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How to Sell Social Media to Your Stakeholders
With any emerging marketing channel, it takes time for the stakeholders in your business to recongize it’s value. Social Media is one such channel. As a marketer, you recognize it’s value but how do you convey this to stakeholders who are responsible for your bottom line?
Know your budget constraints:
If you are prepared to discuss the financial and personnel resources required for a social media strategy, you will look educated and more credible when stating your case to stakeholders.
Here is a list of common items to budget for when planning your social media campaign:
- Staff hours dedicated to the campaign instead of work involving core-competencies.
- Ongoing social media education and training
- Additional bandwidth usage from your company website (especially video)
What to do if your stakeholders balk at the cost:
Let your stakeholders know that when compared to traditional marketing, Social Media is actually a low cost vehicle for fulfilling many business objectives such as:
- Promoting products and services
- Increasing website traffic
- Boosting natural search engine rankings
- Monitoring your competition (what stakeholder would not like that?)
Some more statistics to the help the case:
No claims holds water unless they have some concrete data to support them, so here you go:
1. Research from Hub Spot found that companies that blog increase their website visitors by 55% compared to those who don’t and they may generate 97% more website links and 434% more indexed pages.
2. A survey run by McKinsey of about 1700 corporate executes discovered that 65% of respondents claimed measurable advantages from social media – which included a lower cost for doing business.
3. Dell computers which has 1.3 million followers and has earned 2 million in revenue since 2007 directly from their Twitter account.
So there is a start of how you sell the value of social media to your stakeholders. Check back here for more insight on this subject later.
