NextBound started with a belief it could close a common gap within most businesses – integrating brand, marketing, and corporate communications as one harmonized symphony serenading their marketplaces.
The strategic need is significant. But most companies simply do not think about the connection or continuity between the three, nor are they aware of its material effect and competitive advantages. From CEOs to CMOs, creative services to PR, demand generation to product marketing, I’ve seen this gap go unnoticed for decades, caused partly by nonchalance and partly by org designs inhibiting mutual goals and collaboration across these three fronts.
Enter NextBound. Unlike one-dimensional agencies covering only PR or digital marketing or events, we decided to take an integrated approach to address it once and for all – tops-down integrated marketing and communications together from the start, or for evolving organizations, a bottoms-up steppingstone approach starting with any of the three.
The CMO, marketing, and comms teams are logical target audiences for our services. But interesting demand opportunities are making us expand our perspective on our TAM/SAM/SOM. It’s a role opportunity that applies to all willing marketing teams, not just NextBound, so I am sharing it here.
HR, employee resource groups (ERG), and product management are engaging with us because they too must communicate with their audiences inside and outside of their walls. They want to be tied to their brand, marketing, and corporate communications. They want a programmatic, campaign approach to support the business but lack time or skill to storyboard, message, design, produce, and project to their audiences in a sustained, formalized way. They need help. They know Marketing excels at these tasks.
But here’s the common outcome: “Our Marketing team has the skills to help, but they are too busy or stretched.”
For marketing teams at large, there is a broader opportunity to support a business materially and culturally. While B2B Marketing’s evolving role focuses on accepting more responsibility historically held by sales and revenue operations, the profession’s partnership with HR and enterprise functions at large – in corporate communications’ speak, “F/XF” (functional and cross-functional branding and communications) – is never spotlighted except during negative pulse surveys, employee churn rates, and talent acquisition. By then any partnership is late.
Marketing’s role is ripe for evolution. Now. Today.
The CMO-CRO role delineation and AI’s impact are two drivers of change, but It’s time to expand the role further. Marketing is a service provider to the business. Not just to itself or Sales. It has the creative, messaging, and programmatic skillset to help HR with employer brand and employee programs. Marketing can help product management with customer-facing engagement like focus groups and on-brand materials for early field trials (EFT) and beta tests. Marketing can also help develop branding, messaging, and campaigns for the chief diversity officer’s ERGs and DEI programs. These are just three examples of how Marketing can expand its strategic value to the business.
The common excuses standing in the way? No time and budget. Not a priority.
The counter? Go to the COO and/or CFO and explain that the proper skills reside in Marketing. Ask them to augment departmental budgets to give Marketing scale for supporting internal programs as a service to the business and offload from the other departments’ cost structures to break even. Would you ask Marketing to code its own application to support its operations? No. You would hand budget and human resources to IT or DevOps to support Marketing. The same principle applies here. To support employee programs, customer-facing materials, and DEI campaigns, who best to help ideate and produce than Marketing? Give Marketing the resources to do so and remove burden from other teams. Those teams would gladly accept Marketing’s help.
If Marketing’s role expands beyond GTM, it becomes more multi-faceted and valuable to the company. At NextBound, we call this lateral enterprise approach Marketing as a service, or MaaS. It’s not a XaaS or SaaS economic model. But it is an operational model driven by a philosophy that Marketing should support Sales and the entire enterprise, not just Sales. The scaled benefits resonate with COOs, CFOs, and CEOs.
It’s up to you to decide which role Marketing plays – marketing for marketing and sales’ sake? Or strategic application across an enterprise, coupled with GTM accountability? For any marketer with ambition to influence their business while shaping their personal brands, the choice is clear.
