Selling Search Marketing Campaigns to the C-Suite: SES Chicago
Filed under: Education and Training, In-House, PPC, Reputation Management, SEO, Social Marketing on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine
Following on from the previous session on Selling your Integrated Marketing Plan, this session deals with selling he topic of search to the C-suite, and handling their expectations. This session was once
Barbara Coll of WebMama.com was the first presenter, and started off by talking about a few CEO situations that you’re likely to encounter…
- CEO-ego #1 - We need to show up - Under some random PR industry that we want to own the category - but we are creating the category
- CEO-ego #2 - Why aren’t we showing up for my name?
- The Cool Factor: Everything Google does is cool, why aren’t we doing everything that Google offers?
You will also get push back from on-high, from those C-level people that don’t understand search;
- Search doesn’t convert for my products / services
- Why would people pay attention to those ads?
- How does it fit into the rest of our world?
- Why not do it through our other agency?
How to sell to all management. You need to address the following issues:
- Competition -Who is your real competition?
- Reputation Management
- ROI
How to talk to a CMO
- What do you want people to do after they see your TV spot?
- What is the expected behavior after someone sees a behavioral ad on Yahoo?
Introduce Universal / Blended search
- Praise marketing elements that have already been developed
- Show the value of optimization of those elements
- Tell them it isn’t all about text-based ad
Talk direct response
- Search is the deal closer
- The ROI is high
- Explain how all other online/offline can uplift search volume
- Praise the other programs and campaigns
There is a problem with volume: You just can’t spend enough on search!
Education and training:
- Bring in the engines for show and tell
- Talk to other agencies about integration of data and consistency of reporting
- Develop standards for the website style guide
- Act professional… don’t look like a hacker
What not to do:
- Don’t brag and say that you’re better than the ‘other agency’ because you produce better ROI with search
- Search is not all that company needs to do, ,especially for branding and selling and online
- Don’t say that search measurement is all that you need, it needs to be integrated with other corporate metrics.
Next up Andreas Stenzel of VMware (a client of the Barbara’s), to give the internal perspective. He walked through 3 different case studies to highlight the differences involved with each pitching internally within each company.
- Don’t sell search alone, highlight it’s place in the larger marketing mix, show the synergies that you can achieve.
- Identify the standalone ROI.
- Identify your targets up front - audience, channels, etc.
- Use seed deals - Proof of Concept to show that search really does work.
His most important takeaway is to define and validate your strategy early on, and stick to it
