Do You Have an Extended Marketing Department?

Tom Johansmeyer is the group marketing director at The Cross Border Group, which publishes IR magazine and Corporate Secretary. He has written about social media for SocialTimes, Business Insider and The Huffington Post.

Should anyone else be marketing for your company?

As a marketing pro, it’s clearly your job to take the reins in increasing visibility, managing your brand and generating sales opportunities. You may get a bit of help from your sales team and product managers, but marketing is marketing – and that’s your job.

Well, sometimes it’s nice to have a little extra help.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen several opportunities like this missed. Corporate marketing professionals have resources outside their company that can be useful in helping them to advance their messaging, get in front of potential clients and communicate the value they provide. The one I have in mind comes as part of a trade media play.

There are several ways you use the media, of course. You may buy a series of ads, sponsor some events or make a PR push. When it works, your brand and specific messaging are put in front of the people most important to your company. At that point, you’re hoping that what you’ve said will drive them into your sales cycle and ultimately lead to a relationship with your business.

When you do this, you leave a lot to chance. That’s why you spend so much time and effort (and money) making sure your brand is visible to your target market as often as possible. If you could increase the targeted visibility of your media initiative, you effectively get additional impact without incremental cost. To do this, all you really need to do is talk … to your media outlet’s marketing department.

Guys like me tend to be overlooked. PR pros spend their time with the editors, and media buyers are usually involved with our sales team. Like the marketing departments we service, my job is to help move my company, The Cross Border Group (and our two publications, IR magazine and Corporate Secretary), forward in the market. A little known fact is that my needs often overlap with those of the PR departments and buyers who work with other areas in my company – and I assume I’m not the only media company marketer who’s noticed this.

It’s obvious that my company benefits when our clients benefit – that’s just the nature of the client service business. What tends to be missed, however, is that your media partners can (and may want to) take a more active role in helping you generate more value from your investments.

Lately, I’ve been calling this the “extended marketing department,” but I’m not particularly tied to the label. The concept, on the other hand, is pretty important to me.

Here’s how it works:

• Take an existing sponsorship, advertising or PR program you have in the works or about to launch
• As part of your discussion with your media partner, ask to talk to the marketing department
• Together, discuss ways you can co-promote each other – examples include content promotion, social media collaboration and tactics for making your program reach further into your target market

Three bullet points: it isn’t all that complex. Maybe the simplicity is the reason nobody is doing it. I routinely take calls and spend time with our advertisers and sponsors to help them get more value out of how they work with us, and the result also bolsters the reputation, visibility and reach of The Cross Border Group. I know we’ve all grown weary of the expression “win-win,” but this is truly a case of it.

So, your action item for your next media buy or event sponsorship is to ask to talk to the media outlet’s marketing department. I’d be a bit shocked if the answer is “no,” and if it is, you haven’t lost anything. The upside is worth risking the two-letter response, though, as it may deliver greater impact with no incremental investment.