How to pitch Social Media Marketing to your Boss?

Posted on October 17, 2007
Filed Under Conferences |

I’ve just talked with brent csutoras who was one of yesterdays speakers at the SMX social here in NY.

ltr rebecca, jason, brent

The conversation was around the question of how to pitch social media
marketing to the people controlling the budgets at your company.

Now I can tell you this is really tricky - yesterday someone on a panel answered this question like this “Well just give me one of the 5 mio budget and I’ll show you how much better social marketing is than your banner campaign”
Now I do strongly believe that the money would be better spent on a social campaign than on rich media advertising - at least for a lot of the cases.

But obviously the above approach is a rather weak one if you try to convince someone to invest money in something they feel is out of their control.
Along the way you will be asked “So how big will the ROI be?”, “How many sign ups do we get out of this” “How many additional sales” etc.

Now thats obvioulsy hard to answer - right? Cause you can’t really predict that.

So I’ve asked brent “How would you pitch this to a SVP type of person, to get him to sign off the budget?”

He tackled it in a way to say that the core of what social media marketing is is a “fast track to SEO”. Sure there are branding effects as well and driving a broad awareness in a very short amount of time is another beautiful “collateral” damage.

But at the end of the day most importantly is the backlinks you will get if you get featured on sites like digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, reddit etc.
They will help you rank in organic search results and give you lifetime links “for free”.

Comments

2 Responses to “How to pitch Social Media Marketing to your Boss?”

Brent Csutoras on October 19th, 2007 2:12 am

Haha. Glad i was able to help and let me know if you ever want to talk abotu anything else.

Cheers

Brent
Frank Fuchs on October 19th, 2007 12:30 pm

hey brent,

every little helps - right And yes will definitely be back in touch.

been good meeting you