With host Darrell Alfonso
What’s your relationship with finance like? If the answer is that there’s room for improvement, then it’s time to start giving finance the accountability it needs—and here’s why.
Put simply, the role of finance is to control and manage an organization’s funds, deciding which initiatives make financial sense and which don’t. In other words, finance has a magic wand to assign funds to different departments in a company. From a marketing perspective, that can be anything from paid media to new hires. The big deal, however, is that whatever these initiatives might be, they all require funds. And the bottom line is that marketing needs investment to achieve its objectives and drive the company forward.
Therefore, it’s essential that finance understands the strategic nature of what marketing is aiming to do. Most of these initiatives cost a lot, so for this reason, marketing manages a big chunk of funds for most organizations.
Giving Finance the Numbers
Finance needs to see the numbers behind everything. They need to know why you’re requesting funds, what you plan on doing with them and the ROI. In other words, you need to be fully accountable for every penny that you’ve spent, and you need to show how this is going to benefit your organization.
Now, the problem from a marketing perspective is that presenting this information can be difficult. And as a result, it becomes cumbersome for finance to keep track of what is going on, because in many cases, they’re not given the full picture.
Part of this can be attributed to the many different metrics used by marketing—which aren’t easily quantifiable and often come off as qualitative results. Take, for example, customer feedback or branding, whose monetary impact on an organization can be very hard to measure.
If you’re unable to demonstrate to finance that marketing is accountable, they’re not going to give you the money to execute your marketing plan. So, how do you turn this around? The answer is to bridge the gap between the two departments. And the best way of doing this is through a clear marketing plan that will return value to the company, giving finance the ROI they’re looking for.
Bridging the Gap
Whatever your marketing goals are, you need the funds from finance to turn them into actions. The problem is that when you have different information floating around, finance is unable to make informed decisions—again, simply because they’re not getting the full picture.
In turn, this causes your marketing plan to suffer, and it has a big impact on the outcome of your marketing goals and the general growth of your organization. That’s why it’s essential to align your marketing plan with finance so that you can work together on key issues and avoid any last-minute conflict. By having regular communication with marketing, finance will see how budgets are being used, creating a greater understanding between the two departments.
Having accountability in your marketing plan leads to closer alignment. And that means finance will have a much better understanding of what will happen to the funds allocated in the plan. Moreover, when you and finance are on the same page, it becomes much easier to reach your objectives and drive the company forward.
Are you ready to try this out for yourself? Uptempo gives you the platform to integrate finance with your marketing plan so that you can become fully aligned. Book a demo and see the changes to your marketing budget.