If you treat marketing as a support function, don’t be surprised when that’s all it becomes

What does your business expect from marketing?

Keep LinkedIn active. Produce the newsletter. Update the website. Create a brochure. Prepare an exhibition stand. Give sales something to send to prospects.

All useful. All necessary.

But there is a fundamental difference between using marketing to produce marketing materials and expecting marketing to contribute to business growth.

Recent Forrester research highlights just how wide that gap can be. Nearly half of the B2B marketing leaders surveyed said their companies primarily view marketing as a support or promotion function, while almost all believe it should operate as a strategic partner or growth driver.

For freight forwarders, that’s a distinction worth considering.

Because the role you give marketing largely determines the marketing you get.

The brief shapes the function

If most requests to marketing start with “Can you produce…”, you’ve already defined its role.

Can you produce a brochure?
Can you produce some posts?
Can you produce an email campaign?
Can you produce something for this exhibition?

Marketing becomes an internal service desk, responding to requests from around the business.

That can create plenty of activity. It can also create perfectly good marketing.

But it leaves an important question unanswered:

Who is thinking about how marketing can help achieve the company’s commercial objectives?

A business cannot expect marketing to become a growth driver if it is briefed, resourced and measured primarily as a production function.

The problem isn’t the activity

This isn’t an argument against brochures, emails, social media, exhibitions or any of the other things marketing teams produce.

The issue is what comes first.

A tactical marketing function receives a decision and communicates it.

A strategic marketing function has an opportunity to contribute before the decision is made.

That might mean challenging whether a proposed campaign is targeting the right audience, identifying where the business has a credible opportunity to differentiate itself, bringing customer evidence into a discussion or questioning whether marketing investment is being directed towards the company’s real growth priorities.

The distinction isn’t doing marketing versus doing strategy.

It’s whether marketing is simply executing somebody else’s strategy or contributing to it.

Expectations are set at the top

Forrester’s argument is particularly interesting because it puts some of the responsibility back on business leadership.

If management sees marketing principally as promotion, marketing is likely to be briefed accordingly.

Its budget will reflect that role.
Its access to commercial information will reflect it.
The point at which it becomes involved in decisions will reflect it.
And, critically, the way its performance is judged will reflect it.

Ask a marketing function to generate activity and you’ll get activity.

Give it responsibility for contributing to commercial outcomes and the conversation has to change.

Marketing needs access to the information, people and decisions that allow it to make that contribution.

Involvement needs to come earlier

One of the simplest tests is when marketing enters the conversation.

If a new vertical, service or growth initiative has already been agreed and marketing’s first involvement is creating the campaign, its strategic contribution is necessarily limited.

The important decisions have already been made.

That doesn’t mean marketing should dictate commercial strategy. It means its perspective should be available while that strategy is being formed.

Marketing sits at an interesting intersection between the business, its customers, its competitors and the wider market.

Used properly, that perspective can inform decisions rather than simply communicate them afterwards.

Don’t confuse strategic marketing with more marketing

This is an important distinction.

Giving marketing a bigger role doesn’t necessarily mean spending more, producing more content or running more campaigns.

It can mean doing less, with greater purpose.

We’ve explored that from several angles recently: focusing resources on the markets where you have a genuine opportunity in Find Your Niche and Build From It, resisting the temptation to Market Everything to Everyone, and putting expertise into the channels where target customers are already looking in Go Where Your Customers Already Are.

Those are different subjects, but they share an important principle.

Marketing choices should follow commercial priorities.

Without that connection, even very good marketing can become a collection of disconnected activities.

Support sales – but don’t reduce marketing to sales support

The same distinction applies to the relationship with sales.

Marketing absolutely should help sales succeed.

But there’s a difference between supporting sales and existing solely to service requests from sales.

Forrester argues that when marketing’s role is too constrained, sales can end up taking greater responsibility for activities associated with creating demand.

That isn’t an efficient division of labour.

We looked at the relationship in more detail in Sales and Marketing: Better Together. The important point here is simply that both functions should contribute to growth from different directions.

Marketing creates conditions that make selling easier. Sales turns those opportunities into commercial relationships.

Neither should be subordinate to the other.

Change the question

Perhaps the most useful starting point isn’t a new marketing plan.

It’s a different conversation with management.

Instead of:

What do we want marketing to produce this quarter?

Ask:

What do we want marketing to help the business achieve this quarter?

The answers might involve entering a market, strengthening a position in a sector, supporting retention, increasing share of wallet, improving the quality of opportunities or building recognition around a particular capability.

Only then do you decide which campaigns, content, events, PR or other activity will help achieve it.

That reverses a surprisingly common approach: choosing the marketing activity first and looking for a commercial justification afterwards.

What do you expect from marketing?

Forrester found an association between companies treating marketing as a strategic partner or growth driver and stronger performance against revenue goals. It doesn’t prove that one causes the other, but it does reinforce the importance of the question.

Freight forwarders operate in a market where differentiation is difficult, margins matter and growth requires increasingly deliberate choices.

Marketing can’t make those choices for the business.

But it can help inform them, support them and turn them into something customers understand and value.

For that to happen, marketing has to be given the opportunity to contribute before somebody asks for a brochure.

You get the marketing you expect.

Perhaps the more important question is whether you’re expecting enough from it.