When it comes to convincing your boss or colleagues to invest in social media, it helps to have a plan. Here are the seven to take when you want to sell social media marketing to your boss or your company.
- Explain how social media marketing makes you a better listener. When a company is effectively tapped into the social media landscape, they get to hear a lot of chatter that they wouldn’t hear otherwise. Those engaged in social media marketing campaigns will be able to monitor channels for any mention of their company, their competitors, their industry, their clients and their potential clients. Setting up a social media marketing listening campaign lets a company know who is participating and what is happening.
- Match the benefits of social media marketing with your company’s goals. Whether your company or your client is a service provider, a business to business specialist, or a business to consumer retailer, there’s a social media marketing strategy for them. But in order to convince others of social media marketing’s benefits, you have to be aware of the company’s goals. Do they want to enhance their customer service operations? To they want to reduce costs? Do they want to manage their reputation? Social media marketing can do a lot to help achieve all those goals. When you know what your boss or company wants, you can show how social media marketing will help them achieve it.
- Start small. A social media marketing campaign doesn’t have to include a setting up a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account, a blog and a YouTube channel all at once. In fact, it’s often easier to start small. Figure out which service will best match the stated goals of your boss or your company. It may be something as simple as registering a Twitter account and starting to engage people via tweets. Starting small requires little time and even less cost. But the results can become apparent quickly. You can even begin to measure such results with a tracking service like Quantcast.
- Set up a strategy and follow it. A social media marketing campaign can appear strange and different, even to people who have plenty of marketing experience. If you don’t have a clear strategy for implementation and execution, people may be understandably skeptical about your social media marketing strategy. Take time to explain each step of the plan and describe why it’s being done and how it will benefit the business.
- Look for examples of success. Lots of businesses, large and small, well-known and unknown, have been able to already achieve a lot with social media marketing. From Charles Schwab to FujiFilm to Goodwill, there are countless examples of companies who have been able to successfully use social media to achieve their corporate goals.
- Anticipate questions. It’s natural for people to be skeptical of new things and new ideas. While you may be well aware of the benefits of social media marketing, keep in mind that resistance may simply be the result of some people being overly cautions. That’s why it’s important to anticipate any and all questions that a skeptic may raise.
- Make your case. Prepare a short, punchy presentation that hits on all the above topics. Give your boss or colleagues plenty of time to ask questions. Think about you boss or colleagues’ personal preferences and consider how you can best sell your social media marketing idea. And remember that there may be some things you don’t know. Social media marketing is still relatively new, and that means that there are still many unanswered questions out there. Be honest about what you don’t know, but make sure to point out all possible benefits to social media marketing.
Social media marketing is an exciting new medium that companies can use to achieve just about any business goal. By convincing your colleagues or your boss of the effectiveness of social media marketing, you’ll be on your way to discovering the enthralling, challenging and rewarding new world of social media marketing.
