Q&A: Building belief in your own brand

Bringing marketing from the back office to the top table is a tough but vital endeavour, says Ludivine Evra, global head of marketing, Mercer Investments…

Financial Promoter: How can marketers begin to get buy-in from key stakeholders?

Ludivine Evra: There’s one thing I encourage marketers to remember when they’re in front of senior leaders in the business: you know more about marketing than they do. The marketing community tends to be humble, as it has been long seen as a support function and not a profit centre, and we can tend to believe  that what we do is mainly common sense. I have developed my own beliefs and convictions throughout my career, I stand by them and build my programme around them – and I often go back to them and repeat in front of different audiences. If you have your own point of views, your audiences  will listen to you, but you’ve got to know what these beliefs, what these strategies are first. Getting buy-in is best achieved through ongoing education – use your knowledge to educate via your beliefs.

FP: How do you ensure marketing is constantly innovating?

LE: I always encourage my team to trial, to test and make mistakes sometimes. To venture new ideas. We launched our corporate podcast “Critical Thinking, Critical issues” just before podcasts became a trend and developed our own podcast channel for Mercer, for example. Innovating consistently shows stakeholders the new formats available and demonstrates new ammunition. A way to illustrate this value is through analogies – I like to say for instance that “Marketing has a shop with lots of stock”. Depending on the season, the target a line of business has, or the conundrum they want to overcome, I listen and understand their needs and challenges, then with the team we go to the back of our shop and get the right stock for them. I’m a big believer in having your own “stories” that are relatable to create your personal brand within the firm and elevate the team’s reputation.

FP: How important is stakeholder buy-in to aid marketing activity?

LE: It’s all down to the demonstrable ROI via the data – a question of survival and justifying your value in marketing. I spend a lot of time socialising our global marketing programme within the organisation, with our marketing teams in the regions, listening and understanding their business needs and adapt our programme to constantly evolve. Convincing key stakeholders to get onboard doesn’t just make your life easier as a marketer – without their subscription to your programme, what’s the point in what you’re doing? If your sales team or marketing clients are not engaged or if you don’t answer their needs, you’re lacking the bigger picture. You need to help them achieve their unique objectives by providing the right content, in the right format, for the right buyer; buy-in only comes if these criteria are met.

FP: How can marketers translate their departmental goals to business goals?

LE: The foundation of success is to attach marketing to the commercial strategy and business growth. One of the content pieces we recently created aimed to do just that – we developed a new piece of bespoke IP  called the “Large Asset Owner Barometer” to stand out in front of this key buyer segment for our business strategy. The campaign has proved  to be one of the best conversation starters that sales has had within this space. Just using the word “barometer” indicated proprietary and forward-looking data collection, and equipped sales with content that their clients related to do as interested in hearing about their peers’ activity. It’s the power of storytelling – back to having beliefs and convictions. It was our team’s view  that we lacked a unique POV, so we created internal excitement around it then took it  to market.

FP: How important is it for marketers to have a voice within a business?

LE: It is essential. You should ideally be seen friendly, of course, as well as assertive and bring energy. If I didn’t have my own marketing beliefs, I wouldn’t have been able to build my voice as much internally, which is essential in my position of global head for the investment business. Marketing is not a back-office job – quite often marketers are articulate and eloquent, we like to talk and convince, and many but not all in marketing are at ease with public speaking. It doesn’t have to be that way, but I think it helps instill confidence in business stakeholders when you lead large budgets or cross-functional projects. Marketing is a firm-wide sales role in that sense.

FP: What are your top three tips for junior marketers wanting to gain buy in?

LE: Develop your specialist knowledge. You will stand out if you are a subject-matter expert in your industry who understands the language and the needs of business stakeholders. I often say “Don’t be a conveyor belt” – there are stages in your career where you need to gain the knowledge through experience, but to progress, you need to engage your brain and question yourself if there’s more that can be added to a piece or if things could be done differently. And read. Use your time to read the content, read technical content too if it comes across your desk, be it macro or product, trends, and pay high attention to detail, always.