It’s important to highlight that you have a plan for how you plan to spend your content marketing budget. But, it’s just as important to prove that your plan is data-driven and ROI-focused. Start by creating a baseline. What are your current monthly/quarterly metrics? How much traffic are you getting to your website? How many leads are you generating? Once you have this information, you can create goals for the upcoming quarter or year. Make sure that your goals are achievable, but also ambitious enough to warrant an increase in budget. If possible, try to find other areas of the business where you can save money so that you can put more towards content marketing.
Show them clean, hard data about what they stand to gain, and they simply won’t be able to ignore it. Often, management types respond better to facts and figures than they do to emotional appeals and slogans. Simply show them the number of customers you are going to reach with your content, and present them with the choice: Are they going to leave all of those customers behind? Present a graph of the markets you are going to penetrate, and ask them: Are they happy to ignore those valuable markets? If you have done your homework and presented it in a clear manner, they will get on board.
Whether you\'re pitching a content marketing strategy from scratch or just the next quarter\'s content, include a plan to measure the value in your pitch. If you\'ve already been measuring, this will be easy and ideally, your value has already been proven. If it\'s a new program, it lets management know that there will be accountability and changes the conversation to KPIs and contents role in the organization rather than whether or not to invest more time and money.
The best way to get buy-in for your content initiatives is to frame them towards a goal your management cares about. If your boss is all about revenue, show the link between content and lead generation. If your boss is obsessed with product-market fit, show how your best-performing content is speaking to customers\' needs. If you know your management\'s KPIs, even better. Report on your content marketing performance or initiatives relative to those goals.
One tip for content marketers to get buy-in from management is to emphasize the benefits of evergreen content. Rather than solely focusing on the immediate results of a campaign, you can highlight the ways that this content can be repurposed and continue to bring attention to the brand in the future. By avoiding references that might date the piece and keeping messaging on-brand and relevant, you can reuse the assets. Thus, a one-time investment can continue to benefit the company.
If management does not understand how big content marketing is then they do not have all the information. I would focus all my efforts on educating management about content marketing. This could be a presentation, a webinar or something else. I would even suggest to add them to (say the Superpath community) to just see how many facets of marketing there are and how many marketers are talking about this.
Show executives what industry competitors are doing with content marketing and the associated benefit as a result of it. Match outcome to output. For example, maybe your competitor launched a gated e-book that resulted in leads. Or perhaps a competitors content strategy led to a national press appearance because a producer found an article they wrote and reached out to them as a source. Content is the lifeline of any digital marketing campaign. All digital roads lead back to a solid content foundation. Not having a robust content strategy can result in fewer media opportunities, lower search engine rankings and decreased sales volume. The best way to get buy-in from management is to compare the wins to losses. Show the pain reduction that content marketing can bring by dialing up the volume on content output. People don't value what they don't understand. Help them understand the value content can bring to your organization to increase C-suite buy-in.
Anticipate questions that management might have regarding your content strategy and provide the answers in your proposal. For example, your proposed marketing strategy may work in another market with a different target audience, but what supporting data can you provide to show promise within your niche? Another consideration when crafting a marketing proposal is the balance of analytics and creativity – some advertising leaders may weigh one more over the other. Do your homework, consider the priorities of marketing leaders, and believe in your ideas.
Management is focused on their goals: how to get more leads, grow brand awareness, or close more sales. Be clear about your content marketing project's aim, the potential impact it can have on the business, and the resources you need to get it done. Be ready to answer questions and back your plan up with data such as organic traffic, conversions, and costs from a previous project or competitor benchmark. If you come in prepared with the right solution, you may get their approval.
The time it takes to get content ranking is an obstacle that can't be mitigated. However, benchmarking and relating to competitors who are now ripping benefits of their work done 12 months ago can provide a relatable reference point. Then, extrapolating several indicators can help gauge the expected results. For instance, if our competitor is garnering 10'000 visits from individual blog posts and we have a 0.1% conversion rate for visitors of similar website segments, we can expect to get around ten leads per month. Multiplying that by the average deal size or margin can indicate the expected value and even calculate ROI based on the hourly cost of writing content.
If management seems lukewarm towards your ideas and isn’t giving you the support you need, ask them to specify what exactly is giving them pause. Often, managers have very specific reasons they’re hesitant to invest their company’s resources into a marketing strategy, though for a variety of different reasons not everyone is always forthcoming. But by meeting with them, one on one, and asking them for specific reasons for their hesitance, you can build yourself a checklist of items to work on in order to best convince them of your ideas.
The key to getting buy-in from management is to be able to show them that content marketing will benefit the business in a measurable way. In other words, you'll have to prove that your content strategy is going to make more money for the company than it costs. This can be challenging, but there are some simple ways you can do so: - Calculate the cost of developing content, and show how much it would cost for your company to hire someone else (or a team) to create that same content. - Calculate how much money you've spent on other types of marketing in the past year and show what kind of return those campaigns have given you.
Content marketers must back their strategies with facts to get buy-in. Management believes in the outcome. It doesn’t matter what path you take, but if you’ve managed to achieve the goal then this is it. So, make sure that you gather every possible fact and figure related to the actions that you’ve taken. Track the progress at each stage and present the accumulative results to the management. That’s the only way to prove your excellence as when management would see that your efforts are paying off then they can’t deny your excellence.
Recycle your content on different platforms to get it highlighted. In case you wrote a blog, don't keep it just to a blog. Turn it into audio and upload it to different platforms. Turn it into video and important para in reels and distribute across YouTube and other social media platforms. Don't forget to add the link to the main blog. Turn it into infographics or text-based content and share it on social platforms. You can also turn it into eBooks and upload them. When you distribute across different platforms, the chance of getting seen is higher. And this leads to more reach.
Content marketing is not just about creating content. It's about creating content your customers (targets) want and distributing that content consistently to target customers. Anything less than consistent communications to your target customers will lead to no results. So you need to show your management what your company is lacking in terms of content and convince them that this strategy will bring the best ROI.
Content marketers should use audience personas to identify the niches they have been effective in targeting. Doing this will help them make the case for their value-add to executive decision makers. Identifying an audience persona can paint a picture for management about who is interested in the content being produced and how this engagement creates return customers. Deploying content marketers is an effective business strategy and managers should be made aware of the advantages that content marketing presents. There are particular customers who might only become interested in a brand through the content they introduce into the public sphere. Content marketers should use audience personas to identify these customers.
To get support from management, you need to explain the importance of content marketing to them. Content marketing is no longer just a part of marketing, but rather its core. Your business won't be successful if you focus too much on solely promoting your products. You need to create content that provides value to your customers and create a story that sets you apart from the competition. When presenting your ideas to the management, give specific examples of how your content improved your business performance. List critical metrics such as website traffic, SERP ranking, and social media coverage and link them to the specific content marketing activities you executed. There is nothing more powerful than seeing peeks in traffic after your article was published and promoted. That's why it's essential to make your management aware of the successes you've already achieved and possibilities for your business when content marketing is given some extra boost.
The most expeditious way for Marketing to win over management is to convince them you’re not going to waste the money you're requesting for your marketing programs. The easiest way to accomplish that is by showing management the KPI’s you will use to determine success, particularly the KPI’s you’ll rely on to adjust your programs midstream, need be. The more you can demonstrate your commitment to ROI more than your commitment to your beloved marketing idea, the quicker you can get corporate buy-in.
Support your content marketing plans with reliable data to get management approval. This is applicable if you are still building relationships with the management. Prove to them that your plans are reasonable and have a valid basis. Show them your previous experience, if you have any, and highlight your achievements in content marketing. If you don't have meaningful experiences yet, share your resources with the management, so they'll know where you're coming from. Your resources can be content created by a competitor who has been successful so far, or it can be statistical research results that reflect the interests of potential customers. This way, you lessen the chance of the management to hesitate and increase the likelihood of putting their trust in you.
Clarify your content marketing strategy then provide measurable data to support your approach. Having relevant information and examples to substantiate your plan can help inspire confidence, especially if you have one or two similar case studies to reference on hand. Anticipate questions that may be raised and be prepared to engage other resources like analytics tracking in your follow-up. Rather than blasting those who have stated objections with more information, first work to understand the specific concerns and what the underlying driver may be so your response sufficiently satisfies their needs. By successfully communicating you understand their perspective, you’ll better be equipped to win over skeptics with a grounded, relevant, and data-based interpretation of your approach.