While many people (ourselves included) can’t imagine their business without it’s content marketing strategy, there are still countless more that have yet to embrace this growing marketing trend. As someone working their way up from the bottom of the totem pole, you may have some great ideas about content marketing, ideas that will resonate with younger audiences and breathe new life into a stale marketing strategy. The only problem is that you can’t get your boss to sign off on your plan.
Talking about content marketing with those who don’t have much familiarity with it tends to elicit a lot of vacant expressions. But it doesn’t have to! We’ve seen first-hand how blogging can bring new business to old industries and establish organizations as thought leaders. You too can make a convincing case for buying into content marketing by preparing the right information for the higher-ups.
Here’s how to sell the power of content marketing to your boss.
Build Your Case
Before you’ll be able to persuade your boss to make content marketing a priority, you need to build a convincing case. Take some time before you meet to compile your talking points, research your arguments, and develop a plan for how you would implement this new marketing strategy. Aim to give your boss clear deliverables in this meeting, and try to think through all the reasons they might have not to do it, beforehand.
Here are some key components your proposal should include:
Speak to Your Organization’s Goals
Talk about the specific ways content marketing can move the needle and address your business’s top goals. Does you business desperately want to generate more leads and improve your ranking in search engine results pages? Talk about the ways a content marketing strategy can help you achieve those goals.
Anticipate Objections
Consider ahead of time what reservations your boss might have about implementing a content marketing strategy. Have talking points ready to address those objections and ease her concerns.
- Back it up with stats. The most powerful arguments you can make are those backed by hard evidence. Be sure to have some statistics on hand to support your arguments. For example, “Content marketing costs 62 percent less than other traditional marketing initiatives, yet it generates about three times as many leads.”
- Think about what it could streamline or replace in terms of a less-than-effective current strategy. Especially in older businesses, it can be tempting to cling to the marketing practices of the past, even when they are no longer effective. Talk about what’s not working right now and how content marketing can replace those ineffective strategies.
- Have a plan for implementation. Who will oversee this effort? Who will actually do the work? Who will measure success? Having a designated point-person will ground this in reality more easily for a manager.
Research the Competitive Landscape
Are your competitors already blogging? If so, how can you do it better? What can you talk about that they’re not? How can you better connect with and engage your audience? If they’re not blogging, consider what opportunities exist for you to differentiate your business through content marketing and gain a competitive advantage.
Give a Primer on Content Marketing & How It Impacts Businesses
There’s a good chance your boss will know very little about content marketing. Give her a brief overview of what content marketing is, what it does for businesses, and why. Read through this useful post on how to justify investing in content. Though tailored to agencies trying to get buy-in from their clients, it perfectly applies to anyone trying to sell someone on their team on the benefits of content.
You can also find a great primer here from our friends over at Content Marketing Institute.
Make the Decision Easy
Before you meet with your boss, come up with a clearly written plan for her to sign off on, in order to make saying “yes” as easy as possible. This means doing the legwork to leave your boss with minimal doubt about how it would be executed and within what timeframe.
What does this include? Download our blog content strategy worksheet for a full run-down on how to sell the power of content marketing to your boss.
Track Your Success
Selling your boss on content marketing is only the first step. Next, you’ll need to determine what metrics define content marketing success for your business and then regularly track them. After all, the only way to actually maintain that high-level buy-in on content marketing is to continuously prove its value to the business.
While some 88% of marketers are using content marketing to reach their audiences, only about 30% see their campaigns as effective. This is because very few of those organizations are actually tracking the metrics that demonstrate the impact of their content marketing efforts and help them hone their content strategies.
Back your efforts up with data. Your analytics dashboard doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles right out of the gate. Just tracking it with some rigor is enough and can get you by until you feel out more important metrics for your organization down the road.
(Need more data? Download HubSpot’s most recent State of Inbound report to bring plenty to the table.
Report it relentlessly. Half the power is discerning correlations for your efforts.
Alright, so you’ve got the buy-in (high five!), and now you just need to find the time to develop the content that’ll make your organization’s marketing dollar go further. Don’t have a lot of spare time on your hands? Let BlogMutt do it on your behalf! Our 10,000+ US-based writers are ready and waiting to help you get the high-quality content you need.
