Getting on Board: 7 Steps to Selling Marketing to Your C-Suite

Buyer behaviour has undergone a major change. As a marketer yourself, you’re likely acutely aware of this shift. Customers, competitors – all now online. But what about your own company? While some of your company’s higher-ups will embrace the vast opportunities that digital provides, tradition still reigns in certain industries.

This means that when it comes to talking your C-Suite (meaning your company’s chief execs) into raising the marketing budget, getting sign-off can be tricky. And, of course, before your marketing efforts stand a chance of reaching potential customers, you’ve first got to win over the big bosses.

So, be it new software and services like CRM and SEO, a pivot from organic to paid social, a revamp of the website – you name it – we’ll be discussing the top ways of getting your marketing off the ground.

Here are 7 tips for selling marketing to your C-Suite.

1. Specify the Challenge

Your first step should be to identify a specific problem that your company is facing – this could either be an active issue that you need to resolve or an opportunity your company is missing out on.

By attaching your proposal to a problem, you can better draw attention to its necessity. What’s more, if the issue is a somewhat urgent one – or something that you can prove is costing your company a lot of money – you stand a better chance of getting sign-off faster by your C-Suite.

Example: You work for a hair salon that is short-staffed and closed two weekdays a week to allow for weekend business. Both of these factors mean that there’s not always someone around to answer the calls and take bookings. 

You know that if you invest in a web developer to create an online booking form, you could reduce the burden of answering calls. This also gives customers more ways to get in touch. Added to your pitch, ensuring your Google My Business Profile is up to date with your opening hours could also reduce the loss of business. Both lead to a better run and busier salon, which could result in the hiring of more staff. 

By showing that your business’s best interests are front and centre during your pitch, you can demonstrate why there’s a need for budget sign-off. This is matchmaking a solution with a problem in action. And, ultimately, as the C-Suite will know too well: all problems need solutions, and not all solutions are free.

2. Choose the Right C-Suite Executive

When you’re trying to get support for your marketing proposal from the big bosses, it’s important to read the room and pick the right person to talk to. But, how do you decide who’s the best fit?

Understanding the C-Suite

The C-Suite is made up of your company’s higher-ups, with the ‘C’ simply standing for ‘Chief’ – think the chief executive officer or chief financial officer, for example. Each executive cares about a different area of the business.

To get their support during your pitch, you need to choose the person whose interests best match what your proposal sets out to achieve.

Connecting Roles with Ideas

Look at your marketing plan. Is it mostly about increasing revenue? If so, the person in charge of money (CFO) might be the one to talk to. Is it about investing in better SEO tools to maximise your in-house marketing potential? The CIO. Boosting brand awareness and company profile? Perhaps the chief marketing officer will be the best to lobby.

Using Supporters

Beyond roles and responsibilities, personal champions play a significant role in the C-Suite’s decision-making process. Look for executives who have historically shown interest in marketing-related efforts or who have a knack for embracing new ideas. Leveraging their support can create a ripple effect, rallying other high-ranking execs to get behind your cause.

By choosing the executive whose sphere of influence mirrors your proposal’s impact, you’re taking a step towards not just selling marketing but nurturing a collaboration that could lead to similar initiatives being more quickly greenlit in the future.

Beyond C-Suite, seek allies in other departments (sales, customer service, etc.) who can echo your sentiment and talk about the positive impacts that digital marketing will have on their work and their targets. For example, a strong digital presence can feed more qualified leads into the sales funnel, improving sales team performance, and hopefully improving revenue growth.

3. Speak the Language of Business

Now that you’ve identified the best audience for your pitch, prioritise speaking the language that most resonates with them: in most cases, this will be your financials. Finance is ultimately the crux of what marketing sets out to impact anyway – even if through more indirect means like a partnership that leads to boosted brand awareness or broadening the SEO budget and creating content that converts – so forecasting how you anticipate your new proposal impacting the bottom line will speak volumes.

As you size up the potential value of your proposal, use a blend of predictive analytical data to show what it could mean for the company itself AND wider industry data to back up how you’ve reached your conclusion.

Example: If you work for a restaurant or chain that has yet to open a takeaway menu, you will want to highlight the missed revenue from not tapping into soaring demand. In 2021, the average annual spend per person on takeaway food in the UK alone was £641, and this correlates with the growth of online orders. That’s huge money to be made if your restaurant went digital.

By aligning your proposal with tangible financial outcomes, it’ll become easier for your bosses to see its value. Frame your ideas as strategic investments rather than expenses, emphasising how your initiatives could directly contribute to the company’s financial goals and overarching business strategy.

4. Explain the shift towards digital activity

Providing a data-based case for investment is crucial, and so too is explaining the shift towards digital activity within your market. Those whose role sits outside the remit of marketing might not always understand the importance of digital, so it’s important to educate them in a way that adds value and gives them clarity on what digital marketing can do for the business.

To do this, show how consumers are relying on digital channels for decision-making. Share trends like how e-commerce, social media, and mobile usage have increased. Here, you can talk about the buyer journey and why showing up at every stage of the funnel is crucial. This is particularly powerful if you’re trying to justify investment in another marketing channel, or further investment in an existing one.

Research and present how competitors (or industry leaders) are investing in digital marketing too. There’s something powerful about showing business leaders what their competition are doing – show them the opportunity, what you could capitalise on, and learnings to take from other market leaders. This highlights the need to remain competitive and capitalise on current trends.

As well as discussing these points, touch on how going digital can futureproof the business. Digital marketing is becoming essential as traditional channels (like print or TV) decline in effectiveness. Position digital marketing as an essential investment to futureproof the company. Explain that your digital presence – particularly your website – is your online real estate and a worthy investment.

5. Highlight cost-effectiveness

One of the key messages to get across to C-Suite is also the cost-effectiveness of opting to invest in digital marketing, and tailoring the messaging depending on the scenario. For example, if you’re looking to onboard a marketing agency, you can explain that engaging with an agency can free up time for company leaders and internal teams to focus on the wider business strategy.

Not only that, even though agencies have their management fees, hiring an in-house specialist for each of your channels means that the salary costs can soon increase, and on top of that you have the admin and training requirements that go along with managing an internal team. So, when all things are considered, using an agency may be a cheaper option.

Agencies have processes, tools, and dedicated account managers, all of which can often contribute to seeing quicker results and therefore getting more from your overall spend.

In terms of growing your digital presence, digital marketing can be more cost-effective compared to traditional methods too. For example, digital routes often offer a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA), better targeting, and more efficient use of the marketing budget you’re given every year.

In terms of presenting this cost-effectiveness – present it as a comparison of costs and expected outcomes regarding what you’re currently doing vs. the cost-savings that could be achieved.

6. Start small, prove results, and scale from there

If there’s hesitancy to invest in digital, it could be worth proposing a proof of concept project so you can prove results and then scale from there. You can then test and prove the effectiveness of digital marketing and what it is that you want to explore, whether that’s ramping up activity at one area of the funnel, or investing in an entirely new channel. You can use a small budget to do this, and then help gain their trust for future investment.

Along the journey, keep an eye out for changes in the market, emerging digital marketing trends, tools, and technologies. Aside from proven results, you can use this to inform the conversation around investment, showing your C-Suite exactly why their investment is key in staying ahead of the competition and capitalising on any industry opportunities.

7. Highlight the measurable nature of digital marketing

One of the great things about digital marketing is that it can be measured, pretty much in real-time, so you can track performance on an ongoing basis. Highlight this to your C-Suite, helping them to understand that, unlike traditional methods where results may be hard to quantify or indirect, this method of marketing can be measured through very clear key performance indicators (KPIs). This may include metrics like traffic/clicks, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, customer acquisition costs (CAC), or return on investment (ROI).

Explain how tools like Google Analytics, CRM software, and social media analytics allow you to track user behaviour, understand customer journeys, and attribute sales or conversions directly to specific campaigns. This data gives you the power to continuously optimise your campaigns and strive for better results based on actions backed by data.

Then, when your campaigns are up and running, by focusing on specific numbers such as how a small paid search campaign drove X% increase in sales, you provide clear evidence of digital marketing’s value. These insights can equip you to allocate your budget more efficiently, ensuring it’s well-spent where it yields the best return. This transparency and accountability in performance metrics resonate strongly with C-suite executives who see the value in data-driven decision-making and tangible outcomes.

With More Customers Online Than Ever, It’s Time to Go Digital

Ultimately, selling marketing to your C-Suite is necessary to gain the backing and resources you need. While, as marketers, it’s easy to get excited about the potential of a new strategy, effectively conveying its value to the board requires a strategic and calculated approach.

With the rise of ecommerce, it’s only natural that the number of internet customers has risen with it. As it stands in 2023, digital buyers have soared to a sizeable 2.64 billion – that’s 33.3% of the worldwide population or, in other words, 1 in 3 people. That’s a tremendous market out there.

If you’ve yet to modernise your business and take the leap online, now is the time to go digital. Speak to the Embryo team today.

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