The role of marketing has never been more critical…standing out from the crowd has never been harder
How can marketing functions move away from short-term targets towards long-term strategic branding? Totum director Rebecca Ellis reveals findings from our latest CMO networking event.
Marketing functions in professional services and legal firms are facing a key challenge. Torn between short-term targets and long-term strategy, brand building versus driving new sales, senior marketing and business development professionals can feel like they must do it all.
What’s the solution? Perhaps it’s time to rethink the function’s role in the future of work by demonstrating its strategic worth to the c-suite. Marketers know the function can be an effective revenue generator, but now’s the time to prove it.
That was the theme of a recent Totum Partners networking breakfast event for senior marketing and business development professionals. Held at Watson Farley & Williams’ headquarters in London and featuring insights from PwC’s director Greg Jackson and partner Tom Adams on the firm’s recent CMO Study: Creating a Marketing Renaissance survey, the event brought together senior level marketers and business development professionals from different legal firms.
The event opened with a deep dive into PwC’s CMO study, which took in an in-depth survey of 77 UK-based chief marketing officers (CMOs) across industry and a series of qualitative interviews with CMOs. It found a tension between how the function was perceived at board level and what it was expected to achieve.
Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed (65%) said leadership primarily viewed marketing as a cost centre, with 74% agreeing that the same leadership expected the function to also create strategic growth.
Our challenging economic and social environment means that 83% of CMOs have had to prioritise short-term performance marketing in the past 12-18 months over strategy and brand building. While this might help quarterly sales targets, it is taking away the function’s ability to drive business transformation at scale.
Part of the challenge for CMOs is having the right tools in place to maximise strategic performance. For marketers, this means adapting to changing business needs by developing both their intrinsic human skills, and their ability to manage data and new technology.
According to PwC’s study, organisations with high creative input from their marketing team coupled with high customers data automation were twice as likely to have performed ‘much better’ in terms of revenue growth and three times more likely to have seen better brand performance year-on-year.
However, when the firm asked survey respondents to plot themselves on a matrix of high/low human influence and high/low data automation, most CMOs (44%) said they had low human influence and low customer automation. Just 14% rated themselves high in both areas.
Metrics for growth
A particular challenge around growth for marketers in the legal sector is unifying the client journey.
When your business is driven by relationships, but those relationships are held by individual partners, how can marketing lead on the end-to-end client experience and drive new business?
“The role of marketing functions has never been more critical, but standing out from the crowd has never been harder. To succeed, marketing leaders need to establish the case for long-term value over short-term performance, taking control of the end-to-end client journey and utilising data to streamline processes.”
One marketing leader at our event shared the struggle of balancing strategic, commercial and global aims with the personal needs of senior partners. Another argued that ‘partners aren’t great at business building in the traditional sense’, with work and contracts received through existing depth of brand, prestige and decades-long relationships, rather than proactively seeking new clients.
Unsurprisingly, PwC’s research suggests performance improves when marketing owns the end-to-end client relationship alongside brand communication, with revenue, brand performance and client satisfaction all positively impacted.
However, the key to success here lies in marketing owning client data and insight. And while some firms have successfully implemented data driven marketing and automation, many are struggling under the weight of too much data, too little data consolidation and not enough talent.
Of those surveyed, just over a quarter (27%) said they had advanced levels of marketing automation skills within their team, while 62% of CMOs feel there is a shortage of next generation marketing talent, particularly in data, operations and technology.
This chimes with what we see in the market and echoes a previous study from the World Federation of Advertisers, which found that 77% of marketing professionals admitted there was high talent scarcity in their organisation. The biggest areas of talent shortage? Data and analytics, ecommerce and measurement.
Dealing with these shortages and creating effective data insight within your organisation requires building your marketing team. Effective skills development and buying in new capabilities will be key to meeting both current and future challenges.
Getting buy-in for brand strategy
Of course, none of this can succeed without buy-in from the top – and a consistent message on the importance of marketing to strategic development.
One attendee at our event argued that while their firm aims to work to four-year planning cycles, the reality of a 12-month reward cycle for partners means that they focus 80% of their activities on a year-to-year basis. Add in the competitiveness of the legal sector and relatively flat demand, and many firms get stuck in a loop of short-term sales work and taking clients from competitors for growth, rather than longer-term investment in brand and strategy.
This needn’t be the case. Responsible business growth can come from effective branding and better data marketing, with marketing departments taking control of the end-to-end client journey and streamlining processes.
The role of marketing functions has never been more critical, but standing out from the crowd has never been harder. To succeed, marketing leaders need to establish the case for long-term value over short-term performance, taking control of the end-to-end client journey and utilising data to streamline processes. Doing so can help firms deliver the sustainable growth they crave.
Rebecca is a director at Totum Partners, specialising in the recruitment of senior marketing and business development roles. She particularly focuses on director and leadership positions.