As a marketing and communications professional, you may often be asked for your recommendations on how to approach a campaign, boost performance, or get a message across.
This is a great opportunity to support your organisation's objectives and grow your own personal reputation. Done well, these are also good examples for CVs and job interviews.
Managing stakeholders and customers in this situation is key, because it's not just that your advice has to be good, it's that you have to communicate it in the right way.
Developing Great Influencing Skills
So what can you do to encourage others to take your professional advice when it's offered?
Practice makes perfect
Sharing your expertise and bringing your stakeholders along with you is something of an art form. It gets better with experience, so look for opportunities to practise putting together your case and addressing questions or objections.
Make sure you know your stuff
Understand the context that you're working in: research your market, relevant consumer behaviour, and your competitors. You wouldn't take plumbing advice from a doctor, or medical advice from a plumber: a customer is more likely to heed advice from someone who has demonstrated a deep understanding of the organisation's challenges and opportunities.
Have a plan!
Set marketing objectives, know your audience and create an effective campaign plan so that you are confident in your own approach, and can share these documents to provide more detail for anyone interested.
Take the time to build relationships
This helps you to establish trust, which is particularly crucial in a marketing context when you are representing your organisation externally. Consistent, valuable communications and interactions over time, not just in the moment where you're being asked for advice, are what builds an effective relationship.
Make evidence-based decisions
Marketing advice can (and should) be based on data wherever possible. Use external research where you can: refer to case studies, research or sector data wherever you can to make your suggestions more compelling. Rely on your internal data sources to back up every recommendation. Tools like Google Analytics, email marketing systems, sales records etc provide concrete evidence to back your suggestions and validate your advice. This depersonalises everything: it's harder to argue with data than it is with opinion.
Timing is everything
Got a great idea for a new campaign? Don't suggest it in a crisis. Need a new tool to support email campaigns? Don't pitch is when there are redundancies elsewhere in the business. The right advice at the wrong time is often disregarded in the moment, and it's hard to bring it up again because you've unfortunately already tainted the idea with your audience. Find a calm time when you can really get the attention of your audience (internal stakeholder or client) so that you can them excited about what you're proposing.
Developing your skills
If you'd like to build your influencing skills, give more compelling marketing advice, and become to go-to person in your organisation, get in touch to discuss how mentoring could help.
I offer mentoring services to marketing and communications professionals at all stages in their careers. It's never to late to examine your practice in this area and to hone your skills.
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