On any given day, your CEO is entertaining pitches from savvy vendor salesmen, business leaders at peer institutions and other members of his or her own executive team.
What makes you think your ideas on video marketing deserve the time of day, and how do you as a marketing manager intend to bring your CEO on board to the benefits of video as part of a larger marketing strategy?
Excuse the harsh tone. We swear we’re to help.
Here’s a roadmap for convincing your boss and your boss’s boss to buy in to video as a true value-driver and revenue-generator.
Connect the dots of their marketing agenda – not yours
It’s easy to compile all the latest data on video marketing success (it’s right here), craft a phenomenal slide deck and then ask for a few minutes of your executive’s time.
The hard part comes when you’re told there’s no room in the budget or that your ideas simply can’t be prioritized at the moment – aka, come back another day.
At this juncture (hopefully before), it’s important to overhaul your video pitch so that it already fits into your CEO’s existing business model. Expounding on a vision that sits outside your CEO’s vision is a quick way to receive a resounding, “No.”
You must instead understand your company’s core marketing goals, its near- and long-term business objectives and the personal opinions of your CEO. From there, mold your own pitch into something that’s easy to digest and conveys an underlying connection between your priorities and your CEO’s.
Brafton Director of Digital Marketing Strategy Jeff Baker has walked this fine line with clients and internal stakeholders many times over the past five years.
From personal experience, he can tell you that during your pitch, “you should remove all personal investment.”
If a CEO is devoting extra dollars to your video campaign, it better be a profitable venture for the company, and not viewed as merely a vanity project to flex your marketing muscles or to propel you into a promotion.
Other effective ways of laying the groundwork for a successful video pitch include conducting and presenting a competitor analysis and identifying what’s at stake if your company fails to catch up or surpass its rivals’ video capabilities. After all, 87 percent of online marketers currently leverage video content, and 73 percent are seeing positive ROI every day. These are enormous rewards to be missing out on.
Few things get a CEO’s blood pumping like knowing they’re losing out on business due to inferior products or services, and one glimpse of a fantastic competitor video can move the needle in your favor.
What helps is being as bold and direct as you can. Here’s a sample statement:
“This is what we’re losing out on as a company, and this is how quickly we’re falling behind our competitors. We need to move fast on video.”
Make ROI the beginning, middle and end of your pitch
In terms of maximizing the time spent of everyone involved, you have to scrap the fluff. As Jeff put it, “the less information, the better.”
There’s one reason CEOs wake up in the morning: business growth.
This means tracking ROI on every line of business and each task they perform. For your video marketing strategy, gather ROI projections rooted in proven data, show how you intend to track conversions and set the dollar amount you require to see your vision to success.
Anything beyond that? Cut it.
As a general rule, lead your presentation with a single slide that highlights investment and ROI. That’s really all your CEO wants to know, and it’s the only way to speak the right language of persuasion.
Take this conversion sequence as an example:
- Every 1,000 clicks on a video results in 100 viewers submitting contact info.
- With conversion rates of 20% for web leads, and an average deal size of $15,000, you can safely say each web lead is worth $3,000.
- Based on the math above, the video generated $30,000 in revenue.
Now that’s a metric your CEO will love to see!
Other micro conversion metrics to track include:
- Number of plays.
- Product pages navigated to after playing the video.
- Any asset downloads.
- Pageviews
- Comments on social platforms on which videos are shared.
These figures can add a layer of specificity to your video strategy and articulate to your CEO that ROI is the No. 1 goal, and that there are other key numbers that will prove insightful when adjusting or building upon the campaign moving forward.
Jeff noted it’s imperative Google Analytics is properly set up to track and measure these actions. By utilizing Tag Manager and the events tracking function through GA, you gain insight into virtually anything you would want to know in relation to video performance.
When collating your final presentation and hoping to secure the necessary video budget, be prepared with any and all metrics you may have on hand and clearly lay out an execution strategy where you can regularly report on your progress.
But more than anything, hone in on ROI as much as possible.
Apply the KISS principle
It’s one thing to be a data wizard or a strong communicator, but another quality every marketing manager should have is the skill of concision.
We’ll eschew the traditional meaning of the KISS acronym (keep it simple, stupid) in favor of keep it short and simple to illustrate the pitch principles to abide by.
Depending on the level of familiarity your CEO has with video, or even the latest marketing trends, you’ll need to customize your pitch, and above all, keep it short – no need to go beyond a few slides.
Jeff stated that one of the easiest ways to get a video campaign off the ground and to build upon existing marketing success is to turn your top-performing blog posts into videos. This is also an easy sell to your boss, as much of the creative work is already done for you.
For execs that may be open to a larger video marketing strategy but still wary of allocating too much spend toward it, short, sharable videos could prove useful in your pitch. Shareability is becoming an increasingly important metric, and distributing videos across several platforms is free – who knows, maybe one of your videos could go viral.
But if your most pressing concern as a marketing manager is to simply get your foot in the door and secure an agreement from your CEO, Jeff stated your best path is to “prioritize videos that immediately generate revenue in the form of sales enablement assets.”
Product demos, interactive feature videos and other video collateral that can be shared with prospects at each stage of the sales funnel are invaluable assets to have, and they can be directly attributed to winning new business. What more could a CEO want than new business?
When in doubt, remember, CEOs care about revenue, not tactics.
And that’s the bottom line.
