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.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome 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 Stephen Sakach, and in each episode, our team sits down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and their strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience, and together we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform brands to connect with people. So let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Chris McGee, Vice President of Marketing at Batteries Plus, which I'm sure you're fully aware of, is probably one nearby you right now.
Chris is a data-driven marketing executive with more than 20 years of experience building strategic full funnel marketing campaigns that drive measurable business results and her expertise spans from paid and owned media across TV, radio, paid search, paid social, programmatic, CTV, e-commerce, affiliate marketing, and email and SMS strategy. I think she's doing all of those now for the most part. Throughout her career, she has managed marketing budgets ranging from 25 million to more than 100 million while leading initiatives focused on revenue growth, customer acquisition, and brand development, and she's been on the agency side and has experience also with Bank of America. Her agency work covered brands like PayPal, and Disney, and AT&T, and so she brings a unique ability to align analytics, creative media, and consumer insights into high performing growth strategies, and we're going to explore aligning marketing with business growth. I'm excited to dive into how data collaboration and full funnel strategy can turn marketing into a business driver. Chris, welcome to the show.

**Chris McGee** (2:13)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:16)
Before we dive in a little bit, I'd love to hear why was aligning marketing with business growth kind of the topic that you wanted to explore with us today, and what makes it maybe so important right now.

**Chris McGee** (2:28)
Yeah. This topic really resonated with me because I feel like it's a pain point that I've encountered throughout my career. It doesn't matter at the agency, at a huge finance company like Bank of America, or at Batteries Plus.
Throughout that career, I have seen companies overindex on lower funnel metrics, demanding immediate results that can lead to evaluating specific channels or even a channel like e-commerce, not even a marketing channel in a complete vacuum. When you have a marketing team that is really focused on just a click, a conversion rate, all of those immediate actions, and they don't really take the time to understand the larger business realities like macroeconomics or even your own inventory levels, pricing changes that you've made versus your competition, or even different customer reviews. You don't really understand the full picture and you can't make the right decisions based on that very small data point that you have, like a conversion rate or even return on ad spend. As to why it's so critical right now, I feel like just with the environment that we're in, that margin of error is disappearing. Media is more expensive. It is more complicated. It's no longer, you can put a dollar in and get $10 out. That doesn't really exist anymore. We have to be smarter about how we plan, execute, optimize our marketing.
If we're saying, let's just dump all the money into bottom of the funnel, like let's dump it all into Google search or shopping, but you're not paying it into some of those other levers, like inventory or pricing, you're going to end up running something that doesn't work. It's going to be inefficient. You're also ultimately, you could be providing a subpar experience. If you're marketing something that you have very limited inventory in, because you're not talking to the right merchandisers, then you could pay to drive a poor experience. I'm not going to, of course, have long lasting impacts on your business. You fool me once, you don't want to come back and purchase from me again. You really have to ensure that marketing is completely connected from operations and merchandising in order to be successful.

**Stephen Sakach** (5:02)
I know we talk about that a lot and people, I think, sometimes think that marketing is just doing their job, but really there's this massive connection. And like you mentioned, if someone has a disconnect with the experience of going in with the brand, there's 17 consumption experiences, emotions, and half of those are negative. And that's where you can get burned in all that marketing work that you've done right then. Suddenly you've got this disconnect and you're just like, great, thanks, guys. You know, just got the rug pulled underneath you. You're perfect on that. You know, you've got someone through this funnel ideally. And then once it gets to that exact experience, you know, things go sideways. This is not good. So thinking about like at your role, CMOs are often kind of pulled between those, those near term campaign results, you know, and long term brand building. How do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with your company's growth goals?