Marketing With Purpose Kit: Aligning Marketing With Business Growth

**SPEAKER_1** (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** (0:16)
Welcome back to the Marketing With Purpose 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. Let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Nelson Montini, Brand Manager at Top Rail Fence. Nelson is a franchise marketing leader with a proven track record of turning marketing into a true growth engine for franchise owners. At Top Rail Fence, he leads marketing strategy for a 200-plus territory franchise network, where he has built systems that align marketing strategy with business outcomes by bridging the gap between marketing and operations. His approach has helped drive rapid network growth, increased local marketing investment from under 5% to nearly 29% of revenue, while growing total marketing investment by nearly 600%. With additional franchise marketing experience at Premium Service Brands and Tropical Smoothie Cafe, Nelson brings deep expertise in scaling brands through data-driven strategy and operational alignment. We're going to explore aligning marketing with business growth. I'm excited to dive in to see how marketing leaders can create systems that deliver measurable results for both franchisees and the business as a whole.
It's good to have you, Nelson.
Before we dive in, I'd love to hear, why was aligning marketing with business growth the topic you chose to explore with us today? Why is that so important today, you think?

**Nelson Montini** (2:09)
Yeah, that's a great question. If you go into most organizations today, there's always a friction or almost always a friction that you can feel. That friction is marketing versus operations or it's marketing versus finance. That's really not fun to work through. It makes growing the business pretty difficult. When you look at what the best marketing leaders out there can do, they're able to change one word in that statement. They're able to make the dynamic across the company, instead of marketing versus marketing with operations, marketing with finance, and really creating that cross-functional alignment that creates the growth that the business is looking for.
With Top Rail Fence, with a lot of the other brands, we've had the opportunity to work with. That has been a huge part of what's driven success, is being able to really create that marketing with dynamic across the organization.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:04)
Now, let's face it. Marketing leaders, CMOs, heads of marketing, they're often pulled between near-term campaigns, results, and long-term brand building. That's always this dance that needs to be balanced. Now, how do you ensure that your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals?
Where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen? You mentioned some of it. Some of it is mindset. What else?

**Nelson Montini** (3:32)
Yeah. I want to ask you a good question here. Imagine you're the marketing leader in the company, and you have your marketing scorecard, and you're a little bit off track, so there's a big red box staring you in the face on your computer screen.
What would you do in that scenario?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:51)
Well, the big question is, why is it there, and was the measurement right to begin with?
I think the biggest challenge for marketing leaders is setting the right expectation and not just accept the push.
Leadership will say, but this is what we need to achieve. Great, we can achieve that, but first we need to establish a baseline.
In any business, whether you're a technology company or anything else, before you set out goals or metrics, you establish a baseline. With some of the marketing, the expectation is that you get to the goal before you've been having a baseline. That's a mindset problem. If the thing is red, my big question is, why was the intended outcome assumption correct to begin with? Then that's a most basic diagnostic first. Was a baseline ever established? How long did that baseline take to establish? There's so many other factors. Once you have that in place and you got a formula, if you're missing the mark, then there's other questions that come up in the industry, the change in the direction of the consumer or the buyer. There's so many different factors to consider. That's why you have to constantly optimize. But in most cases, it's usually, in most cases that I've seen, it's usually a misalignment in expectations.