Good Marketing Connects the Whole Organisation

Some of the best marketing opportunities I have worked on have not begun with somebody saying, “We need a marketing campaign.” They have started with an operational issue, a commercial conversation, a customer problem or an idea that sits somewhere between several departments. That is because customers do not experience organisations through the same departmental structures that exist internally.

A customer does not care whether ticketing belongs to commercial, the website belongs to marketing, an event belongs to operations and an email belongs to communications. From their perspective, all of those things are simply part of the same organisation. If the departments do not connect behind the scenes, the customer is often the person who experiences the gaps.

I saw this repeatedly during my time at Aberystwyth Town. The new website enabled digital ticketing, but ticketing also produced customer data. That data created opportunities for email marketing. Events gave people new reasons to interact with the club, while sponsorship connected businesses to those activities. Social media and PR then helped tell the stories created by everything else. No individual part was particularly revolutionary on its own, but the connections between them made the overall marketing system much more capable.

The Black & Green Business Club is a good example. On paper, it could be viewed as a commercial initiative for sponsors and local businesses. In practice, it also created content, strengthened relationships, brought new people into Park Avenue and potentially gave businesses a deeper reason to associate themselves with the football club. One idea produced value in several parts of the organisation.

The same challenge exists at Cardiff Met Sport on a much larger scale. Sport touches student recruitment, student experience, memberships, performance sport, community activity, camps, facility hire, events, alumni, partnerships and the wider reputation of Cardiff Metropolitan University. If those areas are considered solely as separate communications jobs, significant opportunities will inevitably be missed.

This is why I increasingly think senior marketing should operate across an organisation rather than simply at the end of a production line. A marketer who understands the wider system can start asking much more useful questions. Could sporting success support recruitment? Could an event generate income while strengthening the brand? Could an operational improvement remove a customer barrier? Could one audience legitimately be introduced to another relevant part of the organisation?

Those questions require marketing to understand far more than communications. They require curiosity about the organisation itself, its commercial model, customers, data, operations and strategic priorities.

Marketing becomes considerably more valuable when it stops being the department people visit when they need a poster and starts becoming one of the functions helping the organisation work out where the opportunities are.