Just a few weeks into my first senior growth role, I got a taste of what it’s like to seek marketing buy-in from leadership. SEO was the main marketing channel, so I emailed the CMO to see if I could hire some content marketing freelancers and work with a link builder.
I was clear about who I wanted to hire, how much I wanted to spend, and how it was going to boost traffic and rankings. In my mind, it was a flawless pitch—who doesn’t love ranking number one on Google?
She responded not 10 minutes later: “I don’t have the budget for this right now.”
“Of course you have the budget,” I said out loud from the safety of my home office.
I’d asked for less than $10,000 and the business was fresh off its series A raise. But since nothing in my email talked about increasing marketing’s pipeline contribution, it wasn’t important enough to merit even a small portion of the budget.
It was the first of many lessons that getting management and leadership to approve marketing needs is rarely easy.
I’ve since found content marketing and SEO to be particularly tricky due to their imperfect tracking and attribution, especially when they focus on the wrong outcomes—in this case, traffic instead of organic leads at a fraction of paid CPA.
In this article, I’ll share my experiences and frameworks for:
- What executives care about and how I create enthusiasm
- How to pitch SEO and content to different types of executives
- Tactics that have helped me consistently secure executive buy-in since 2018
- A checklist to help with your next pitch
- Why I believe the buy-in process fosters career growth
How to get your leadership team invested in SEO and marketing success
So much of getting executive buy-in for SEO and content marketing depends on whether you can build initial bridges with the leadership team. I’ve found that the best way to do this is to speak their language, focusing on three company-level goals:
- Increasing revenue i.e. top line growth
- Improving profit margin i.e. bottom line efficiency
- Making the business look good i.e. brand equity
To most executives, how you plan to execute your strategy matters less than the goal or return on investment that you commit to. That’s not to say that brand values and ethics are disposable—in fact, you’ll be trusted and expected to deliver while adhering to them.
But at the early stage, my conversations typically focus on three areas.
1. Sell a vision
Marketing to an audience and crafting a pitch for stakeholder buy-in have plenty of overlap. While clear and logical messaging is often noticed and appreciated, I’ve rarely seen it get people excited. What captures attention in both scenarios are vision and storytelling.
These are the questions I ask myself before speaking to an executive or a leadership team about marketing and SEO strategy:
- What narrative and points of view separates our business from the competition?
- If this narrative exists, does our go-to-market approach line up with it?
- How strong is our conviction that this is the “right” way?
If you do this right, then when you get to channels and programs, they’ll connect back to your marketing strategy and provide reassurance that you’ve thought things through. To-do lists should never be the focus of an initial buy-in pitch.
You have to start with a vision, and you have to be able to share this vision in a compelling way that’s compelling. I tell leadership teams how we’re going to get where they want to go: Our philosophy is this, here’s our point of view, here are the channels, here’s where we’re going to win, here are the messages we’re going to take to those channels, and here’s the frequency of this output.
– Devin Reed, Founder, The Reeder, Executive Conversations Podcast Ep.8
If you try to do the opposite—here’s what we believe, we’re going to do webinars and podcasts and white papers—that’s not exciting. It’s not even exciting to me as a marketer. Lead with the big vision, the desired state, and the excitement. Then people want to know how to get there.
2. Balance short-term and long-term plans
SEOs and marketers are always walking the tightrope between delivering results yesterday and setting the brand up to succeed in the future. This tricky balancing act is almost always divided into performance or demand marketing for short-term results, and organic or brand marketing for long-term growth.
In my conversations with decision-makers—both at the outset and when checking in—I like to revisit the three company-level goals and connect each one back to short-term and long-term marketing and SEO:
With efficiency being the name of the game, there isn’t a lot of room for tactics that aren’t guaranteed to work. CFOs, for example, love numbers that can be proven. So you tend to default to tactics like performance marketing, and long-term tactics like brand awareness tend to fall away.
– Lisa Vecchio, former GVP of Integrated Marketing, Aircall, Executive Conversations Podcast, Ep 10
I find that even with data where I can correlate something like branded search to MQL volume, it doesn’t matter if it’s not a dollar in, dollar out measurement.
3. Cater to marketing and non-marketing executives
Depending on the business, you may need to get buy-in from an individual—CEO, CMO, CFO—or a combination of them. While the focus on business results is consistent across leadership roles, there are nuanced differences between getting SEO budget approval from executives with marketing specialism and ones without.
When pitching to non-marketing executives, remember that they typically:
- Don’t often have deep technical expertise in marketing
- Aren’t always up to date with trends and best practices
- Tend to prioritize things like financials, brand, and values/culture
- Will often propose solutions that you may need to educate them on
- Insist on immediate or short-term results with full measurement and attribution
Whereas with marketing executives, they tend to:
- Often understand the work you’re doing and your methods
- Tend to be clued in on trends and key events such as Google core updates
- Prioritize the metrics they understand alongside financial or business impact
- Frequently have higher standards for the quality of the work
- Understand that not all investments come good immediately (or at all)
There are CEOs who are career marketers and CMOs with deep financial savvy, so treat this as a framework rather than gospel.
For example, one of my biggest challenges of the past 12 months has been convincing a three-person leadership team (CEO, CTO, COO) with no SEO expertise to continue investing in human content marketers even as generative AI becomes more popular.
I’ve shown and proved that generative AI’s impact on marketing isn’t purely beneficial, and that there are real pitfalls to the absence of human input when over-indexing on AI output. By steering these conversations from technology back to revenue and brand, I’ve managed to grow marketing headcount at a time when many teams are being told to reduce their team size or freeze hiring.
7 tactics I use to craft pitches that win buy-in for SEO and content projects
Once you’re aligned on vision and strategy, the next part is getting your budget approved. Depending on the team, you may need to do this part once or several times a year. Either way, you want the focus of these conversations to be around the work and its impact, not fulfillment or tasks.
To help with your next pitch, here’s a simplified version of the template my team uses when weighing up new marketing and SEO initiatives.
- Summary: What is the idea or hypothesis? Be sure to include the specific pain point or insight that it will address.
- Differentiation: How does the idea tie back to our vision, strategy, and thought leadership positioning?
- Belief: Why do you believe in this idea? Include evidence, data, and insights that support your theory.
- Purpose: What area(s) of growth does this initiative contribute to?
- Grow brand and product awareness?
- Support acquisition of new emails or leads?
- Improve our chances of converting leads?
- Boost product adoption among trials and subscribers?
- Support customer engagement and revenue retention?
- Audience: Which ICP audiences or segments will the idea resonate with?
- Distribution: Which channel(s) will you use for distribution?
- Forecasting: Based on past and current performance, what outcomes do you expect?
- Production: What is the proposed timeline for production? When do you expect to go live?
- Friction: Are there any blockers, dependencies, or potential complications?
- Cost: How much will your idea cost to execute and distribute?
Here are seven tactics I use to consistently get budget approvals for SEO, content marketing, and organic growth programs.
1. Connect your ideas to stakeholder priorities
The first step in securing buy-in for SEO and content marketing is knowing whose approval you need, what conditions they operate in, and what makes them tick. Getting them to approve budget for campaigns and initiatives is not that different.
- Are you talking solely to a maverick or visionary CEO chasing their own legacy? It will probably be easier to sell a large-scale thought leadership content program.
- Do you need approval from a conservative, risk-averse CFO who’s been asked to trim wastage from the operating budget? They will likely ask you to forecast the exact return on your competitor comparison pages.
- Is the budget controlled by a seasoned CMO with a track record of success? They will likely be open to both ideas but have other areas of marketing to consider aside from SEO and content. Be prepared to make a case for why your needs are more important than a new design agency.
For example, my current employer where I lead acquisition marketing is a product-led SaaS with no outbound demand generation. A significant part of my impact is measured against lead quality and pipeline contribution.
But just as important to the CEO is the brand’s standing in the PPC community.
This means that alongside campaigns that have a direct, measurable, and immediate impact on pipeline (demand capture), I am expected to consider awareness targets that yield few immediate customers but contribute to a year-on-year increase in revenue.
2. Make a business case for SEO
Buy-in is secured more easily when you focus on business goals instead of marketing metrics. This might seem obvious, but very few marketers I talk to know how to make a business case for SEO.
And the nature of the company’s business model heavily influences how you should approach your pitch.
- Does the company have a fresh injection of VC funds? Newly minted companies tend to have ambitious goals and heartier risk appetites, making them more free with spending.
- Are investors breathing down the founding team’s necks? This pressure may cause leadership to over-index on initiatives with immediate and guaranteed results.
- Bootstrapped businesses may be beholden to no external influences, but they usually have less to spend and scrutinize expenses more closely. You’ll likely have heavy competition for resources.
One of my trusted techniques is applying a copywriting framework that I learned from Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy. Dimensionalization allows you to get to the heart of “the benefit of the benefit of the benefit” by asking “So what?” over and over.
I start with the most immediate impact and drill down until I reach the value to the business. If I can’t find one, I know I’m looking at a vanity project or something better reserved until we have a bit of surplus.
Applied to a simple content creation project, it might look something like this:
”
3. Use data to forecast impact (within reason)
There are no guarantees in SEO and marketing. I consider our line of work (when done well) to be a series of experiments. All that separates the good from the bad is how informed those experiments are.
Forecasting SEO growth has always been difficult, and recent changes to the way Google works have made it even more unpredictable. Try this three-point framework I use to inform my pitch when seeking stakeholder buy-in:
- Use current data to set a baseline for performance and costs. Recent performance and investments can offer a foundation on which to build your pitch. What did you spend on SEO and content during the last three months? What were the returns in terms of sign-ups, free trials, and subscriptions? How is the quality of the leads sourced from organic search? Are you aiming for more of the same or do your results validate additional investment?
- Use seasonality to spot volatility and uncertainty. Look back over the past couple of years to identify periods of flux. In SaaS, I typically look for holiday periods, summer, change of calendar and fiscal years, tax seasons, and inflection points in the market. Review sales data to identify any dips in conversion rate during these periods. If you’ve been annotating your performance timeline, you should have this already. If you don’t have years of data, try to look back at least 13 months.
- Use historical data to set expectations against what’s been achieved within a budget. This can be tricky, but it’s also what your CEO/CFO/CMO wants to see. In other words, what can they expect in return for every dollar they invest? Account for extenuating factors such as aforementioned fluctuations, levels of intent, and required nurture programs. Creating several new “what is” articles with a resource download CTA is not the same as in-depth buyer’s guides that drive immediate sign-ups.
The first thing I try to do (when getting buy-in) is establish a baseline. What are others in my category spending? Brands publish deep-dive surveys every year.
– Mick Essex, Head of Growth, POWR, Executive Conversations Podcast, Ep. 1
One that I look at is the Deloitte CMO Survey. It gives ideas of standards for different factors such as your category or geographic market. So that’s where I find the baseline. For SaaS, this study indicated around 8% of gross revenue as the marketing budget. So you could use that as the foundation of your pitch.”
Author’s note: Scaling a budget and program is rarely linear
When forecasting, remember that the unit cost of production goes up no matter the channel. What you spent to go from 0-50k in organic traffic will not be what it costs to go to 100k. You should also be aware of any points of diminishing returns, such as owning the top organic positions for all your branded queries.
4. Dispel myths with evidence—empirical and anecdotal
For better or worse, being familiar with marketing means that people sometimes think they understand the mechanics of the industry even when they don’t.
Executives sometimes hear and read things about SEO and content marketing from a variety of sources. When they don’t have the background to evaluate and discern what’s reliable and what’s not, their level of conviction in those ideas may spell trouble for SEOs.
Part of getting buy-in from leadership means that from time to time, your job is to dispel misconceptions as quickly as you discover they exist. The longer you go without addressing them, the more difficult it will be when you finally bring it up.
I use a blend of qualitative and quantitative evidence to make my case in these situations, including what’s worked for me as well as the mistakes of others.
When my team started meaningfully testing generative AI in our workflows, senior stakeholders suggested that we should use it to mass-produce content and save on content costs.
As qualitative evidence, I referenced this cautionary tale to explain why we should not outsource the creative process wholly to LLMs. For quantitative evidence, I published three articles created entirely by generative AI and tracked 30-day performance as a reference.
It’s important to recognize that good leaders can be complex people, and you may not get the exact outcome you want.
Ultimately, we decided to integrate LLM tech more deeply when creating upper-funnel glossary style content, where differentiation is not as strong a selling point but search volumes still present opportunities. The condition was that a human marketer would still need to review and edit the output, adding our thought leadership angles to the content as a point of differentiation.
5. Learn testing and validation methodologies
It’s almost always easier to get a leadership team to approve a $1,000 test than a $10,000 investment in a new and unproven program. If your test fails, the expense can safely be written off. If it succeeds and you find validation, projecting the impact of an additional $9,000 investment is a relatively straightforward process.
Improving my data literacy has been incredibly powerful for my career, especially how to run different testing models and interpret the findings. Learn the difference between A/B, multivariate, holdout, and split tests—and how to pick the one relevant to your goals.
These days, I nearly always get tests approved when I frame them as, “I have a hypothesis, and based on these data points I believe we can achieve these results. I want to test this out over 90 days for $x—here’s my process. If I see the following results or positive signals, I’d like to spend an additional $x to replicate it for another 90 days. If I can validate that, I’d like to invest $x per month to sustain the program until it’s ready to be scaled.”
I’m in the middle of one of these tests now, to determine the impact of SME authors on lead generation and quality. In other words, do articles written by our ICP get more attention and build more trust with potential customers? Framing this in the context of growing our qualified lead pipeline made it even easier to get the investment and backing I needed.
6. Make friends on other teams
Budget approval for SEO and content marketing doesn’t always have to come specifically from those allocations. If there’s alignment with another team that stands to benefit from your work, why not have them share in the risk as well as the reward?
Of course, there has to be true alignment and you have to make a good case. But if you find it tough to persuade senior management, this might be an easier starting point.
One proposal I made earlier this year to a consulting client was to ask product marketing to absorb half the cost of creating an in-depth buyer’s guide. The target keyword was a high-volume query for a category that they wanted to be known for (and its variants), so the test had the volume needed to draw conclusions.
SEO would measure results from the SERP—ranking and appearance in featured snippets—product marketing could test the validity of their new category hypothesis, and both teams would observe the quality of the leads that came through.
It was successful on all fronts, and both teams jointly presented the findings (and their deep collaboration) at the next all-hands meeting.
7. Use language as a psychological tool
A critical lesson from my copywriting days is that word choice has a tremendous impact on audience and customer behavior. People are defensive and critical by nature, but are easily rallied to ideas that align with their beliefs and preconceived notions.
Executives are people too, so I apply that same logic to how I craft pitches to get approval for SEO and marketing projects.
- Use the fear of missing out. Out of sight, out of mind can be a strong driver of action. If everyone in your category is present in a given channel, you don’t want to be the only ones missing. You also won’t want to carry the same message, so vision and differentiation are still important and should be addressed proactively.
- Turn FOMO on its head. Alternatively, leverage FOMO by turning the concept on its head. When pitching ideas that go against industry trends, do so with the view that you specifically want to stand out or be the first ones to the party.
- Sell opportunities, not ideas. When I first asked for the budget to outsource technical SEO, I made the mistake of positioning it as plugging a skill gap we didn’t have. Because there was no talk of chasing upside or covering downside, it never got any attention. A year later, I pitched it again—this time successfully—as a way to make more time for the team to improve critical content experiences during a period of dipping conversion rates.
- Use executive terminology. Want a seat at the table? Don’t show up with a pitch that focuses on semantic search and indexability. Executives aren’t trying to improve those things, and if they don’t understand what you’re saying, you’ll almost certainly be turned down. Instead, focus on the one or two metrics that are important to them and how your SEO program will influence them. You’re more likely to get what you want if you frame indexability as a way to lower customer acquisition cost.
- Move the business forward. One way I’ve secured buy-in for SEO projects that don’t directly impact revenue is by connecting them to key strategic initiatives that the company cares about. When my employer wanted to build an industry database, I illustrated how additional headcount in SEO could help us build and rank that directory and grow traffic from LLM queries. With time and practice, you can even pitch ideas that create entirely new strategic initiatives.
I was in sales for six years. I understand some of the human psychology that goes into people being skeptics, and trying to get them to see your point of view and the value in what you bring. When I moved into marketing and consulting, I realized that this was a rare skill. Most marketers get one to four years depending on their position in the marketing organization.
– Devin Reed, Founder, The Reeder, Executive Conversations, Ep. 8
As I started working with different clients, it really upset me. Here are these really hard-working marketers with great ideas, some of which we’d work on together. Then they go to get buy-in and approval and come back because they failed. I don’t blame them—there are a million reasons for it—but I recognize the skill gap.
How the buy-in process builds better marketers and SEOs
The value of a buy-in process to businesses seems evident: greater control and involvement, as well as making marketers and SEOs work harder for budget approvals, theoretically reduces investment in low-quality projects.
But this process arguably benefits marketers and SEOs even more. It can be tempting to chase every trend in SEO, but only the largest companies have enough resources to meaningfully pursue them all. Getting good at securing executive buy-in means knowing which asks to put forward and which ones to let go of.
When you’re forced to make a strong case for every dollar we want to spend, you either sharpen your sales and business acumen—two skills that forge both excellent individual contributors and executives worthy of a seat at the table—or you stagnate.
We all want big short-term wins, so it’s important to keep showing what you’re working on and the wins we’re achieving. But if a team’s marketing leader doesn’t have autonomy and decision-making power—the CEO doesn’t want this, the CFO doesn’t want that—you’re really just handicapping the team and making it difficult to get anything done. Marketing needs to have a seat at the table for marketing programs to be executed successfully.
– Shana Haynie, Head of Content and Organic Growth, MoEngage, Executive Conversations Podcast Ep. 11
Of course, even a solid pitch doesn’t mean you’ll get everything you want. You can do everything right and still be turned down from time to time. But having a codified process will ramp up your success rate and let you work on more of what you enjoy doing.
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