This is Bob Tripathi and one of the big questions that I asked get asked by people all the time is how do you create company buy-in when it comes to marketing or digital marketing. There isn’t one short answer on how you create buy in across the company, but essentially what you’re doing is, as a leader, as a seller, as anyone, your job is to bring everyone together on the same page and to pay attention. And essentially sell your plan. That’s how you create buy-in at a really basic level.

Leaders do it all the time and politicians try to do it. Sometimes you do things and sometimes they fail, but most of the time when it comes to digital marketing there are specific steps that you need to take, if you need to create a company-wide it, now in this day and age and this year that we are in, you don’t need to convince people on the benefit of digital marketing–that everyone knows–what people don’t know is what it can do for their business.

Or sometimes even if they know what it can do at that business core, your real big question is how can you can still use digital marketing in your company? Either you are just starting out with your digital program or you are at a mature level, whatever that case may be. You always have to create a buy in with your company.

So the reason you create a buy in is essentially you want to sell your plan to all the stakeholders within the company. And once you’re able to sell the plan to everyone within the company, then everyone is going to chip in and going to be part of your plan. And then everyone is going in the same direction. And that is up, right? So here are some of the points that I’ve found around all my professional life in digital marketing and I know which ones work and which ones don’t.

Step 1: Present yourself as an authority

So the first step you do whenever you’re trying to get a company-wide buy-in when it comes to selling your marketing plan, whether it is either be a project or big initiative. The first thing you want to do is you want to present yourself as the authority on that subject, right? So if you present yourself as an authority based on your word, than people are going to get that instant trust in you. They are going to trust you, they going to believe you, right? It’s not about likability. Likability is somewhat important. But most importantly, it is what you know. And because of that, the subject matter expertise that you bring in, that’s how people start trusting you more, right? So that’s the number one thing. So establish yourself as a subject matter expert.

Step 2: Show examples of what other companies are doing

After that, you want to show examples of things that other companies and other organizations, in other areas in life have done better when they’ve implemented digital marketing and how they have taken their program from zero to 50 or from 50 to 100.

So when you show examples to everyone, especially your leadership in your company, then there’s going to be a lot bigger and broader buy in. And remember this, nothing gets the creative juices flowing, especially when it comes to showing your competitor’s information. Say, if you show your boss how the competitors is doing in the market, it’s going to get the creative juices flowing and that’s what you want to do, right? So you want to pick an example from your competitors also for model ancillary, other parts of the, of the society of business or what have you, so that’s the really critical.

Step 3: Bring all the stakeholders together

The third step after that, what you want to do is you want to bring in all the stakeholders together and figure out who are the different stakeholders. Let’s say you’re a small company, or a medium-sized company, then it could be a content writer, it could be a CFO, it could be of course your CEO, it could be your customer success person, it could be a sales person. So you want to bring all these people together as stakeholders and do this kind of presentation on what others are doing.

Step 4: The Power of small wins

The fourth thing you want to do is figure out which part of the business can you pick and have the most amount of impact in the shortest amount of time. And that is what you call as a low hanging fruit. So you don’t want to go out and take the topic or take the project which is going to take like a year or two to implement and see results. But do you want to take the smallest topic or the smallest sub project where you can make the maximum amount of impact and based on that which is known as power of small wins, then you want to work on that form a project or small or little campaign, whatever you want to call it.

Step 5: Show the results with data

And then you want to show the results, whatever they could be. It could be a couple of weeks or it could be in a month. And that’s called the power of small wins. You show the wins that you did with that little project and then you go around your company, different departments, whatever the structure is, and then you show the different stakeholders and what you are able to do with digital marketing in any area and make a huge amount of difference in the smallest amount of time.

Once you have data, that’s when you can convince people what you can do or what you’ve been bringing to the table. Right? So that’s really key to go after that part, which is the power of small wins. You are your own PR agency, so you have to go around and show what you did and now what you can do for the broader set of the business and that is very critical.

Now after going through all these steps and with the power of small wins you are pretty sure you’re going to gain lot of trust and confidence from the other stakeholders in the business, including your boss, right? So they won’t stop the momentum. After that, you pick up those bigger initiatives, the bigger campaigns that people were afraid to give to you for digital marketing, and you take them over and then you start working on it.

This is how essentially you get everyone to be on the same page and essentially, create a company-wide buy-in when it comes to digital marketing. So, that was few of my points when it comes to creating company-wide buy-in.

Be sure to reach out to me. My email is bob@digitalsparxmarketing.com. I have some templates, and if it will help, email me and I’m happy to send them over, but I hope you find this video helpful and as always, you can look at some other videos and at our digital marketing. Thank you for joining.