Many of you no longer face this problem within your company, which is great. Some of you are increasing spending on digital and reaping the rewards, but not all. Some B2C companies spend the lion’s share of their marketing budget on traditional marketing, even though the digital is highly effective, and so should get a bigger slice of the pie. Worse, I still work with B2B clients who not only do not understand the value of digital marketing, but they don’t even understand the value of any marketing at all. Marketing is considered a cost center and gets as little investment as they think they can get away with. What can help these executives see the light?
You might at first think that it should be easy. After all, if the numbers show that digital marketing is working, why not spend more on it? There are a few reasons:
- Inertia. It is harder to get execs to do something new than to keep up the old. If the company is plugging along, why change? Change is risky and invites criticism, so why chance it?
- Lack of analytics. B2C companies sometimes can show the value of digital marketing tactics in ways that they can’t duplicate for B2B. Because they can’t compare, they are reluctant to shift spending. Similarly, some B2B companies have so little spending going on that their analytics aren’t even trustworthy. They don’t spend, so they don’t measure, so they can’t prove they should spend.
- History. What worked for these execs when they cut their teeth in the business is good enough for them today. B2B execs learned that marketing was a low-level low-value area, so they haven’t kept up with how digital has completely changed the game. B2C execs have an unshakable belief in traditional marketing and are reluctant to reduce its investment for this new unproven alternative.
So, if analytics won’t persuade them, what do you do? Show them the competition. One thing you should know about executives is that they are fiercely competitive. That’s how they rose to the top of heap in their own company. They certainly don’t want to be in second-place as a company. But how do you show them what competitors are doing?
- Show them the pundits. Dig up the consulting studies on how customer behavior is changing to require reaching them in digital channels.
- Show them how companies in their industry are adapting. Show them how the world has changed from what they knew. Show them how investment in marketing (especially digital marketing) is correlated to improved revenue and profit growth.
- Show them the numbers. Yeah, I know I just said that it can be hard to get numbers, but there are numbers out there. If your competitors are public companies, you can pull their annual reports and SEC filings and get numbers on how much they spend on marketing. You might be surprised to see that in the same industry, some companies spend 10 times what others do.
Don’t sit idly by while your competitors are running digital rings around you. Eventually that doesn’t work out for you personally, because some new exec will show up that thinks you were asleep at the switch. Make it your business to persuade your execs of what is really needed. If you can’t maybe you need to find someone new to work for, because your job at that company is a lot less stable than you think.
