How To Pursuade Your Board Of Directors Accepting Social Media Marketing

If you go to your board of Directors and try to sell them on social media, you will fail.

Unless you put it into context and unless you incorporate it into your overall marketing strategy, the value of social media marketing will fall on deaf ears. Instead of having an open-minded audience, chances are you will be met by a litany of negatives:  “I don’t understand Twitter.” “I thought Facebook is really only for friends.” “Our lawyers recommend extreme caution when entering social marketing.” “I thought it was free.”

If on the other hand you go to your board of Directors and try to sell them on a comprehensive digital marketing plan that will increase your organization’s brand awareness, help you more successfully interact with all of your audiences, enable you to be prepared in the event of a company disaster, and increase your sales, chances are they will be all ears.

Here’s a 4-step approach on how to succeed in selling social marketing to a board of directors.

1. Make sure your CEO is on board 100%. The CEO usually deals directly with the board of directors. If you have your CEO’s trust, and you have a solid strategic marketing plan that shows the ROI of each element, your CEO should back you.  How do you earn this trust? Kristin Zhivago in her book How to Become Indispensable to Your CEO lists these five ways to earn your CEO’s trust:

• Interview your CEO – formally
• Interview your customers – continually
• Report on the results of your efforts – regularly
• Behave like a leader – in all circumstances
• Communicate with your CEO – effectively

2. Set the stage with a research-based foundation. Show through research how your target market is involved in the internet. Don’t start by talking about Social Media, but introduce the term within the context of the whole presentation so that it makes sense how and why more and more people are involved in social media.

• Offer some broad research findings from companies like the Pew Research Center. They have reports on how young people are using it, as well as how older adults are.
• Drill down and show how your specific target market uses social media, and where you can find them on the social landscape. You need to do this to prevent the inevitable, “But our customers don’t use social media.”
• Reveal how much or little your competition is involved in social marketing. Check out their company pages on Facebook and LinkedIn. Monitor on Twitter the key hashtags. For example, if you are in automotive insurance and want to see what the social world says about your industry, just type in Twitter’s search box “autoinsurance” and you’ll be surprised at the amount of chatter.

3. Present an integrated digital marketing plan. Remember, social media marketing works best when it’s integrated with all of your other digital marketing. There are many ways to present a plan but here are some key factors you need to address specifically in relation to making the case for social media.

• Inbound vs. outbound marketing. We’ve said this before, but outbound marketing techniques are becoming less and less effective, and are very expensive. Make the case for the power of inbound marketing. You want to “get found” rather than competing with the thousands or millions of daily outbound marketing interruptions. Social media is a critical element to any inbound marketing program.
• PR & IR. Most companies understand the value of public relations and publicly traded companies rely on good investor relations (IR). The new PR embraces social media as a way to communicate with media and other key audiences. There are also relatively new laws that deal directly with blogs and social media in relation to IR. In fact, if you are a publicly traded company, you should note that the SEC implicitly encourages blogging or communicating through a social media channels.
• ROI. Boards of directors are responsible for the fiscal well-being of a company. However, instead of having your board dictate what is valuable in terms of ROI, be the one who sets the metrics by which you measure the success of your social marketing. It could be increasing your fan pages, or your blog subscriptions. It could also be number of leads attributed to social media. Here are some tools and benchmarks in measuring social media ROI. The key is for you to establish those benchmarks.

4. Have a contingency plan. Anyone presenting to a board should be prepared for all of the negatives that still might come your way.  One of the best arguments for the value of social marketing that counters all arguments before the fact came from a webinar that had the unlikely title “Why Social Media is BS.” It’s a great example of how to position social media marketing within the context of inbound marketing.

So, with this information, are you better prepared to make the case for social media to your CEO and your board of directors? What are we missing? Have any of you had any success (or failure) pitching the value of social media?

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