Maximising Impact: Understanding the Multifaceted Role of Marketers in Business Strategy

“A marketer has their finger in all the pies” was heard in a meeting this week. We agree. But we should refine that to explain what those fingers may be doing in those pies.

They certainly aren’t there to extract and take. Quite the opposite, we would say that they are actually there to test what is in the ingredients, assess which bits they should be telling their team about, and which will add value to the team making the accompanying dish. 

You see, marketing isn’t just the transactional bit that creates the campaign, tracks your customer and monitors conversion and generates the lead. This is important. But you need to know the business to get the right ingredients to create a message and a creative that ensures that the campaign gives you the best bang for your bucks—generating not only the right number of leads but high-quality leads and a strong conversion rate.  

How you structure your marketing team can have a tangible impact on your success. Let’s start at the top. Our Property Marketing Survey discovered that 52% of our respondents do not have a marketing position on their board. When you come back to our pie analogy, the room in which the strategic direction of the business is developed does not always have someone with the mindset of how you communicate those objectives to employees and understands how you ultimately reach your customers to translate those goals to reality. That is quite a vital bit of the pie missing. 

This is a good point to talk about mindset. You build an executive team to cover off all areas of your business – so you need a range of perspectives. You need your Operations Director to be focused on running an efficient building - both the bricks and mortar and the people in it; you want your Finance Director to have an analytical brain asking challenging questions to the right people; your HR director will need to be focused on how to attract, develop and retain the best talent; your Commercial Director will be insatiable in their quest to engage with the market, seeking out the best new opportunities. 

Without a Marketing Director, who is considering what your customer needs? Who is making sure all that work that goes into running an efficient building, hiring the best possible people to deliver the best experience and finding the best locations and partners to build the best facilities – is actually being put in front of and made aware to your customers?

And this is where you have the missing link. You can’t tell the world how great you are if you don’t have someone there when the business direction is being created, considering how you get that information and story out in every aspect of communication. It is almost a bit like having the internet without a computer/device/tablet. 

You need to tell the world why they should live with you, why you are in the best location, with the best experience, with the best sustainability practices and that you do all this with the sole interests of providing a supportive, welcoming and fantastic home for your customer. The customer– the person without whom your company cannot survive.

So what happens next? If we have convinced you of this value, what else do you need in a marketing team. 

We think the best place to start is to look at what tasks you need to do. You will have a long list of those:

· Website management

· Content development

· Integrated campaign management (digital, onsite, events, offline, partnerships)

· B2B

· B2C

· Regional and national campaigns

· Agent management

· Sales team

· Data and analytics

· Graphic Design

· Social media

· PR

Once you know what you need, your goals, where you will generate the most success, you can see what skills are most important in your team. Some you will decide you need in-house, and some you will outsource, but unless you know what you are driving towards, it is harder to determine. 

But don’t forget about that lesson we learned at the top. Whilst your task goals may all look slightly different, your main goal is the same – to tell the whole story of your business. So make sure you share these key messages across an integrated campaign that works across all relevant channels. Make sure that the same approach to working as a team at the top is filtered down. You want your Marketing Managers, Executives and juniors to be speaking to your ops, finance, development, acquisitions, sales team – all the time. They need to know about the whole business as much as your Marketing Director does.

Marketing teams should be spreading their fingers out and getting them in all the pies – because this is how a business delivers for customers; communicates all the great things your business is doing and engages with your audience to build a brand that they trust and want to buy from. 

If you want to review your strategy or your team structure, The Property Marketing Strategists can help. Please get in touch.