Communications professionals will keep losing relevance in their own organizations or with clients if they can’t justify Budgets with Finacial returns. Non-financial returns are good( awareness, message reach, media pick up) but every Naira to be spent is an investment and every manager will look at the rate of return of every potential investment to make a decision to fund your budget or reject it. Most comms people struggle with justifying financial returns of their budget and will keep loosing relevance until we speak the executive language of returns on every spend. As a Kellogg Alum who took Marketing training from the school, Kellogg. I also struggled with this financial measurement of campaign results until I got to the School. The first training was Data-driven Marketing and the first word from the lecturer was “ if you can’t justify your marketing results with financial results, you are wasting money”. This was the change I needed. I will ask marketing Industry practitioners to embrace finance skills as part of needed marketing skills, this will help a great deal in making them relevant to the growth goal of their organization which mostly is financial. With these skills, we will be relevant at the strategy level( when a key decision of the organization is being made at the board level) not at the tactical level( where you just have to execute what has been planned out by the board), but you can’t climb up that ladder without the requisite Finance skills to complement the marketing and comms skill.
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