Making The Invisible Visible

Most of marketing is invisible to leadership.

Your job isn't just to do the marketing...

You need to make the invisible visible.

P.S. If you're looking, here are a few things to help you:

- Hang out with 20 marketing directors for 2 days in Orlando, FL at the Momentum conference. You'll walk away with a simple strategy that works, the skills, plan, and confidence to make it happen. ​Click here for details.​

- Download the Marketing Director Roadmap to get the one-page blueprint to succeeding as a marketing director.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. There's a massive challenge that every marketing director faces, and I guarantee you have faced this challenge as well. And that is managing up. That as a marketing director, one of your biggest needs, objectives, goals is to make the invisible visible. So much of our work is invisible. It's unseen and misunderstood what marketing is, what marketing does, and why we do what we do, and why we do it the way that we do it. There's also lots of misconceptions around marketing. Why and how and how long it takes to get results. The leadership doesn't understand marketing in nine times out of ten, if not more. And so it's your job to not only do the marketing, but to communicate and make the invisible work you're doing visible to them, clear to them, and to keep them apprised and updated on what you're doing, how it's going, and what's next. If you don't do this effectively, a lot of bad things can happen. For starters, you can continue to struggle because leadership won't understand what is marketing and what does marketing do. And that means you won't get the support that you desperately need from them to give you more budget and more time and more support internally. But also, there's this idea of out of sight, out of mind. That if they aren't seeing what you're doing, if they're not understanding the work that you're doing, and if they don't see the results or the progress or the momentum from your marketing, then out of sight, out of mind. And that means they won't be thinking about marketing. They won't be seeing it from your perspective, and again, they won't give you the support. Or instead of supporting you, they'll be telling you what to do, dictating what you should do. And that will relegate you to being a button pusher and not being strategic and not having a seat at the table. In addition to not getting the budget and other forms of support that you desperately need to make the marketing successful. And marketing is the key driver of all business. And so if the marketing is not successful, they're not going to get what they want either. So this is a big deal. But the good news is if you can get this right, if you can successfully make the invisible visible, then you can have all the support that you need. You can over time educate leadership about what marketing is and does, why it's so important, and how it actually works. And if you can get to that point, amazing things can happen in the company. In addition, if you can do this effectively, if you can bring awareness and education to the marketing that you're doing, you can get the support that you need from sales, from the CEO, and the budget that marketing actually requires, the headcount that you actually need to execute on all this stuff. That's why this is so important, that we have to make the invisible visible if you want to be successful as a marketing leader. And today I want to give you a really tangible way to do this. It's something that I've told many of the people in my coaching group. It's worked really well for them. And so I want to share it with you so you can copy it and replicate the results, the success that they've had. And like everything that I teach, it's extremely simple and very practical. So here's the idea, the challenge is that every week you're doing stuff, you're making progress. And progress is good things getting results, but it's also not getting results. It's the learnings, the lessons of when you see that something doesn't work. Now we know that doesn't work, and now we can pivot or change or do something else. And so that's what progress looks like the good and the bad. And every week, as you go through this, as you go through the motions and as you execute your marketing, as you're getting results and also learning and getting insights, most people in the company have no clue what marketing is doing. They don't know, maybe they don't care, but they certainly don't understand it. Again, out of sight, out of mind. And we need to fix this. And it's really easy to fix this. And what you're gonna do is choose three to five people whose opinion matters, who can give you the support that you need. For example, the CEO or the founder. Maybe it's the president, maybe it's the sales VP, maybe it's someone else, a CRO. There's three to five people in leadership that you're thinking of right now. These are the people that you wish understood what marketing does, that you wish would give you the support that you need, and that you would love to collaborate with at a strategic level to drive the business forward and to do marketing that matters. Those are the people we want to pick. So pick three to five of these people and write down their names. These are the people that we're gonna email every week. We're gonna send one email to them, to all of them, all together, every week. And this email is going to make the invisible visible. It's gonna bring awareness to the marketing that you're doing, and it will emphasize the positives that are coming out of the marketing, the things that you're doing in marketing, and what's coming up. And by sending this email, it does a couple of things. One, it gets you a seat at the table. People will become aware that you're active, that you're doing stuff, and what marketing looks like. Also, it will let them know the things that you're doing, the activities, the initiatives, the effort behind marketing. And so it shows that you're being a contributor, that you're being a team player, that those conversations that were had last week that you're acting on, that you're taking action. And also, it puts on their radar the things that you're working on, the things that you and your team are doing. And that's really important because these three to five people are the people who come to you and dictate things. They ask you for things, they demand things, they make changes that impact you. And so if every week you can remind them and show them the things that you're doing and the things that are coming up in the world of marketing, then it's a defense mechanism for you that now you can push back in those conversations and point to your email and say, I told you we're doing this, or I said we're gonna do this and we're doing it, and so we don't have the time or capacity to take on this other thing right now. So this is a wonderful thing to do. It's extremely easy to do, and it helps you in many important ways. So pick three to five people and send an email every week to them. And the email will do three things. In the email, you just want to outline and bullet out in lists three different categories. First, what has marketing done over the last week? And you want to list out your wins and the progress and results that you've got. Maybe you launched the campaign, maybe you updated the ads, maybe you finished the buyer personas, whatever it is you've done over the last week, outline that. And ideally, here you want four to eight bullet points of the things that you've done. This will again show the progress that you're making. It shows the effort you and the team are putting in. And this is a great place to call out and praise your team by name. We did this thanks to the hard work by John. Susan launched this thing and it has gone really well. So, first section is here's the things we've done over the last week. Four to eight bullet points is really good. The next section, the next heading, if you will, is what's currently in progress? What are you doing right now? What does this week look like? And you want to outline three to five things that you're currently working on. Again, because of the nature of the people you're emailing this to, don't get into the weeds. They don't need the marketing jargon, they don't need the low-level details, they need the big picture. What campaigns are you working on? What strategies are you implementing? What are the things that they've talked about that they care about that you are involved with this week, that you're moving forward this week? So outline those things so they know what you're doing, so they see that you have listened, that you're executing the right things, and that they're on your radar and their priorities to you. And then the third and final section here is what's next? What's upcoming? And you want to think about the timeline here of the next 30 days or less. So it's not the stuff that you've done, it's not the stuff that you're doing this week, it's after this week and for the next couple of weeks. What are the things that are on your radar that are coming up? That you need to let them know. We have this in the queue, and it'll be coming soon. It's coming down the line for us to work on. Remember, this is how you will protect yourself when they change things, when they demand things, you can always point back to this and say, we have these things coming up that we're committed to. So outline three to five things here that are coming up. Again, keep it high level, keep it big picture, but call out the things that are coming up. Maybe you have a webinar coming up that you're preparing for, and that's something you can mention. Maybe the new campaign is about to launch, or you have an in-person event, maybe the website is going to be launched, the new website, whatever it is, put the things that are on the roadmap to remind people of what's coming up. And even better, if you can assign dates to these things, that this update is launching or this change will be made on this date. That's the email. And so you send this email, and all you say in the email is here's your weekly marketing update of what we've done, what we're doing, and what's next. If you have any questions or thoughts or feedback, I'd love to hear it. And you list out those three categories with the bullet items. If you do this, you will be amazed at the praise that you get, at the positive feedback, and the response from sending this email. It's an incredibly powerful tool and it's so easy to do. But if you're like most marketing leaders, you're probably wondering how do I start this? How do I tell them I'm going to email them this? And so let me give you some guidance here. It's very easy. All you have to do is you approach them or email them the first time and say, hey, I'd like to keep you updated on all the important work that marketing is doing. And I'd love your feedback if you have any when I give you those updates. My plan over the next six to eight weeks is to send you an email with an update on what marketing has done, what we're doing, and what's next. If it's useful, I'll continue doing it. And if it's not, then we'll do it for a couple of weeks and then I'll stop. We're not asking for permission here. That's the language to use in your email to tell them, hey, I'm going to do this thing. It's going to be important and valuable to you and to me. And I'm only going to do it for a short period of time so we can test it out and see if it's useful for both of us. Again, you're not asking if they want to receive this, you're not asking for their permission to do this, you're going to do it no matter what. And then you'll send the email. And I guarantee the positive response from this. Every time I've told someone in the coaching group to do this, and they've done it, they've come back to me in a week or two and said it's been transformative for the organization, for their relationship with leadership, and for the support that they get, the visibility that they have of the important work that they're doing. Marketing is fundamental to the business, but most of marketing is invisible. And it's your job and my job to make the invisible visible. And this is one of the simplest and one of the easiest ways to do just that.