You are the sales or marketing manager, and your boss has given you sales target you must meet for the Year 2019. Since you are tech-savvy and understand the latest marketing trends, so you plan to adopt digital marketing as a part of your marketing strategy.
Your boss is accustomed to traditional marketing and is not familiar with digital marketing strategies, despite the fact that your company has a website and a few social media pages. How would you convince your boss to adopt and invest in a new marketing concept that looks abstract and non-traditional?
Of course, your boss uses Google search engine and other social media networks, and has seen countless online promotions, but might not have thought of them as prolific digital marketing channels. So the big task is to explain digital marketing to your boss using common knowledge and prove to him/her how your company would benefit from it.
This post is meant to help you with the big task, as it will show you how to convince your boss to invest in digital marketing, by giving you points needed in presenting your case and the things you need to do to make it a successful outcome.
How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in Digital Marketing in 2019
1. Money Spent on Traditional Marketing Versus the Value Earned
You would start the conversation by comparing the money spent on traditional marketing in previous years with the projected sales that will follow. It is likely that the marketing budget spent outweighed the sales accrued, as traditional marketing is very costly.
Therefore, you can now introduce digital marketing as a better alternative that is cheaper, result-driven, and gives room for measuring return on investment in real time. You can also decide to put more budget on digital marketing channels that yield more returns and either fine-tune or decrease budget on channels that yield the least results. This is more like doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t work – it’s that simple!
Read Also: How to Generate New Business Leads with Social Media
2. Granular Audience Targeting
To make the first point more convincing, it also worth mentioning that digital marketing involves using audience targeting, in which the demography, interest, age, gender, income and location of customers can be targeted. Google Ads, Facebook Ads and other social networks allow you to target people that might be interested in a particular product or service at a particular time rather than targeting everyone every time.
Restate the fact that, since audience targeting facilitates showcasing marketing messages to the right audience, there is a higher chance of conversion. This makes digital marketing better than the traditional marketing that speaks to every Tom, Dick and Harry – both the right and wrong audience at the right and wrong time.
3. Competitors are Dominating Search Engine Result Pages
Truth be told, your competitors are already investing time and money to dominate the digital space, it will be at your company’s detriment if they don’t explore the opportunity. To further strengthen your statement, show your boss how the websites of your competitors are dominating search engines for your targeted keywords, and how the competitors are receiving better engagements with customers on social media. At least seeing is believing!
If your company’s website is poorly ranked on Google for your targeted keywords, as it’s most likely the case, then you can further buttress your point with readily available statistics online. Chitika Insights, a credible online advertising network analysed the value of result positioning for websites on Google’s results page, and discovered through a survey that for a particular keyword, the website ranking 1st gets 32.5% of the traffic, while the 2nd gets 17.6%, 3rd gets 11.4%, 4th gets 8.1%, 5th gets 6.1%, and the 6th – 15th shares the rest.
You should use this statistic to explain to your boss that if your competitors’ websites dominate the position 1 – 10 on Google, they get all the organic traffic, leaving nothing for your company.
Read Also: Top SEO Tips that actually Ranks your Business Higher in Nigeria
4. Analytics Tools can Measure Marketing Efforts in Real Time
Imagine running a marketing campaign online, and you are able to see how the campaigns are performing in real time. Available analytics tools allow you to see how your targeted audience engage and respond to your marketing campaigns – this lets you know what works and what doesn’t in a timely fashion.
Unlike the traditional marketing platforms that blast out messages and no one knows how many people see or get the messages, digital marketing platforms have numerous mechanisms for tracking engagement and conversion. For example, for a post published on social media, you can see engagement trackers like impression, reach, likes, retweets, clicks, sessions, follows, page views and many more.
5. Back Up your Findings with a Market/Client Survey
A well researched and reported market survey will go a long way in serving as a proof of concept. Issue an online or offline consumer-behaviour questionnaire to your company’s current clients. In the questionnaire, you can ask questions such as:
- How did you get to know about our company?
- Do you perform online research before buying a product or subscribing to a service?
- How often do you shop online?
- How often do you listen to the radio and watch television?
- How much time do you spend on the internet, social media, and mobile phone daily?
In Conclusion
Without any doubt, you would find out that most of your clients do basic web browsing, and a few of them would undergo online research on products and services. With the result of the market survey, you can then present a convincing proposal to your boss to highlight your findings alongside the benefits of digital marketing, as mentioned earlier.
Furthermore, the differences in the results obtained from the questionnaire on how often your potential clients listen to the radio and watch television, and how much time they spend on internet, social media and mobile phone, can be used to emphasize how costly, wasteful and ineffective traditional marketing is. This is down to the fact that your potential clients spend more time on the internet and social media, and less time watching TV and listening to the radio.
Finally, there is more to gain than to lose when digital marketing is executed correctly. The end result is very rewarding and your boss will constantly praise you for introducing a marketing solution that is measurable and actually works.