Give your marketer a seat at the table

At Strand, we’ve spent 13 years sitting alongside marketing managers in boardrooms, away days and the occasional crisis call at 9pm. One truth keeps coming back … the marketing manager is usually the one in the middle and the one who holds everything together.

They’re the grit in the room. The ones pulling updates from finance, sales, HR, operations and turning them into a strategy that makes sense. They’re the people translating tactical board decisions into campaigns that deliver. And yet, too often, they don’t get the seat at the table they deserve.

Why this matters

When marketing is an afterthought, businesses lose. We’ve seen it. Campaigns slowed down by internal approvals. Messaging diluted because no one invited marketing into the early conversation. Opportunities missed because the person who knows the audience best wasn’t in the room.

Your marketing lead shouldn’t just be delivering the work. They should be informing the decisions that shape it.

What we’ve seen works

From our experience, three shifts make all the difference:

1. Give marketing exposure. Let your marketing manager into board-level conversations. They’ll spot opportunities others miss and they’ll save you time by shaping messages before they need fixing.
2. Speak their language. Marketers spend their lives learning your industry acronyms. Return the favour. Whether it’s CPC, ESG or AI-driven GEO, understanding the basics lets you cut through conversations faster and keeps everyone aligned.
3. Bring them in early. Don’t brief marketing when the decision is already made. Involve them at the start. It saves budget, improves strategy and gets campaigns out the door faster.

The point

Marketing is the engine of change.

At Strand, our role is to back you, the marketer, with clarity, strategy and solutions that make the case for your seat at every table. Because when marketing leads, businesses grow.