Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I think there are more than a few questions here. At first, your problem was explaining your marketing plan to the higher-ups, but later your problem became developing the marketing plan itself. Which one are you really struggling with?

Personally, I think your company should overhaul its site before you do anything remotely related to 2.0. I didn't get any real feel for what your company does right away, and it's certainly anything but search-engine friendly.

As for what else to implement, I think you have to give thought to who your constituents are, how they use the Web, and what benefits can be obtained by them *and* your company. You say you "know" you want to use Facebook. Why? (Not saying it's wrong, but not saying it's right, either.) What will be the advantage of this other than to say, "Look at us, we're cool and hip...see?"

I would make a matrix of all of the possible 2.0 assets that you might implement, then include information about cost, time, benefits to constituents, benefits to company, etc. This will help you not only decide which 2.0 assets to use, but also sell the idea when you make your presentation.

As for actually getting buy-in, it sounds like you were asked by someone to do all of this. If that person, or anyone else higher up, has an understanding of 2.0, share your marketing plan before the presentation and solicit buy-in ahead of time.

Finally, I would locate case studies or other examples of companies that have implemented these assets so that you can provide real-world evidence of the positive impact that they could have on your company.

As Inbox_Interactive mentions, don't focus on the tools/technology, focus on your goals.

Starting with what you have - what measurable results can you show from your past efforts? How much has your email list grown? How many unique visitors do you get? How many inquiries?

Next, focus on who you're trying to attract. Social media is quite varied. Presumably you want Web 2.0 to get more clients - what networking sites do THEY join/use?

Also - if you have video/audio of your staff presenting topics, consider a YouTube/Google Video campaign as well.

And yes, your website needs an overhaul. As a minimum, fewer words, bigger font, on the home page with copy benefits-focused.
If you get more traffic to your website, you want conversions. Make sure you can get them.

Don't forget to build in ways to track results from your efforts. Sooner or later, people will ask, "What is your work producing in sales from these efforts?"

You might want to build in an affiliate tracking system just for your own use. Or separate landing pages that are monitored and sales tracked.

Dear Erin

Firstly, welcome to the forum. I hope that we can be of some benefit to you.

Secondly, given the way you outlined the nature and scope of your problem if you are afforded the right assistance, I don’t think that you will have much of a problem conveying the argument to your board and senior managers. Sure, you’ve presented two things that need sorting but they are inextricably connected. You can’t present your desired marketing mix or even start to work out the optimum mix unless your management can fully understand the concepts, their costs and their benefits.

Firstly, your website. You might think that it is really out-of-date. It is, but in the education world, it is very much as expected. Only when you get into the realms of higher education do the supplier offerings start to be even vaguely a-la-mode! That give you a potential advantage in being distinct and standing out from the crowd and a problem with your management – “If the average educational supplier web presence is a bit “1997”, why should we seek to be different?”

The last point is a serious internal objection and it is based on the false assumption that the average marketing figure / model / template for a given industry is somehow important to your particular company. (See questions here, ad-infinitum about the average % of marketing spend versus turnover in software / printing / automotive sales / education and other claptrap figures) What is important is what works best for you and not for someone else.

The convincing of your management will come mainly from giving them the explanations which will allow them to understand the proposals, then following the figures and following the money. The web 2.0 arguments consist not just what they do and how they achieve it, but what they do for you, what benefits they confer and what sales can be expected to follow.

You have the confidence of the Marketing VP regarding the work you have done. That might be based on quality, endeavour, hard work and image. The CEO will be more interested in your measurable results as well. The CFO will have a tendency to see you as a hard working cost to the business who (which? They are pretty inhuman) is proposing yet more expense for “decoration” John Schulte made a very important point that someone is shortly going to ask what you contribute to the bottom line. The commonest cause of failure in marketing execs is not the failure of a project which sinks them (America in particular respects risk-taking endeavour) but that they can’t prove that they have contributed anything.

I was fortunate enough to have it drilled into me that my efforts must be measurable through their impact on the bottom line. You need to do that. Starting with your current achievements, forget for a moment the aspects which make all of us proud of our endeavours – a good interactive blog, a presence on networking sites, a better SEO for the website, decent email shots and so on. Look at the measurables and be prepared to do some analysis and some predictive forecasting. The last part is risky because unless it is based on existing metrics, you are to an extent guessing. CEO’s will accept this as a risk at the planning and implementation stages (You’ve convinced them, well done) but when the actual figures fail to meet the projections or, on rare occasions when the company is swamped by more orders that they can handle, they tend to forget that you said that there was a risk involved. This is self preservation but it is advisable to cover yourself because it is so easy, in marketing, to benefit the company, but fail to prove that you were responsible for the benefits.

Fortunately, verifiable proof and projections both come from metrics which you might well already have, perhaps pertaining back to before you arrived. All successful actions in marketing have a sales consequence - the big problem with most companies is connecting the two as few sales, marketing and accounts departments note the right figures needed to track a campaign through to the bottom line. But with a bit of extrapolation, it can usually be done. Sorry, but part of your solution is a lot of figures and some sums – part of constructing the current picture can be like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and no picture on the box to guide you.

If your client base is on a database other than the accounts system, you are probably on your way. Ideally it would be on a flexible CRM system where the relevant figures can be recorded relatively effortlessly. You need to track thing you can measure to thing s that you can put a $ sign in front of. You need to estimate what the latency is between an initiative and an enquiry, between a site visit and an order, between launching a blog topic or a position on FaceBook or BeBo and additional visits to your site.

When you win your argument about the website, you will need to be able to show that the effort was worth it, that the SEO effort is more productive, that more visitors arrive and stick on your landing pages, that calls to action on the web make either the phone or the cash registers ring.

Most of my friends who are highly creative web marketers think that I’m a boring old so-and-so who should have become a finance director, but I believe that talent needs to be protected and to be able to stand up for itself. The prettiness of the picture won’t win your battle, but the weapons found in the numbers will.

Damn, I’m sounding like Barack Obama and I’m British, but if you measure all your touch points and track the ratios between them and the financial results, not only can you justify your programmes but you can make a stab at forecasting the outcome with some confidence.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Social networking is just a link in a bigger potential customer relationship and PR programme. Apple used to call this 'customer evangelisation'. Online makes these types of campaigns easier to manage - for instance you can introduce customer areas, online seminars, customer feedback groups all online via your website. In addition you can look to support customer advocates you find in public forums (say thank you for instance).

Don't get too hung up on specifics like Facebook or Myspace, these are important now, but may not be in the future - they could easily just be fads. In the early 1990s the same stuff was done in IT markets using newsgroups for instance.

In the end these are publications/ communications channels like you might have for PR so they become another route for your message and to build an audience. You may also be better off building conversations using third parties (eg encouraging your evangelist customers to post).

This sounds a bit corporate, but this is exactly how the hip and trendy music industry is hitting social networking and viral marketing. They're employing viral marketing firms who have people spamming the networks and building connection networks. It's actually one reason why people turn off these types of sites - they didn't join to be sold to. Ultimately, you too are looking to abuse the networks for the same thing so do be careful.

It's important to realise that there is always a potential backdraft, particularly if a customer gets disgruntled. Backdrafts can be huge on the Internet and almost everything will be in the public record so don't get let yourself get too laidback. Act nobly and with dignity (eg no flamewars, bad language, badmouthing). You may appear a little less hip than you'd like, but in the long term it will be better.

Saul

I answered a question like this a few months ago here, but I can't find the post for some reason. But, I also expanded upon my answer in this blog article about How to Convince a CEO to Enter 21st Century Marketing

This blog article includes a PowerPoint file you can download and use as a basis for your presentation.

Thanks,
Mike Volpe
VP Marketing
HubSpot