Has your CEO or CFO rejected your SEO budget? Here's why you should think about your conflict in terms of communication and safety.

As marketing professionals, we frequently feel like we are at war with the financial decision-makers of our organizations.

The CEO, CFO, and CRO seem like the villains keeping us away from the funds needed to do our best work.

We ask for buy-in on exciting initiatives that, we think, will exponentially improve our work's impact, only to hear a dismissive "no." We describe the results of our campaigns, just to be questioned about the "actual ROI".

Worse yet, we might feel like Natalie Marcotullio, head of growth and operations at Navattic.

"Marketing is just often seen as a cost center since we're not directly bringing in revenue like sales or customer success," Marcotullio said.
To find out why this happens, and whether that gut feeling is actually true, I spoke to fellow marketing practitioners as well as people who have crossed over to the other side – marketers who turned into CROs and CEOs themselves.

Here are four things I learned from those conversations:

Marketers feel trapped and suffocated by the controlling and overbearing behavior from executives and finance teams.
Executives do indeed doubt whether marketing departments are actually doing useful work.
Both sides have fallen into dysfunctional and toxic communication patterns, giving up on the hope of ever finding common ground.
Despite this lack of understanding, both marketers and executives are actually pursuing the same goals.

Let's examine how poor communication affects buy-in for our work as SEOs, content professionals, or other marketing specialists. And, who knows, maybe we'll discover a way to finally break out of that self-perpetuating cycle.