Oversimplify when asking for marketing budgets
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study at the end of the newsletter.
Most marketers and probably most people have a tendency to overshare and vomit information when it comes to asking for budget for a marketing effort. This tactic probably has the opposite effect.
I think this is especially important in our current climate of economic turbulence and shiny object syndrome as it relates to AI.
The unfortunate reality and one I have seen occur on multiple occasions is that the marketers who lack the ability to articulate their value end up on the layoff lists. By oversimplifying and making content relatable to the audience you are more likely to be successful.
I will illustrate this with an example of the time I landed my most enormous SEO budget ask ever. I was working with a company where the c-suite was furious at the SEO team and thought they were failures. The CEO gave the team a few days to prepare a presentation of why the team even deserved to still be employed.
The team had intended to go back in front of the leadership and "hit them even harder" with the facts about why they were in fact succeeding at SEO and the executives were just wrong.
The SEO team was factually correct in their assessment of what was happening.
Everything the leadership group believed about the SEO team was based on a false premise: a mix of past experiences with shady agencies, unintentional misinformation from other marketing teams, and the SEO team's continued failure to communicate.
Due to the misinformation and a lack of understanding, the leadership team themselves had a huge role in causing the SEO issue they were now blaming on the SEO team. This was obvious to the SEO team, and they thought it should have been obvious to the leadership team too. Should have was not working.
I implored upon the SEO team to try a different track and was ultimately successful at convincing them that if they went back to that meeting with more of the same, they would probably end up without jobs.
Instead, we built a presentation that used the majority of our allotted time to explain "WHAT" SEO actually was and how it worked. Many SEO teams wrongly assume that just because most people know what search engines are they must also know how it works.
We threw all assumptions aside and went back to basics.
Since we wanted to present like this was the first time they ever heard of SEO, we used very basic analogies that they could understand. One member of the exec team was a sports fanatic so we talked about SEO as an "assist". Another member of the team was a wizard with numbers, so we compared SEO to a house accruing equity as each mortgage payment was made. And, another member of leadership was an engineer, so we showed how the algorithm worked and didn't just tell.
Result
The result was a complete 180.
Everyone kept their jobs and we scored two new full-time hires. We had only asked for one and the executive team generously offered another because they wanted the plan presented and more. We also landed hundreds of thousands of dollars for content, PR, education, and software.
This reaffirmed my commitment to always trying to keep it simple even if I think the audience is already advanced.
It is always possible to skip over the beginning of a presentation if the audience needs something more complex, but it is a lot harder to try to simplify a presentation that is too advanced.
7 principles of simplification when asking for budget:
Explain. Never hide behind a "black box" in marketing. Yes, the Google search algorithm, the Google Ads auction, the LinkedIn Algorithm etc are all very complex, but don’t hide behind the mystery. Explain everything you can to the best of your knowledge. Let the audience be the ones to declare it a black box, don’t be the one to say it yourself.
Give answers, not defenses. Many marketers have a tendency to say “it depends” when asked a question with a scenario that could go in multiple directions. This is not acceptable to many leaders who will take that “it depends” and instead go find someone else who will give an answer. An alternative to “it depends could be "I don't know, but I will find out.”
Make your audience care. Never assume your audience knows, likes, or even cares about what you are presenting. Executives hear multiple presentations each day and they can’t be expected to have the same level of passion for every function and discipline. It is your job as the presenter to make them care.
Use analogies for hard-to-understand topics. Everyone needs something familiar to understand the unfamiliar. This is the reason that many app-delivery companies are called the “uber of…” Uber is familiar to most people and it allows them to have a point of context about something unfamiliar. If your topic is unfamiliar and novel, find a way to make it familiar.
Know your audience. Always prep for your audience; it doesn't help if you sound smart but you have not connected to your audience. If you have never presented in front of this audience before, see if you can sit in on another team’s pitch or ask others that have met with this audience.
Always have an ask. The answer might be no, but it is a certain no if you don't ask. You may not meet with this particular team that has budget powers often, so even if it’s just information sharing meeting find a way to end with an ask.
Summarize upfront. Use an executive summary at the beginning of your deck. Just in case you end up losing the team in the details later, hopefully, your simplification and analogies landed at the beginning of your summary.
The future of marketing is undoubtedly in flux, but there are certainly budgets being approved. Don’t assume that your request will be unsuccessful just because of the macroeconomic conditions. Follow these principles and you will have a far better chance of landing the budgets you need.
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