Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. Stephanie is the Vice President of Marketing at Silverchair.

Marketing: elusive, omnipresent, oft-misunderstood. Most people know we need marketing, but beyond the hallowed halls of Hubspot, understanding can be limited as to the breadth, depth, and nuance of what the blanket role of “marketing” really entails. Over the years, I’ve found it’s one of those things that many outside of marketing suspect they could probably do (my graphic designer friends can likely relate).

In many organizations, marketing has been hyper-compartmentalized into very specific areas (e.g. paid media or SEO), while elsewhere the marketing generalist wears about 100 hats as designer, writer, brand specialist, public relations, internal comms, and more. Still, there are some overall marketing principles that tend to ring true across responsibilities.

I’ve consulted with some industry pros to compile a marketing manifesto of sorts, as a way to help our non-marketing colleagues see behind the curtain and understand how to best leverage these critical team members.

1) Collaboration is Essential for Success

Marketing works best when it’s a team sport. This theme surfaced across all the insights gathered from marketers and underlines each other lesson to follow. Sure, marketing’s role is to promote the organization and its offerings (whether that’s a mission, a product, or a publication), but to do that well, we rely on other departments to share context, bring marketers into conversations early, provide subject matter expertise, and understand that everyone’s goals are interconnected.

Besides that, I’ve found that a good chunk of the work I do is internal marketing – helping to make sure that the goals, plans, and strategies that we’re communicating to the market are likewise understood by all teams within the company and giving them the relevant resources to ensure we’re all singing from the same songbook (which we’ve usually also written the music for, designed, printed, bound, and distributed).

Here’s what my compatriots had to say:

Laura Simis (Director of Marketing, Hum): “We rely heavily on support from other departments to bring us into the right conversations, keep us in the loop, take photos at events, share wins, and engage with the things we’re posting online.”

Amanda Rogers (Communications & Engagement Manager, BioOne): “Success takes collaboration. You are the expert in your position; we are experts in communicating. When we work together to craft messaging and campaigns, we’re much more likely to be successful. Sharing context and information, including the details of the ‘big picture,’ not just the immediate task, helps us create messaging that resonates with our audiences. Your insights help refine our efforts, and our work supports yours. We will both be successful when we have a strong, collaborative working relationship.”

Nicola Poser (Director of Marketing & Sales, American Mathematical Society): “For editorial teams: We want to share your authors’ excitement about their work and widen its reach. Help us get them excited to work with us. Encourage them to share our marketing messages, whether on social, to forward emails to their colleagues, etc.”

Lou Peck (CEO, The International Bunch): “Support more cross-functional collaboration and bring marketing experts in earlier to a process. For example, in past roles I have been responsible for working with sales on pricing, working closely with product on building out the narrative of the product business case, and creating innovative, time-limited working groups for specific projects to move them along quicker.”

2) Even collaboration needs boundaries

This is the other side of the coin for item #1. Marketing is one of those things that everyone has opinions on. I’d never tell a developer how to do their job, but I have never experienced a shortage of marketing hot takes from non-marketers. And we don’t want this to stop — ideas are great no matter where they come from. But…

Rory Williams (Director of Communications & Marketing, Rockefeller University Press): “Since our marketing work involves a lot of collaboration with other teams, it’s easy for responsibilities to get a bit blurry. That’s why it helps to keep the lines of communication open, check in on everyone’s bandwidth, and sort things out together up front.”

Jessica Lawrence Hurt: “It takes time for marketing strategies to play out, and while we always love hearing feedback from our customers and prospects (really! keep it coming!), it doesn’t mean the concern of one account or stakeholder will or should change the overall strategy and messaging.”

Michael Casp (Director of Business Development, Atypon): “One sentiment I’ve heard often from other marketers is that it can seem like everybody in the company has a strong opinion on the marketing (copy, creative, process, strategy, execution, etc.) and feels it’s important to let us know all about it. Being bombarded with these opinions constantly can make it difficult to manage, especially since sometimes the opinions are diametrically opposed, or would take more resources than we have, or are ideas we’ve already tried/considered, or are just bad ideas. While this feedback can be helpful, an orderly process for sharing feedback is appreciated, and ultimately, the final strategy / approach is up to the marketing team.”

Which leads us to:

3) Marketing is Strategic, Not Just Tactical

Marketing isn’t just making a flyer, and it isn’t just vibes (though we do love vibes as a byproduct). We’re experts in strategic positioning, design, and communication. Rather than just executing requests as order takers, marketing professionals want to be involved early in initiatives to help shape messaging, spot opportunities, and provide strategic guidance to make other departments’ work more impactful.

Our specialized skills in copywriting, design, strategy, and audience engagement can help to communicate and broaden the impact of the work of the rest of the organization – but not if you tell them about a launch the day before and tell them to go tweet about it, or if you demand a flyer simply because that’s what you’ve always done.

Instead, we want to work with you to determine the audience for a new product, identify the painpoint it’s solving, articulate what differentiates it from comparable offerings. We want to understand the problem you’re trying to address with a physical piece of collateral so that we can be creative about the best way to meet that need (which, spoiler, isn’t usually a flyer).

Lou Peck: “Marketing isn’t just about creating a flyer or sending out an email, as Development isn’t just about fixing a bug or doing a quick update, or Editorial isn’t just about commissioning an article or speaking with an Editor in Chief. Marketing is about systematically improving how we connect with and support our communities, and we are experts in our fields.”

Jessica Lawrence Hurt (Director of Marketing, GeoScienceWorld): “Effective marketing campaigns are more than just ‘sending an email,’ and take time and thought to produce. We generally develop multiple messaging options, attractive calls to action, well-designed visuals, and of course the target list.”

Amanda Rogers: “Marketing isn’t just here to send newsletters or post on social. We’re a strategic resource. Have a new initiative? A product idea? A relationship you want to strengthen? Loop us in early. We can help you shape messaging so it resonates with the right audience, spot opportunities to amplify your work, avoid common pitfalls that hurt engagement, make your presentation, proposal, or pitch ‘pop’ (in a good, on-brand way). We’re here to make you look good — and help your work go further.”

4) Every Interaction is Marketing

Whether it’s a support ticket, presentation slide, or casual email, every touchpoint shapes how people perceive your organization. Marketing isn’t confined to the marketing department — everyone contributes to the brand experience (see item #1). This is why we rely on other teams to bring us in to consult on various aspects of projects, whether that’s helping draft an auto-reply template, improving design of a roadmap visualization, or framing the positioning for a new offering.

And it’s not just organizational work: it’s the team members themselves. The personal brands of your leadership team and beyond are a significant way that others experience your organization. Posts by individuals typically receive 3x as many impressions and engagements as those from company pages, so when we ask you to share our latest announcement, it’s not about whether social media is your “thing” or not – it’s a key part of your role as a representative of the brand.

Amanda Rogers: “You might not think you’re doing marketing work — but you are. Marketing isn’t just a banner ad, a press release, or an email campaign. It’s every single interaction someone has with your organization. Every email you send, every slide you present, every support ticket you answer — those are all touchpoints that shape how people feel about your organization or brand. And everyone in the organization contributes to it, whether they have ‘marketing’ in their title or not.”

Marianne Calilhanna (VP, Marketing, DCL): “To lead you must be present! That’s my motto and I mean that on a number of levels. Be present in meetings, turn on your cameras, ask questions, make comments, and smile.”

Nicola Poser: “For many organizations, the customer service and support teams are the front line for marketing and the embodiment of our brand through their daily interaction with customers. They rely on their colleagues in other departments to help them provide timely responses; please help them by treating requests that come from customers with some urgency, or provide a realistic timeline for a response that they can share. Providing good customer service is everyone’s job.”

5) Content Creation is a Shared Responsibility

Even in the age of AI, content is still queen. When the marketing team is the only one contributing to your thought leadership, it can quickly become one-note. A healthy content pipeline benefits from a variety of perspectives and expertise. Ongoing input around customer stories, project wins, common questions, and industry insights help deliver value to and connect with our audiences.

Amanda Rogers: “We need your help to ‘feed the content monster.’ Content is the fuel that keeps our marketing engine running — but we can’t generate it all on our own. To stay relevant, visible, and valuable to our audiences, we need a steady stream of insights, stories, updates, and expertise. You’ve got access to great content without even realizing it! A customer success story? That’s a case study waiting to happen. An internal project win? That could inspire a behind-the-scenes blog or social post. A common question you keep hearing? Sounds like a perfect FAQ or explainer video. We’re great at polishing, packaging, and promoting — but we rely on you to surface the raw materials.”

Laura Simis: “The brilliant analogies you use to explain complex concepts over lunch? They’re marketing copy waiting to happen. Please don’t keep them to yourself! And even though we’re communicating with folks in academia, I promise: that piece of content or email you drafted would benefit greatly from not sounding like a research paper.”

Involvement in the wider industry can also support not only content but also context:

Marianne Calilhanna: “Something I’ve learned over the years that changed how I think about things and approach work in my marketing position is to get involved with my industry as a volunteer. I often urge colleagues to volunteer in an area outside of their day-to-day roles. It offers a clearer view of how your work connects to the broader ecosystem—helping you understand your company’s role in the bigger picture and sparking ideas for how you can make a greater impact from within.”

6) Marketing Needs Time and Resources to Be Effective

Strategies require time to develop and show results. Marketing teams need adequate budgets, tools, and dedicated time for innovation and experimentation, not just executing the same tactics repeatedly. Clean contact lists, updated sales information, and shared customer feedback are essential for success, and gathering those resources take time and money.

Leveraging AI tools has allowed for added efficiency in certain areas of marketing, but even those tools cost money and take time to configure to specific needs. Marketing teams need budget, staffing, and access to good information (product details, data, contacts, etc.) to thrive.

Lou Peck: “Just as product, development, and IT teams rely on continuous innovation, marketing teams need dedicated resources and support to evolve and optimize our strategies, especially in a highly digital landscape. We are experts in our fields, and I think that is often forgotten, and we can be treated as a churn machine! It’s extraordinary what some teams are working on and achieving internally, especially when given the opportunities to grow and flourish.”

Jessica Lawrence Hurt: “Data hygiene is the least sexy thing ever, I get it, but we really are only as good as our contacts. If you’re not keeping your sales contacts updated, you can’t expect campaigns to be successful. Bounce-backs ding our email deliverability rate, which can have long-term negative consequences for the organization as a whole.”

Anne Stone: “We wish we could do more. We continue to do more with less and will continue to creatively address change and challenge.”

These are our soapboxes—what are yours? Or, what do you wish your marketing colleagues knew?