My CEO does not believe in paid search

At a recent Webinar on search marketing, I received a plaintive question from a participant. She had listened carefully to all my advice, but practically wailed into the phone, "My CEO does not believe in paid search. What can I do?" If you've run into this situation, you needn't be as worried about it as she was. The first thing for us to do is to take away the mystique of paid search, or any marketing tactic, for that matter. There is no need for your CEO to "believe" in paid search. Paid search is a business idea, not a religion. Let's break down what you do need from your CEO.

CEOs do believe in things. Mostly, they believe in money. If you've been trying to get your CEO to believe in paid search, that is an unnecessary abstraction. They don't believe in abstractions such as supply chain management or clean stores either, except to the extent that they've come to believe that those things produce cash. Those abstractions might increase revenue or they might decrease costs, but somewhere, somehow, they equate to more money.

Image by Steven2358 via Flickr

That's every CEO's religion.

So instead of laboring to convert your CEO to your paid search beliefs, it's so much easier for you to present paid search to CEOs as a natural rite of their own religion. Show the CEO how paid search makes money and suddenly your CEO will fervently believe in paid search.

And it's not all that difficult. Just run a small experiment. It won't cost very much--certainly not enough to bother the CEO for an approval--and see what happens. If you've thought a bit about what you are doing, you should be able to run a few small experiments with paid search until you start to see that you are making some sales. At that point, it should be relatively easy to convince your CEO to make a more substantial investment.

Now, you might be balking at this advice for a few reasons:

• You don't believe in paid search all that much yourself. When put to the test, you're not sure that paid search really can deliver cash all that quickly, at least not enough to divert from other investments that are more mature. If that's true, you need to rethink whether this is the right thing to do at your company right now.
• You don't know how to measure your results in money. If you have an offline sales business, you might have no way to track what people do on your Web site to the eventual sale. If that's true, you have a much bigger problem than paid search. First, go back and figure out how to implement the right tracking for all your Web activity, so you can measure the sales results of any of it. Then do your paid search experiment.
• You really can't spend any money at all. If you can't spend even a few hundred dollars on an experiment, you have a few choices. You could go to someone with authority and explain your plan to run an experiment and request the money. You could spend the money out of your own pocket. You could sneak the money from some other place where you saved a few dollars. You could decide that you need to work somewhere else where these kinds of experiments are at least tolerated, if not welcomed.

Paid search needs to make business sense, just like every other investment a company makes. Stop expecting your CEO to believe and start showing everyone in your company, not just the CEO, how paid search makes business sense.