How to leverage marketing stakeholders for growth

Whilst we are advocates of an outside-in, customer-first approach to marketing and growth, focusing solely on customers can be detrimental to your team's success. Your success depends, at least in part, on your ability to effectively engage relevant stakeholders across your company.

At Growth Method we believe there are 3 main reasons to spend time building relationships with marketing stakeholders:

1. Aligning growth goals

2. Gaining support & resources

3. Leveraging expertise & insights

In early-stage companies one of the primary benefits of effective stakeholder engagement is for marketing & growth to gain the trust of colleagues and stakeholders whilst the marketing machine is being built (compound interest is great, but it doesn't happen quickly). For later-stage companies it may be to recruit employees who can play an active role in content creation by sharing their unique perspectives, expertise and insights.

Who are marketing stakeholders?

Traditionally stakeholder management has been solely focused on "managing up" to business executives involved in the decision-making and activities of the business. Exec and leadership teams are in the business of getting the best results with the least amount of resources.

However, marketing stakeholders expand well-beyond purely senior stakeholders, as outlined below.

• Your team: The single most important stakeholders

• Leadership: Align marketing goals with leadership expectations. Demonstrate how marketing & growth drives business outcomes.

• Sales: Provide continual customer insight and feedback on Leads/MQLs & leverage insights in content creation.

• Product / Engineering: Leverage expertise in content creation

• Customer Service / Support: Leverage insights in content creation

• IT: Support your ideal MarTech stack and wider marketing operations.

• Other teams: e.g. Finance to communicate goal of marketing as a revenue generating function

• Customers & prospects: The primary and often sole audience for marketing and growth teams.

• Suppliers: e.g. contractors, agencies and freelancers

• Investors: e.g. shareholders and investors

• Partners: e.g. channel partners

The stakeholder map

Traditionally a stakeholder map has been used by marketing teams to identify, categorise, and prioritise stakeholders based on factors such as their impact, relationship, influence and interest.

Mendelow’s Matrix suggests analysing stakeholder groups based on Interest and Influence as below.

Prioritising your stakeholders on a map helps focus your communication plan on those people and teams who most significantly affect your ability to achieve your goals.

Increase your influence with marketing stakeholders

Lenny's Rachitsky's post on getting better at influence outlines 7 ways to improve your influence skills (from studying Frodo’s journey in Lord of the Rings):

1. Make their goals your goals

2. Charge your trust battery

3. Help them see what you see

4. Show success

5. Bring evidence

6. Leverage authority

7. Be likeble

To achieve this, teams rely on a range of stakeholder communication methods including:

1. Sending a weekly newsletter to internal teams

2. Posting on the company Wiki, Intranet or Slack channel

3. Building your personal brand via a blog, conference speaking or LinkedIn

4. IRL meetings over a coffee or beer

But, producing content like newsletters, intranet updates, or even internal social media posts that don't align with broader marketing goals takes significant time away from actual marketing and growth work.

Automating stakeholder communication

We believe the best way to influence stakeholders is by sharing your marketing & growth strategy, alongside weekly experiment insights and results with the wider organisation.

In Growth Method the Weekly Growth Update is sent automatically every Monday and includes:

• Your current growth goal

• Summaries and links to completed and live experiments

• Insights into which high priority items will be worked on next

By default anyone with an @yourcompany.com domain can subscribe to receive these weekly updates, and other emails can be added manually. All live and completed work is summarised automatically using the latest OpenAI GPT-4o model. Should individuals want further information, secure sharing links allow even non-users to drill-in and see all of the detail - the hypothesis, quantitative results, qualitative results, insights and learnings.

A side benefit from building engaging marketing and growth stakeholders in this way is that, as their work becomes more public, people on the marketing and growth team become increasingly precise in their execution and in the documentation of their work.

Early stage marketing & growth teams

And during the early days of building out a program, the results aren’t usually champagne worthy. It’s often a slog until you get the machine running. You need to hit “escape velocity.” Especially true with SEO. One thing to do is prioritize red meat and low hanging fruit so you can quickly tie back wins and satisfy stakeholders. Another thing you can do is celebrate all wins, small as they may be, and give lavish praise and credit to whomever collaborated with you, greenlit the project, or did the work to make it happen.

When, two weeks after putting us at position #1, our conversion rate increased by like 10X, I didn’t take credit. I publicly posted in the content slack channel giving full credit to the content marketer who gave me permission to update the post, along with data and the business impact of the additional freemium users.

Now I’ve got an ally.

I do the same thing with clients now, especially in the early days of the program. SEO results taking a while to show? Well, we’re building links and, wow, we’ve already landed X placements and increased DR by +5. And wow! This business critical keyword moved from page 3 to page 2.

This sounds so stupid, but being the cheerleader and pointing out all of these small “wins” drives momentum and motivation, which is hard to sustain in long term projects with multiple stakeholders, but absolutely critical for their success.

So I’ll be the cheerleader, giving public credit and praise, doing the work to tie-back the data and impact, and leveraging that to drive more and more ambitious programs. No one wants to brag for themselves, so do it for them.

Final thoughts

Marketing and growth marketing is an increasingly cross-functional role, requiring the support and trust of IT, web teams, performance marketing, content, product management, product marketing and more.

Start small, and share the small wins early on, remembering that it is these small wins that drive momentum and motivation. If SEO is a core acquisition channel (for example) you may want to share new link placements initially, then keyword rankings improvements, then traffic improvements, and finally conversions - you need to take your stakeholders on this journey with you.

Finally we would suggest building marketing partners, rather than marketing stakeholders. It's not about "stakeholder management" but rather building partnerships that can lead to relationships and exchanges of value in the future.

For further reading we suggest 3 Vital Techniques to Work Better with Stakeholders by Itamar Gilad.