Chapter9.Sell Your Search Marketing Proposal

Chapter 9. Sell Your Search Marketing Proposal

It's time to close the deal. Time to get the approvals for your proposal to start a search marketing program. Next to actually managing a search marketing program, the most complicated activity is getting "buy-in" from your extended search team and your executives. How hard that is to do depends on the scope of the search marketing program that you selected in Chapter 8, "Define Your Search Marketing Strategy." The larger your scope, the tougher your approval process will be.

In this chapter, you learn how to do the following:

• Assemble your proposal. You calculated the revenue opportunity for a single campaign in Chapter 7, "Measure Your Search Marketing Success," and the costs for both your first campaign and overall program in Chapter 8, "Define Your Search Marketing Strategy." In this chapter, we put them together and craft a proposal that you can use to persuade others in your company. Your proposal will contain business cases that justify the investment in both your first campaign and the program as a whole. Your proposal will also include a step-by-step plan with a time line to implement your first search marketing campaign.

• Sell your proposal to the extended search team. Your organization already has an existing team (maybe lots of teams) to manage your Web site today. These specialists decide the strategy, write the content, create the pages, design applications, and do many other things. You must take advantage of these existing resources as your extended search team, because search marketing cannot succeed unless they do the right things. You need to understand these specialists and speak their language, because you must convince them to add search marketing tasks to their day-to-day jobs.

• Sell your proposal to your executives. In most places, no money gets released without executive approval. You will learn what executives are looking for in a proposal, so that yours will be approved.

In some organizations, you can sell your proposal to the executives, who then order the extended team to execute, but in most companies that will not work. Many corporate cultures do not allow executives to bless a proposal until there is consensus among all affected. You can assess how your organization works to decide whether to talk to the extended team first, the executives first, or to work them in parallel. Regardless of which you approach first, you need to assemble your proposal so you have something to talk about, so let's do that now.