How Marketing Extends Department Lines

If you think HR and admin have no role in marketing, you might want to reconsider

One of the things that is prevalent in small business marketing is how intertwined different roles are in the business. It’s not uncommon that an employee might have responsibilities for bookkeeping plus reception, or sales plus marketing.

It’s natural to think that in larger businesses, that overlap lessens – bookkeepers do only bookkeeping and customer service is only responsible for managing customer inquiries. However, marketing continues to overlap in these departments, leaving an opportunity to leverage how to use that to a company’s competitive advantage.

Marketing Relies on Other People in the Business

The role of marketing is to get people interested or more interested in what you have to offer. If someone’s interest is piqued, they are going to pursue another way to connect with you, and that might involve reaching out to customer service, contacting a sales rep or exploring your business website.

Here’s where other departments can extend marketing value:

• When someone is attracted to the company and follows up with a personal interaction with the business, the administrative or customer service person is their first 1:1 experience. The better informed that individual is about the marketing strategy, the better they can direct the customer and the more likely the marketing value is extended closer to a sale.
• If a potential customer visits the website and finds it easy to navigate and easily communicates what the customer wants to know, they are more likely to continue pursuing their role as a customer.
• In meeting a sales rep who is current on the marketing strategy of how certain customer audiences are attracted to the product or service, the sales process proceeds more easily.

Here’s where other departments can derail the marketing value:

• When the first 1:1 experience with the company is with someone who comes across as unknowledgeable or disinterested because they don’t know how to properly direct the customer.
• The website developer has focused on high-tech attributes of website development that are not conducive to information-finding for the customer, or the sector language is too unfamiliar for the potential customer.
• The customer feels like they have to educate the sales rep on why the product or service is important to them, which reduces confidence in making a sale.

How Much to Educate Other Departments

The non-marketing departments don’t have to know everything that the marketing department knows, but the marketing department’s strategy should be to provide them with enough information that they can be confident they are rowing the boat in the same direction. Other departments are assets in your marketing strategy and should be part of how you appeal to customers.

In speaking with the event planner of a large business one afternoon, I presented the idea of other departments being part of the marketing strategy. She wasn’t convinced – admin does admin, IT does IT, sales does sales. There was no intermingling of responsibilities.

I asked her if she used IT to promote events on the website as part of her marketing – she did. I asked if she directed people on her marketing materials to contact admin to take registrations and answer questions – she did. I asked if her marketing efforts were greater or diminished with the help of other departments – she said, “I see where you’re going with this” and walked away.

Focus on the Big Picture

In large organizations, everyone should still be working towards the same overall goal of making the company the best it can be. Sometimes, a department-specific commitment to tasks can hinder the pursuit of the overall goal. Weaving the departments together, whether from company leadership or an outside perspective like a forward-thinking event planner, could make marketing work better simply by involving others who are already ambassadors of the company.
That seems reasonable, and very cost-effective.

Where to Go From Here

I never did hear again from that event planner who abruptly ended our conversation, but I hope it made her think about how she could offer her employer more without extending a cost. Sometimes ideas need to marinate a little – it’s not always easy to suggest doing things differently, even if you know there’s a great benefit in doing so. (But that’s a blog topic for another day!)

Need an outside perspective to bring this idea forward at your business or organization? Bring in Jennifer as a speaker.

Email: [email protected]
Phone: 613-312-7824