Today, marketing, in all its many forms, is more important to organizations than ever before. As companies acknowledge their increased reliance on a strong marketing function, tapping the right leadership becomes even more essential to ultimate success.

Marketers come in all types of expertise and in every size of experience. Likewise, companies have varying objectives, cultures, and needs. Therefore, it’s crucial that organizations looking for marketing leadership clearly define their priorities and challenges. Before your company realigns its marketing model, you may first need to align your expectations. Finding the right marketing leader depends on it.

Set the agenda

Start by recognizing the marketing issues that keep you and your management team up at night. Then determine whether these needs are mostly tactical or primarily strategic.

If your organization has a clear brand strategy but very little brand continuity or equity, you may need a marketing focus that’s heavily tactical. Or if various business units and managers are responsible and accountable for creating distinct or independent marketing plans, then your company may likely be better served by tactical marketing resources. A tactical marketing leader can direct the creation of collateral, brochures, and advertising; work to protect brand consistency and promote guidelines; coordinate market research; direct corporate communication efforts; and manage marketing employees, services, and suppliers. 

If, on the other hand, your greatest need is to develop an overall brand strategy or acquire fresh insights in creating new and innovative products, you’ll need a marketer with greater executive management skills, along with the essential proficiencies in marketing services. Strategic marketing leaders will work to ensure an integrated and consistent customer experience, as well as help to stimulate innovation. They align marketing plans with overall business strategies, and typically partner with the CEO in promoting growth. They often lead the integration of sales with R&D efforts to help build new business initiatives. In short, they bring influence and direct impact to business-building.

Whether tactical or strategic, a successful marketing leader should have strong creative talents as well as excellent analytical skills. Leaders should be equally comfortable with creating advertising campaigns as they are with targeting markets and measuring results. In addition to this right-brain/left-brain capacity, a leader with good interpersonal skills and the ability to develop supportive teams and influence others will be an asset to any corporate marketing agenda.

Factors for success

Marketing is either grossly misunderstood (creative types who draw up brochures) or vastly undervalued (everyone believes they are marketers). Therefore, once you’ve established the direction of your marketing leadership, it’s time to make some commitments to the discipline of marketing. Reaching a few key agreements will help ensure successful competencies.

Firstly, your entire management team must agree on the marketing mission and objectives. Executive members should further recognize and respect the marketing leader’s responsibilities, whatever you’ve determined them to be.

In addition to being clear on the mission, the CEO and the marketing leader should be in full agreement on expectations, responsibilities, and desired outcomes. They should also decide in advance how marketing success will be measured.

Ultimately, the support between CEO and marketing leader should be strong, unified, and complementary—the CEO should visibly support the marketing agenda, while the marketing leader must actively support the CEO’s role as brand cheerleader.

Make the connection

Finding a good marketing leader can be tough. Finding the right marketing leader for your organization can be even tougher. Be sure to identify the expertise that satisfies your business objectives and complements your company’s approach. Without this alignment, it will be almost impossible to achieve marketing success that matters.