You're Wasting Your Money

Getting the ear of the CFO

It's like trying to explain to my parents what I do for a living--getting the CFO to buy-in to more advanced digital marketing beyond some Pay-Per-Click and some banner ads.  It's getting better though (the part about the CFO, not the part about the parents).  But you have to speak to them on their terms.  Not ours.

So, instead of rehashing Twitter for business, or explaining how having great online karma will bolster their brand, I've had to go in with my financial guns blazing: you're wasting your money.  And I'll show you how.

Now I've got his/her attention.  Hey, their departments are graded on saving the company money, so why not help them?

Now, to back it up, I walked through the price of advertising in the "trade" magazines, the price of sponsorship in the directories, and some other standard B2B stuff for companies that "don't really need this Web 2.0 stuff."  Then we looked at the price of those--per head--on the call to action in those ads.  In some cases it got to over $300 per visitor to their web site!

Try it with PR too.  Just because the Journal gets X Million subscribers doesn't mean they all go to page B4 to read the 3 inches of column your agency secured for you.  Though we don't have statistics that show how many people go that deep, we do have statistics on how deep into search results people go.  Maybe page 3.  We have comedians like Brian Regan who poke fun at this a bit joking that he never finishes stories that are continued from the first page.  "And after a 9 month long trial the verdict came in...continued on A9.  I guess I'll never know."  So we can make a pretty strong argument that the number of people that made it back there in the Journal is substantially less than the subscriber base of the newspaper.

So back to wasting money--or rather, not wasting it.  We walked through cost of conversion for the effort of some social media campaigns, and how we can track who/when/where/how.  (I wish we knew the why!)  We walked through effort hours, we walked through cost per conversion, and the lasting effects of promotions placed on the web versus the newspaper and magazines (daily, weekly, or monthly shelf life).  And we tied it back to some of the measurements they were getting familiar with: pay-per-click (cost per click) and banner ad media buys (divided by number of click-throughs).

So we had cost per conversion, shelf-life, search visibility, and effort cost to compare.  All of which was (on a case by case basis) lower than what they were currently doing.  

They say to be successful in business, you have to build a better mousetrap.  We have the tools and creativity to do that now.  We just have to show off how many mice it catches rather than how cool and new the components of the trap are.

More to come...