Marketing With Purpose Kit: Aligning Marketing with Business Growth

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:17)
Welcome back to Marketing With Purpose, a segment of the Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Tullio, and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. So let's get started. Today I'm joined by Becky Beyer, Vice President of Marketing for Pillar To Post. Becky brings a wealth of experience from franchising industries, including real estate, for her role at Pillar To Post. She started her career in marketing and communication at Greyhound Bus Lines before moving into real estate franchising with Anywhere Real Estate, which is now Compass.
She worked directly with brokers and agents to build local marketing plans. During her time at Anywhere, she worked across brands including Century21, ERA and Better Homes & Gardens, and let teams working on franchise sales enablement tools, recruiting digital strategy and industry events.
We're going to explore aligning marketing with business growth. I'm very excited to dive into this, Becky. Thanks for being with me today.

**Becky Beyer** (1:43)
Thank you so much, Tullio. I'm so happy to be here.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:46)
Now, before we go ahead and dive into this, I'd love to hear why was aligning marketing with business growth the topic you chose to explore with us today, and why is this important right now?

**Becky Beyer** (1:57)
I think it's very important right now. A lot of times you will hear, even in a company, if sales are down or things need to be cut, the first thing to go is marketing. That is the wrong approach. Because marketing is what drives not only awareness, but it drives your revenue growth.
It's very important for everybody in a senior leadership team and executive team to understand the power of marketing. It's not a nice to have, it's imperative to have. If you look at companies who cut back on that, they will see that usually their sales have gone down. If they cut back on marketing, and then it's the first thing they bring back. So it's this really bad cycle sometimes of, oh, we don't need this, we're going to put our focus somewhere else.
Then they see the negative effects of it, and it's brought back. But that continuous marketing is so very important, and that's why I thought, let's talk about that today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:01)
I love it. That's been a contention for a long time.
Where marketing is treated as an expense, instead of looked at it as just a strategic investment. Now, I actually authored two white papers that we're going to make available shortly on Zero Company website that speak to the importance of having a baseline, and the lag effect of what happens when you play with these bursts up and down. It's interesting to see the impact it has on franchising and also in wealth management space. Those are the two areas we focused on. And oddly enough, sometimes the impact doesn't happen till a year later. And so you cut the expense, you're like, see, we're doing fine, right? And then you hire someone back in, and it's like, well, nothing's happening. And it's like, well, because of what you did the year before. All right, so let's-

**Becky Beyer** (3:54)
We didn't even plan that, Tullio. We didn't even plan that.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:57)
No, and that's why the correlation isn't always there. And it's important to understand that there is a science behind marketing. And people don't see it often as a science, and that's a problem.
But the reality is, CMOs are often pulled between near-term campaign results and long-term brand building. It's this dance, right? Now, how do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with company growth goals? And where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen?

**Becky Beyer** (4:26)
I think the biggest friction point, especially when you're talking about franchising, is that we can do a lot from the brand building. You know, the 30,000-foot arena. So we're up there. We're trying to drive that brand. So to give you that cover in your local market. But what I can't do is I cannot determine and I cannot have a fixed reaction of how our franchisees interact in their markets, how they treat their customers in their markets, right? So that's the biggest drop-off point for me, is that I no longer have control at that point where the transaction is going to transact but with a franchisee and no longer the franchisor.