Ready to have ‘the talk’ with your boss? The one where you make your case for why it’s time for your company to start using social media (what talk did you think I meant?!?)? Here’s some tips for helping you make your case:
1 – Don’t talk buzzwords, talk tangible business benefits. Only mention things like comments, Facebook Likes and Twitter followers IF you also explain how they relate to things like sales, conversions and leads. Make your case for why your company should use social media by showing your boss how it will help your company generate sales, and/or lower costs.
2 – Point out how social media can help your company build its awareness. A lot of people focus on ‘the conversation’, but using social media is a wonderful way to increase search placements and traffic. For example, yesterday I wrote a post titled How to write good blog content. Here’s a screenshot I took of the Google results for the term “How to write good blog content” right before I wrote this post:
The #1 Google result just a few hours after publishing the post. Not too shabby. And this perfectly illustrates how blog content can help your company’s search results. Maybe even to the point where your company can lower or eliminate its SEM budget?
3 – Social media can make your marketing more effective. Look at your existing online marketing efforts and how success is judged. Show your boss how social media can compliment those efforts, making them more effective and efficient.
For example, a blog will help drive qualified traffic to your website. Let’s say you provide lawn-care services, and you write a post entitled ’10 Steps to Having an Insect-Free Lawn by June’, and someone arrives at that post by Googling the term ‘getting rid of insects in my lawn’. And let’s say that in that post, you give wonderful advice about ridding a lawn of insects, and add a call to action inviting the reader to visit your website if they want to schedule an appointment with you. Anyone that arrives at your site from visiting that post is probably going to be a potential customer, or qualified lead. So the blog is enhancing the website’s ability to sell your services.
So those are some quick tips to helping you convince your boss to use social media. The problem is, your boss is likely to have a few objections to using social media. We’ll talk about how you can address and counter your boss’ objections to social media, in the next post.
As a relatively young social-media presence, I and my company are still “experimenting” with it, but as one of the bosses I had the luxury of selling it to myself basically, that helps a lot too :p
Great tips anyway, and I agree on all the line.
This is a message that can never get old. Maybe it needs to get louder in fact. Those presenting I feel need to be very educated themselves in order to present to their bosses. How important it is to investigate and get a well rounded view before jumping into anything. Don’t just say “Hey boss we need a Facebook page”. Thanks keeping the message loud and clear Mack.
Thanks Jonathan. From the employee’s standpoint, it really helps their case to understand the boss’ POV, it will help them present their case for how social media can impact the business’ bottom line in terms that are important to the boss’, not to them.