How to Get Stakeholder Buy-in for Your Inbound Marketing

When it comes to creating a good inbound strategy for a business, organisations that work together across several departments will always be able to create better content for their customers than those who silo their marketing team.

By creating data driven content based on the experience of your customers, your marketing team will require collaboration with sales, as well as any other department that has an insight into the customer’s journey. Once you have the right people on board, you will be able to start to build a truly customer-centric content strategy that aligns your brand’s position, business goals and customer interactions.

This delivers a clear message to anyone who works with you, but how do you get the key decision makers in your company to embrace the new strategy?

Keep things simple

Firstly, it is important to remember that other departments will not be used to the marketing lingo that you may be using, and so keeping things simple will be the first step in making sure you don’t lose their interest as soon as you start to speak.

Next, consider what an inbound strategy can do to benefit the stakeholder you are appealing to. If they are the Head of Sales, then discuss real life examples of how a content-driven strategy will help to provide the sales team with more highly qualified leads, saving their team time and provide more opportunities to make more sales.

‘Content business strategy’

Referring to the inbound marketing strategy as a ‘content business strategy’ will be much more inclusive than just a ‘content marketing strategy’, so start to set up some content business strategy meetings with your stakeholders and discuss their priorities. Come armed with a high level plan that you can start to talk your stakeholders through to start to gain trust. You will want to include any stats what will show the tangible benefits that a well-implemented inbound strategy can bring.

The buyer’s journey has changed

Whenever you speak to stakeholders, you will also want to make it clear that this will not be a marketing revolution compared to what has come before, or that anything that they have done in the past is wrong. What you will want to do is emphasise that inbound marketing is just a shift that reflects the way that people purchase now.

Thanks to the Internet, 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before a potential customer even speaks to a sales person. This means that by the time most make contact with your sales team, they have already researched and come to some sort of opinion about your product and company. This shows the value of content marketing because if you have created insightful content which has allowed customers to find the solution to their problem with your product, you will be able to have many more qualified sales leads and less time wasted on leads that will never convert to a sale.

So, how do you get your key stakeholders on board with your inbound strategy? Consider how the strategy will benefit their department and goals, and be sure to go armed to the meeting with examples that will help make the goals you want to set much more tangible and realistic. With the right preparation and approach, even the most stubborn stakeholders will be signing up.