How To Sell Video Marketing To Your Executive Team

Before you approach anyone and start convincing, you need to build a business case for video marketing. Your case needs to be a documented argument that demonstrates how video marketing will help your company achieve business goals and get a solid return on investment.

Before you meet with internal teams pause and take a look at your business’s current landscape and ask yourself some key questions:

• Why do you want to implement
 a video marketing platform? Come up with a statement that clearly states your reasoning for implementing video marketing software. How do you expect it will help you with your marketing efforts and revenue generation goals?
• What are your goals? How would you like to see the marketing department improve with video marketing software? Better engagement? Better conversion rates? Better lead qualification? Lead nurturing?
• What are your challenges? Which aspects of business stand in the way of achieving those goals?
• Which campaigns are you currently running? Which types of campaigns do you currently run to reach your goals and how effective have they been? Are you running email campaigns that incorporate video? Recorded webinars? YouTube ads?
• How are you planning to make video marketing work? Have you considered how you can ensure successful onboarding?

It’s important to research and find industry stats on the impact of video marketing that will help shape things in your favor. Look to reference stats that demonstrate the ROI of video marketing — for example, how it improves effectiveness across the buyer lifecycle. You should focus on finding information on lead scoring or lead nurturing, how it allows marketers to demonstrate more revenue contribution, or how it makes companies more competitive.

For example, a study from Aberdeen found that 70% of companies are using video marketing to drive buyers more effectively through the buyer’s journey. 
Be prepared to back up your arguments with facts from this data.

Once you have finished your research, organize the information you need to present your argument in a way that can be delivered to stakeholders easily, Word document or PowerPoint Presentations work great.

Be a Champion

Now that you have created an argument for video marketing software, you need to get the ball rolling. By this point you know that video marketing would be a game changing solution and not just for the marketing team, but also for the sales organization. Now its time to get the rest of your stake holders ready for a change.

Since you are empowered with the plan, you will need to act as a primary champion, or the one person responsible for making this evolution possible. You will need the vision, courage, knowledge, and skills to move your company toward transformation. Just like seating in an airline exit row, if you can’t be this person, you need to find someone who can otherwise your efforts are likely to fail.

Here are a few tips on how to position yourself as the champion:

1. Be Brave: To effect change you need to be brave, which often means having the ability to make bold moves and admit to missteps.
2. Be Action-Oriented: Now that you have solid facts to support your reasoning for video marketing it’s time to stop theorizing and start working toward your goals.
3. Set Realistic Goals: Be very careful that you don’t set unrealistic goals that you can’t meet. In the early phases, it’s critical that you hit the benchmarks you’ve outlined so that management retains its faith in your project.
4. Partner Up: Marketing has many other stakeholders and impacts other departments. Your voice is more likely to be heard if you get sales and other departments on board before reaching out to executives.

Find An Executive Sponsor

Once you’ve built your case with sales and other stakeholders, you’re ready to sell video marketing to the level above in the C-suite. Without an executive sponsor, your initiative to implement a platform solution will die on the vine.

Getting buy in and generating enthusiasm from other executives will give your initiative greater reputability among peers. Executives are better able to communicate the need for technology throughout your organization. They also have direct influence over resource allocation that will enable the project to succeed. Recruiting an executive sponsor is one of the most vital and challenging stages of implementing video marketing software. Start by setting up meetings with members of the executive team.

Identify The Stakeholders

The best place to start on the journey to make your case for video marketing to executives is the CMO. The CMO is a great person to approach, but each organization is different and may require buy-in from different people.
Outline the executive’s individual persona and corporate perspective,
note the answers they are most likely to
have about the project and initiative. Each executive has a different view of the company and along with this perspective, has unique concerns.
CMO

Identify The Persona

If you are in the marketing department, you should be familiar with the CMO role. This person is most likely to be on board with video marketing once you present your case. As leaders of the marketing department, CMOs are interested in tools to achieve return on investment more effectively. CMOs want to make marketing departments more relevant and effective so that they can drive more revenue. In addition, CMOs are the number one customer advocates in your organization. Customer experience is definitely one of their top concerns and will likely be a factor considered in all decision-making.

Your CMO is likely to ask the following questions:

1. What is the cost and ROI? Be prepared to answer this question with the ROI estimates from your research. Tell your CMO that companies using video marketing report faster growth and 70% of the buyer’s journey is already done through digital content, according to Aberdeen’s Benchmark Report.
2. How many resources do you need? Your CMO will be interested in how implementing a video marketing platform will impact the department structure. Note
that video marketing helps streamline productivity and will take many hours of off work the marketing team is already doing and will make the sales team more effective in their conversations. If you choose to implement a user-friendly video marketing platform, it will be easy to train
the current team and get up to speed quickly.
3. What current gaps do we have — and will be filling? Set the stage with solid awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of your department, including the ways video marketing would impact these areas. Maybe marketing’s lead qualification system isn’t as good as it could be, resulting in reduced sales productivity. Video marketing can help streamline this process and provide deep insights into contact behavior across video content to reduce errors and arm your sales team to engage at the right time.
4. What is the change management plan? A really good CMO understands that one of the greatest roadblocks to change can be the team itself. It can be hard to introduce new technology that will disrupt current processes, even if it will improve them.

To address this, here is an outline for four-step change management plan:

1. DISCOVER: Understand business objectives and connect them to the new technology. Create a roadmap for implementation and strategy, outline KPIs, and get key stakeholders involved.
2. DELIVER: Create a governance board and start kicking your plan into high gear. Start executing the outlined strategies.
3. DRIVE: Use video marketing to mature your capabilities.
4. DEFINE: Introduce video marketing to your team and advocate for its position in marketing practices. Demonstrate how you will use
the platform.

Influencing your executives to believe in the benefits of video marketing is a pivotal part of implementing the solution. Each executive has a unique perspective and focus. To effect change you have to appeal to all of the key stakeholders, demonstrating your understanding of their unique pain points and concerns. If you build a strong case that will allow you to argue the importance of video marketing from many different perspectives you will be successful. Good luck!