5 Tips for Demonstrating Marketing's Value to An Organization
Marketing professionals are constantly seeking ways to demonstrate their value within organizations. This article presents expert insights on proven strategies to showcase marketing's impact on business success. From connecting activities to outcomes to leveraging PR for brand visibility, these tips offer practical approaches for marketers to prove their worth and drive organizational growth.
- Connect Marketing Activities to Business Outcomes
- Implement Account-Based Marketing for Revenue Impact
- Measure and Communicate Marketing's Business Impact
- Prove Value Through Cultural and Business Shifts
- Leverage PR for Cost-Effective Brand Visibility
Connect Marketing Activities to Business Outcomes
Tie every marketing activity to a business outcome the CEO actually cares about—pipeline, profit, or retention. Don't show vanity metrics; show momentum. Replace "engagement is up" with "this campaign added $240K in qualified pipeline." The key? Build reporting that connects the dots from campaign to revenue. Make yourself impossible to ignore by speaking the language of the boardroom, not the marketing blog.
Implement Account-Based Marketing for Revenue Impact
Based on my experience as a CMO, I would advise implementing account-based marketing to transform the relationship between sales and marketing teams. This approach shifts the conversation from simply generating more leads to collaboratively engaging high-value accounts together, which naturally demonstrates marketing's contribution to revenue. The key is repositioning marketing as an advisory and orchestration function that directly supports sales outcomes rather than operating as a separate entity. When marketing is viewed as a strategic partner in the revenue process, communicating its value becomes much more straightforward because the impact is visible in business results that leadership cares about.
Measure and Communicate Marketing's Business Impact
I'm Isaac Bullen, Director of Marketing at 3WH - top marketing role; budget owner; pipeline and revenue accountability.
To demonstrate marketing's value, measure and talk about what changed in the business because of marketing. Treat every important campaign as a cause and effect test by running a simple holdout or geo split, then tell the story in finance terms like revenue, margin, and risk. Finance leaders lean in when you show what would have happened without the spend, not a string of channel metrics.
When you present it, use a one-slide value bridge that links spend to reach to pipeline to revenue to profit. Put the incrementality stat in the top right and keep the language plain. (For example, a geo holdout on paid search in the Northwest showed a 3% lift in qualified pipeline.) Finish with the decision you want and the payback described in cash.
Best,
Isaac
Prove Value Through Cultural and Business Shifts
My advice to CMOs is this: prove value by showing how marketing moves culture and business together. At Ranked, I saw how traditional data, surveys, and samples missed the voices that actually shape culture. We changed that by working with micro and nano creators of color and tracking real-time sentiment down to the zip code.
When brands saw campaigns drive sales and community trust at the same time, the value of marketing became undeniable. My lesson: show proof where culture is happening, and the boardroom will listen.
Leverage PR for Cost-Effective Brand Visibility
To show impact, PR is definitely my favorite tool in the marketing toolkit. I think PR is the most cost-efficient way to get your story out there. Thought Leadership is a great way to stand out, build your influence for your brand externally, increase your visibility, raise your profile, attract more attention from the media, and potential customers/clients too who want to work with market leaders. Tracking activities like being quoted in articles, speaking at conferences (online/offline), creating content pieces, and building your following on social media all contribute to increasing your awareness and building your credibility with a larger community including internal/external stakeholders. To have trade journals/media folks mention you as a market leader or quote you in an article carries a lot more weight, and perception is reality in marketing, so you get a lot more bang for your marketing buck with PR in my experience. Bill Gates was once quoted as saying, "If I was down to my last dollar, I'd spend it on public relations," so I think I am in good company!
Content marketing is the new PR, the single most cost-effective thing a brand can do to build their awareness, visibility, and credibility. With content, if you get mentioned, noticed, or tagged by key influencers (for instance, as one of Oprah's "favorite things" as many of my clients have), it can literally put your brand on the radar, sell out your entire inventory in hours/days. I look at PR as an investment rather than an expense. To demonstrate value, if a story about you in the media leads to new customers or shortens your sales cycle, you can measure success by the media equivalency cost of the press you are getting in print and online, through quantitative and qualitative market research, and/or monitoring social media mentions, likes, retweets, followers, etc. Every time a new article hits, you speak at an event, or you are quoted in the media, there is value in that exposure as well as instant credibility in the third-party validation, which carries a lot more weight than a paid ad. When that exposure gets prospects to reach out or decide quicker to hire you or buy your products/services, just think about how much it would cost to buy a half-page ad in a major magazine or newspaper to get an idea of the media equivalency of having an article about your business written as editorial. It is a huge opportunity that most businesses could not afford, and it can be used on your website forever as a sales tool.
