How to Get More Digital Dollars from Your CFO
In this economic environment, the importance of marketing couldn't be higher, yet new tactics are needed to build the case for spend. Here's how to get money into digital faster.
We know it's a tough economy, but marketing is certainly not dead -- it's thriving. Never have the stakes been so high to emphasize value propositions and show market leadership, but at a limited spend. This is a time to increase market penetration at the cost of your competitors, while keeping yourself afloat.
For most companies, budgeting dollars have already been defined, and often committed. While robust business cases detailing measures such as ROI, net present value, risk analysis, etc. are valuable and may be necessary, very often they don't result in additional monies for necessary projects. There exists an opportunity, however, to obtain additional dollars for projects that address severe pain points. Enter digital.
Marketing, at its core, is meant to understand and influence brand sentiment. In the past, this was a disjointed process where the four Ps (product, pricing, placement, and promotion) were leveraged to their greatest extent, and then the marketer would wait and see the results. Depending on the outcome, the marketer would then tinker and start again. Now, we have new tools. The digital channel and the prevalence of social networking are providing new ways of interacting that can help marketers stay close to customers, participate in a dialogue, and establish a richer, longer-lasting connection. On top of that, online programs are highly measurable, providing safe harbors to continue marketing activities in a responsible manner.
So how can you convince your CFO that digital is a smart investment? Through discussions with CFOs and marketers, I have found the following five tactics can help you build the case for digital marketing dollars.
Rebuild the relationship and educate
Over the past few years, the relationship between the CFO and the head of marketing has eroded. The CFO is paid to be cynical, to shoot holes in plans, to ask the hard questions, and ultimately ensure the company is making wise investments. This is problematic for the marketing department. In the past, costly projects, such as that CRM initiative, were extraordinarily expensive and are still not complete. Further, every year broadcast media is spent with only a fuzzy relationship to brand awareness -- and it's a relationship that the CFO doesn't truly care to understand.
The first step to obtaining digital budget in these times is to rebuild the relationship. Let the CFO know that you understand times have changed. Let him know that you are looking to change your marketing model in a similar way to how he has changed the business model. You are going to leverage new technologies for efficiency. You are going to work with others to make sure that a marketing initiative isn't just about "brand," but also helps build immediate value.
You can start this rebuilding by sending articles from the business pages about digital and social media. For years the CFO has read articles about MySpace, then Facebook, and recently Twitter, but he likely doesn't truly understand their relevance to the business. Start the education process on why these concepts and tools are relevant. Do a quick Twitter search on your brand and your competitors, and show the CFO what customers are saying. Remind him that this is not a paid marketing research panel -- it is customers choosing to express their views and influence their followers.
Lastly, you're going to become accountable for results. Don't shy away from this one. This has long been his problem; until now, marketing has had little accountability for its spend.
Align on value creation
What the CFO does understand is that marketing is necessary. He understands that there is a magic, unknown formula that equates "marketing" to "demand." He also knows that this mysterious equation is based on logic, research, and intuition, and therefore ROI is not always the answer. In fact, every time ROI is shown to be the answer, he gets more cynical knowing that there are always big assumptions that are not always rooted in fact.
Understanding this, marketers should work with the CFO to identify other ways of measuring value that hit upon his key objectives. During the education process, try and understand what leverage points are important to him.
For instance, knowing that customer satisfaction is a key business objective, ask questions about the value of improving customer satisfaction. Does he feel it's a top line concern (such as increasing repeat or cross product purchases) or is it bottom line (like decreasing the cost of customer service)? The answers will give you insight to create an appropriate plan and ammunition for building your case for increasing digital investments.
Social media can address both of these areas, even with small steps. For top line, consider allowing people to digitally interact with each other by tagging content. In a more robust way, consider creating separately branded sites that educate and focus topics that are core to your brand and their needs. For bottom line, consider creating searchable FAQs written in easy to understand language, and in a more advanced way, enable chat or user-generated support wikis.
Gain supporters through addressing pain points
Work with other leaders in the organization to understand pain points and how marketing can address them. This is not about making a list of pain points. It's about building consensus and obtaining supporters. The more a project addresses multiple constituencies beyond marketing, the better chance it has to succeed. Leveraging these people also means shared responsibility, with a side benefit of possibly shared budgeting dollars.
After understanding another group's pain points, collaborate to define them further. To learn about the severity of the issue, work with them to understand the metrics they are capturing, and help define the benefits of improving those metrics. Examine how the digital channel can help. After all, marketing is among the few departments charged with thinking broadly and working across divisions -- you understand both creativity and analytics. This combination of right and left brain thinking can help solve problems well beyond your traditional charge. When you engage in this manner, you will find new opportunities.
For example, let's assume consumers' expectations have not been met after purchasing your product. As a result, product returns are mounting and call center wait times are increasing. By referring purchasers to the internet, you could drastically help improve the "new buyer" experience. Incorporating robust videos and text content on your site could be handy, aided by user-defined content. Fostering customer's desire to help each other will help not only the end user's immediate need, but also drives that person back to the site to purchase more.
This exploration can often result in a creative solution -- one that benefits your peer's pain points and provides marketing ingenuity. When these types of initiatives are created, marketing becomes part of a solution, not just a budget line item.
Discuss new strategies
The CFO doesn't want to hear any more about broadcast media -- it's violently expensive and results are "squishy'" at best. He is already annoyed about broadcast media and has been asking the same question for years: "Is this the best use of our dollars?" And face it, you've been asking it, too! Obviously, that doesn't mean you remove all broadcast, but it does mean it should no longer be the central focus. Programs that can be analyzed and tracked should become core to the plan. Leading companies are approaching both short- and long-term strategies to assess how they want to invest in digital.
Realizing that it takes a while to understand your digital community, it is important to start now. Spend a half-hour per day following people and updating Twitter. Inspire other divisions to write thought pieces. Create a blog and add RSS feeds. The key here is to start thinking about how you want to influence people, what is relevant for your customers, and what you can realistically support.
The long term strategy involves research. Talk to your constituents about their needs. Define how they want to interact with you. Understand where they are going for information. The goal here is to leverage your insight from the anecdotal experiences to perform qualitative research. Further, driving toward quantitative research will validate your assumptions. Create personas through segmenting the results by the respondents' goals, needs, and behaviors. At this point you can understand the experiences that each persona craves.
For instance, one persona might be willing to invest significant time to understand product differences so they don't overpay for unwanted functionality. Socially, this means exploring online forums, reading ratings and reviews, watching YouTube videos, etc. The way to attract this persona would be to "influence the influencers" by going to these sites, fostering discussion, and creating content specifically designed to meet the consumer's needs.
Another persona may be a professional buyer looking to expand their business. This consumer can be attracted by value-add initiatives. Creating a vehicle on your site so they can advertise their products or services could be beneficial. Recruiting them to answer FAQs could give them the exposure they need, while also satisfying other customer's needs. The way to attract this persona is to show that you consider their purchase as a partnership.
While these examples may be irrelevant for your business, the point is to understand their individual needs and craft responses appropriately.
Become data driven
So how do you make yourself accountable? How do you track results of these initiatives? Become data driven -- it is an effort your CFO will understand and appreciate.
While most companies claim to be data driven, they are simply spending enormous amounts of time and money accumulating mountains of data about their consumers. Unfortunately, a large majority of the data being tracked is not used because it is not actionable to anyone in the organization. Being data driven is not about tracking every possible piece of data related to the consumer experience, it is about knowing the pieces of data that provide valuable insight into the consumer experience. For a piece of data to be labeled valuable, it must either drive or support actions that optimize the value of the experience for both the consumer and the business.
Likely, you have some sort of web measurement tool already in place. The first step is to see the value it is creating. Are you even looking at the dashboard reports consistently? Do they teach you anything? Have they influenced your decisions at all? If the answer to any of these questions is "no," then it's time to reengage.
Working with the CFO to become data driven will enable the both of you to track results, but more importantly, it will allow you to have an ongoing dialogue in a language both of you can speak. Becoming data driven will allow you to set a baseline to then foster discussions about different variations of ROI, where "return" is not always monetary.
Conclusion
In short, market to the CFO. You've spent your career defining the needs of your customers; spend some time understanding the needs of your rainmaker. Rebuild the relationship through education. Define multiple ways to work with your peers and solve joint corporate problems where marketing becomes the central link. Leverage the new strategies that you are already embarking on and find ways to benchmark all results.