How To Get Promoted as a Marketing Director

Ready to get the support you need, the pay you deserve, and finally have a seat at the leadership table? Here are the 5 steps to getting promoted as a Marketing Director.

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- 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 0:01

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. The CEO sends you a message. I would like to have a talk with you this week. You're worried, you're scared, you're afraid. But when you end up meeting with them, they tell you how great a job you've done, how impressed they are, and that they're ready to give you a promotion. To pay you more money, to give you a higher title, and to give you more budget. It sounds like a pipe dream, but I'm here to tell you it's actually within reach for you. Today I want to talk about how to earn your promotion, how to get paid what you deserve, and get the support that you need to be successful as a marketing director. It may not seem believable yet, but hopefully by the end of this episode, you'll see the pathway of what it takes to get promoted, and you'll realize it's really not that complicated. And I know this because many people inside of my coaching group for marketing directors have been promoted, have gotten paid more, have earned higher titles, and have acquired more budget in the process. And I'll share some of those stories with you and the practical steps that you can take to earn your promotion. But let's start from the beginning and talk about the challenges, why I think this is so important for all of us. Whether you think you deserve a promotion or not, there are some serious challenges that you're facing. First and foremost, I think we could all use a lifeline. Marketers, marketing directors in particular, don't get enough support. You don't have the big enough team, you don't have enough time, you don't have the authority to speak into things, and you certainly don't have enough budget to do the marketing that you need to do to get the results the leadership expects. So we all need a lifeline. We need more support. But this comes from the second challenge, which is not being in the room or not being in the right room. The leadership will go and meet and make decisions and have conversations and discuss the challenges and direction of the business, and you're not in that room. They're not including you. Whether they don't understand marketing or don't respect marketing, or maybe it's harmless and unintentional, but they've never thought to invite you into that room. It's a big challenge. And until you have a seat at the table, you won't have the ability, the authority to speak up, to be heard, and to drive real change. And both of these have left many marketing directors to have one foot out the door. Then maybe you have thought before, or maybe you're thinking right now, is this really the place for me? Do I really belong here? Should I stay here? Do they respect me? Do I have a future here? And if you have one foot out the door, I want to encourage you that things are probably better than they seem. That it's possible to get the support that you need, to have the control, the authority, the budget, and to have a seat at the table. So the leadership at least listens to what marketing has to say, and that you have the opportunity to push back, to challenge things, and to drive real change at the company. But more importantly, that you are paid to stay. Not just paid for your job, but that they see you and value you so much that if you were to try to leave, they would pay you to stay. That might seem unbelievable, and I'll admit that. However, many people in my coaching group, this has happened to. And Olivia is one of the more recent ones who found a different job. She had some things she was unhappy with at her current job. And she told them, I'm leaving, I have a different job. And they said, No, please don't. We want you to stay. We'll give you more perks, we'll pay you more money, we'll give you more support. So this is possible for all of us, just like it was for Olivia. It starts with understanding the marketing mind map, which is in the CEO's brain or leadership's brain, how much or how little are they thinking about marketing? Because in your head, you're thinking about marketing 110% of the time. But the CEO or the founder, the president, or whoever's at the top isn't thinking about marketing that much. So if you had to guess, is it 1%, 10%, 30%? How much are they thinking about marketing? And the best proxy for this, if you want to have a real sense for it, is what percent of revenue is your marketing budget? Typically, what I see is 2 to 10% is percent of revenue that is your marketing budget. You're probably somewhere in that range in terms of the revenue of the company. And that's usually about a good approximation of how much the CEO is thinking about marketing. And that's a huge challenge, right? Like they're not thinking about marketing nearly as much as you. They don't really care about marketing that much. They just want the business to keep going, to grow, to be steady. So, my question for you is what would change if leadership actually gave you the support that you needed? Probably a lot of things would change. You could speak into things, you could push back, you could say no with confidence, you could do more things, you could have a team to help you. You wouldn't be so exhausted and burned out all the time. So let's talk about the five steps to make this happen. The first one is to budget for success. And I'll talk in a future episode about this, but budgeting for success is key. That every dollar you're given control over, you need to be a good steward of it. We need to make sure that your dollars, your budget is used in a way that's effective. We can't just blow it or waste it. One of the biggest wastes I've seen in coaching hundreds of marketing directors is in agencies. Agencies will promise the world and charge a lot and deliver very little. But it helps to start by looking at your budget. What has been effective, continue investing in those things. What has not been effective, let's stop or let's reevaluate those things. So step one is to budget for success. The better you are at managing the budget and controlling that and seeing where it's effective and where it's not, the higher ROI you can demonstrate to leadership. The leadership team and leaders care about money, as you can imagine. They give you a budget and they want more back. That's why it starts with budgeting. Number two, though, is to track your wins. That every week, every month, every quarter, you need to be showing leadership that you're making progress, that you're having success, that you're getting wins. Whether you're getting them or not, you need to show people, tell people, remind people of what you're getting. This is how you make the invisible more visible for leadership. This is how you get them to think about marketing more. When you say, hey, we have a hot new prospect that came in from our campaign, they want to hear that. Hey, we got a three to one return on our ad spend, they want to hear that. So share the wins with leadership. So you have to track them first and measure them, but then you need to share them. The next step is to own their numbers, not just your numbers. There's a ton of stuff to track in marketing. Most of it doesn't matter. But what leadership cares about are probably not your metrics. They care about their metrics. So you need to understand what are those numbers. They care about qualified pipeline, they care about deal size, they care about revenue. What are the numbers that your leadership team cares about? And how can you help own those numbers? I'm not proposing here you can actually influence all those numbers, but you need to be able to understand them and see how they think about them and communicate how the marketing you're doing will help to influence and drive those numbers. If you do that, you win. If you do that, they're gonna want to have you at the table. The fourth one here is to lead by example. If you want to be promoted to senior director of marketing or to VP of marketing or head of marketing, it starts by acting like you're already that role. You have to lead by example. You have to take control and say, what if I was this role already? What would I do differently? How would I present myself? How would I communicate? What things would we be measuring? What things would we stop? And which things would we start? So lead by example. Pretend like you've already been promoted. That's the fastest and easiest way to shift everything to actually get the promotion that you want. But the fifth thing here is the most important that almost every marketer I've coached in terms of getting a promotion overlooks. And this is if you want to get promoted, if you want to get paid more and have a higher title and get more support, then you have to find a way to replace yourself. Because once they promote you, your seat is empty. And now they have to do something about that. So promoting you actually creates a problem for themselves. And this is often why people don't get promoted as soon as they want to, as soon as they think. So you have to be ready, you have to be prepared to be able to replace yourself. And if you can do that, then they're much more likely to listen up and to give you the promotion that you deserve. So those are the five steps: budgeting for success, track your wins, own their numbers, lead by example, and replace yourself. And if you do those five things, you'll get the support you need, you'll finally have a seat at the table, and you'll be paid to stay and no longer have one foot out the door.