If your having a difficult time proving the worth of social media to clients, especially executives, then you may be approaching the situation from the wrong angle. Below are a few tips to help you convey the importance and necessary priority of social media in those executive meetings.
Tip #1: Understand the Executive’s Perspective
Instead of flooding an executive with social media jargon, use terminology that is familiar and relevant to them. Executives often have a skyscraper view and aren’t worried about site traffic or the number of impressions.
How they measure and what they consider is important varies from our typical social media view. It’s vital that you adjust your benchmarks to match theirs.
Tip #2: Money Matters
Since social media is going to be a new platform for them, make sure you connect with what matters to them as stated in the previous tip. To make an early connection, speak their language – money. Give examples of how social media will increase sales and revenue. Not much speaks louder to an executive than ROIs.
Executives are extremely concerned with sales, revenue, and costs. They usually look at daily reports and will respond well when numbers are presented. Find a way to present social media in this financial context so that you can break through and excite the executives about the possibilities.
Tip #3: Track All You Can
Does your company typically use Customer Relationship Management (CRM), web analytics, and other reporting systems to generate executive reports? More than likely, these are the systems being used and it is important to learn how these online activities are being used.
For example, is Google Adwords or organic search results accounting for a majority of sales? How is the information tracked and where does the data end up? These are important questions because you can sometimes utilize these systems to track social media traffic which can be valuable information. Sometimes a few extra modifications can track your social media efforts so that you can use valuable measurement tools.
