How To Convince a Marketing Skeptic
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How do you convert a marketing skeptic into a supportive advocate? By showing them you know what you’re doing.
Gee Ranasinha | April 24, 2022
Marketing
Designing and executing effective marketing programs is a tough gig at the best of times. Today’s marketer faces a wide range of emerging strategic and operational challenges. Yet, on top of everything else, many marketers in small businesses are saddled with having to convince skeptics on the value of marketing in the first place.
Pretty much every small business has (at least) one marketing skeptic. It’s the person who remains unconvinced of the ultimate effectiveness of marketing as a business function. The one who wonders whether all this hippie talk of “brand narrative” isn’t just a thinly-veiled communist plot to overthrow the country.
Marketing skeptics can come from any walk of life, and may be embedded at any corporate hierarchical level – from the CEO down. Marketers inevitably run into creative and budgetary blockades thrown up by such cynics. What’s worse is the public display of indifference (at best) from such denouncers gets noticed throughout the company. Their influence effectively works against your best efforts to integrate marketing-centric thinking within the organization. Without their buy-in, your chances of success aren’t looking great.
So how do you convince a marketing skeptic? How can you convert them from cynical detractor to a supportive advocate?
Marketing skepticism is partly our own fault. Part of the reason why marketing is seen by some as being inconsequential fluff can be blamed on marketers themselves. We talk to civilians (the people existing outside our little bubble) as if they know what we know.
We’ll use insider jargon and acronyms in our explanations and justifications. But by trying to sound clever, we end up alienating the very people from whom we’re trying to elicit support.
Using marketing jargon outside of the marketing department ends up reinforcing the naysayer’s perception that marketing’s all about intangibles and hocus-pocus.
To be taken more seriously we need to read the room. We need to adapt our language depending on who’s asking the question. Finance types like the CEO or CFO like to hear about ROI, LTV, and conversion rates. Hit them with words like saliency and share of voice and watch their eyes glaze over. Using words people already know and understand makes it infinitely easier to bring someone to your way of thinking.
The lack of confidence in marketing is partly rooted in employment practice, effectively fueling the fire. What happens so often is the wrong person is employed for the job. It’s a vicious cycle. A business owner knows they have to employ a marketing person. However their experience with marketers hasn’t been great. So they employ someone with little experience or education in order to keep costs low.
A “Digital marketer” hard at work
The (ahem) ‘marketer’ dives straight into tactical execution. But they’ve ignored the basics of where every engagement should begin – diagnosis, analyses, strategy, segmentation, targeting, positioning, and all the rest. This is usually because they don’t know what marketing is. Alternatively, it’s because their boss is expecting an immediate tangible deliverable (since they don’t know what marketing is either).
Inevitably, results don’t meet with the business expectations of the organization – and marketing (in this case rightly) gets blamed.