior VP of global brand at Smartsheet. By sharing the work that goes into learning customer’s pain points, and how this understanding leads to sales, marketers can prove to the C-suite that their work is driving impact.

2. Break down silos with integrated marketing tools. 

Marketing teams tend to tackle different processes in silos, with project planning, feedback gathering, approvals and reporting all dispersed between a number of tools. This makes it hard to maintain visibility across the organization. If campaign information and reports aren’t shared by all relevant parties, it’s hard to get a cohesive view of a project.

But when there’s a central location where the work happens, via integrated tools in the marketing tech stack, there’s one source of truth to manage work and prove value. Management can see real-time updates on how a project is progressing, and you can minimize the amount of tedious tasks spent on a project when you have everything in one place.

Implementing one system that cuts across silos to handle budget management, reporting, as well as planning and executing campaigns, can maximize efficiency. When Webex by Cisco was looking to increase visibility across the organization and provide centralized access to assets, they optimized their business processes. This saved them 520-plus hours a year, and they were able to offer better quality services to their customers at scale.
Using the right tools can also help a brand strengthen and expand how it connects with its consumers. McLaren Racing sought to speed up workflows and provide a richer racing experience to its partners and fans. By creating a shared central document and streamlining processes, the company achieved seven times faster race day footage and assets, with proper tags for searchability.

3. Align all teams on goals and objectives. 

Only 5% of marketing executives have a holistic view of work, according to Harvard Business Review. Every week it seems executives are providing the people managing marketing projects with new directions and information. When leadership constantly changes priorities, there’s hardly an opportunity to show a campaign’s value.

In a post-COVID reality, we’ve become more aware of how things can change any second. The whims of social media can escalate discussions within hours and drop them in a few days, leaving you in a state of quickly seizing trends while being ready to pivot when the trend goes away. If executives are also frequently shifting marketing priorities, there’s little time to really dive into a campaign, follow through and test the results.

Imagine a world in which your leadership gains instant visibility into the impact that your work is driving. All necessary project stakeholders get consistent access to updates and reporting, meaning the value of your work is visible across the organization.

With the right marketing management tools, your team can keep track of budget planning, campaign timelines, team bandwidth, creative feedback/approvals and reporting, all in one central location while seeing updates in real-time. This means you can effortlessly create a report with metrics on cost and time during the production process. Say goodbye to the days of manually gathering information from multiple tools and compiling them into a report for your leadership to view.

By consolidating data from different sources in one place, your C-suite gains visibility into the impact of your team’s marketing activities. You can easily pull reports and put information into customized dashboards, empowering you to make more strategic decisions on marketing activities.

The key to c-suite partnership

By implementing these approaches, you can provide real-time visibility throughout the planning and implementation of your campaigns and a campaign’s life. This can lead to more efficient work processes, more successful campaigns, and—in a perfect world—more unity, funding, and support with the C-suite for your marketing endeavors.

You can welcome the C-suite into your process by using workflow systems that enable everyone to see progress on a project in real-time. If all involved can see how their teammates’ contributions lead to a campaign’s success, you’ll have a greater chance of bringing unity with the C-suite and garnering both their confidence and their investment in future projects.