The moment a client and an agency come together on an idea for a digital campaign is a satisfying experience on all sides. You had a plan to solve a problem for your brand, and watched a solution come to life in a way that's creative, compelling, and maybe even surprising.
But the next stage of a project's development has only just begun. Now, you have to present this idea to your superiors for more than just their approval to move forward with the campaign. You also have to provide them with the ability to present an argument to their bosses so that your project gains approval.
But as much as you may love your agency’s vision for a digital campaign, the fact is too many great ideas are killed in the boardroom after a failure to communicate their benefits within your organization. As frustrating as that can be, this is a failing on the part of the agency. It's the agency that should provide you with the tools to deliver a compelling, effective presentation to stakeholders in support of an idea you love.
Too often this internal sales cycle goes unaccounted for in the agency-client relationship. When the best ideas fail to move forward, all the time and resources that went into those unmade campaigns are lost and require extra effort to replace.
Knowing how to influence key stakeholders is essential to gaining approval for the campaign idea you want that will bring success to your project. Plus, by gathering support across your organization, you can build a groundswell for great thinking by encouraging fresh perspectives.
Going for the heart is as effective with internal stakeholders as your customers
Presentations to executives occupy a narrow window of time. Too often, a lot of great work that's true to a brand’s brief and strategically on-target dies because the presenter didn’t have tools to stand up for its effectiveness. According to the Harvard Business School, some 95% of consumer decision-making arrives at the subconscious level. Then, after someone reaches a conclusion driven by an emotional response, any supporting evidence is back-filled by logic.
By effectively citing user research in a presentation, you can underscore how the campaign will address specific customer pain points. By sharing details such as how an agency's idea will serve real customers like a single mom or a busy executive, you emphasize your campaign's capabilities. Focusing on how your project solves problems for consumers will appeal to your audience's altruistic self. With the addition of forward-looking visioning exercises, you can also illustrate the bigger picture for how this campaign would progress in the future after approval at this level.
Whether presenting an idea to colleagues or supervisors, your approach should be built on empathy. By listening to your audience and understanding their desires, your presentation grows that much more persuasive. For example, if your stakeholder is motivated by career advancement, you should emphasize the ways a campaign will deliver success for the business and, consequently, further their career. Through empathizing with your internal stakeholder's desires, you also address what forms a baseline for everyone’s professional motivation. If you can present the ideas you want in a way that earns the trust of your superiors, the prospect for your career advancement only improves as well.
A presentation grounded by logic allays risk concerns
Underscoring the positive impact a campaign will have on a stakeholder is an effective motivator for the right audience. But fears about the negative impact of a campaign often make up the biggest roadblock for the strongest creative approaches for your brand.
With an emotional appeal, you’ve sold your stakeholders a big vision and how it’s going to solve your customer’s problem. Now, through backtracking to the original business goals of the project, you return to the logical framework behind your idea.
Here, you paint a picture of your project's objective and how the need to address those problems inspired the campaign. By offering a clear roadmap of the project, you can illustrate the points of known risk for the project and how you’ve already accounted for them every step of the way. By communicating with internal teams in compliance and legal, you also can underscore that you’ve considered how the idea impacts your organization as a whole.
You can sell a big idea through a beautiful story, but you have to assure your stakeholders that you’ve done your homework. Hitting these checks, balances, and first principles are crucial to effective, well-reasoned storytelling for your audience.
Winning hearts and minds with the money pitch
Appealing to emotional and logical reasoning is often enough to convince stakeholders to back your agency’s idea. But without an appeal to how a campaign will impact your company’s wallet you may not earn enough support to see your idea approved.
In presenting your idea for a campaign, it’s important to remember that you’re also selling to your stakeholder’s stakeholder. Often, the higher you go within your organization, the greater the value of hard business metrics. If you can determine that key measure of success for your audience – whether it’s click-through rates or sales figures – you can provide your boss with the language to convince their boss. Effectively communicating on all three of these levels may sound difficult. But if you're working with the right agency, they should provide you with the tools to translate their pitch into a powerful, persuasive presentation to your organization's decision-makers.
After all, the prime motivator across all industries is to be in the position to deliver your best work. A lot of ideas die on the boardroom floor, and that's a waste of both time and money. With your agency’s guidance, you can allow their strongest creative ideas to get approval and make a difference for you and your brand. When creative ideas are engineered to perform at the highest level, your organization can’t help but follow suit.