CONVINCE YOUR BOSS

Sometimes it's tough convincing the boss to let you spend the money on a conference & sometimes it's tough convincing the boss to let you spend the time at a conference. SO we thought we would give you a list of ideas to help get you to our events.

Explain how the range of content on offer at Search Marketing Summit is full of presentations that show how to raise revenue, lower costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Then make a deal. If you can go to this conference, you will come back with five eye opening ideas, tried and true techniques or proven processes that will demonstrably improve your marketing ROI.

Go read the blogs about previous Search Marketing Summit events and you'll see this is an easy win. How will you provide evidence that these ideas are working?

Search Marketing Summit is all about tactical information to help you improve your search ROI, all the time.

Seek out the groups in your organisation who benefit from your knowledge, then find their boss. Prepare a solid business justification. Email and visit in person the list of target bosses.

Borderline on being a pest. They may finally approve the expense just to make you go away. Always have a list of spare bosses in your pocket in case you need them. Before you know it, you have an email thread going between bosses who are willing contribute to the expense.

Show enthusiasm, sincerity and volunteer to sleep in your car, share a room or walk to the conference to reduce the expense. Assuming success, follow-up after the conference with the same list of target bosses, regardless of their contribution. Make sure you have memorable and timely information sharing sessions after the conference.

Remember, you want to attend the conference again next year.

Bosses love efficiency. Bosses also love food. If you combine the two, you've got a powerful selling point for approval: a "Search Marketing Lunch & Learn". When you invite your boss, promise to create a presentation about what you learned at the Search Marketing Summit - which you will deliver with tasty sandwiches - to your coworkers.

You get to go to Search Marketing Summit and your boss gets to rationalise the expense as training for the whole department or company! (You can even use actual cookies to talk about cookies, because everyone likes desserts).

Budgets are tight all over, but not all budgets are created equal. While your department may not have any discretionary coin for search marketing, there may be a different fund somewhere that can cover a few days of a conference. Talk to your colleagues about possible resources available under different names:

• Education
• Training
• Seminars
• Conferences
• Travel
• New Projects
• Special Projects
• Software Evaluation
• Infrastructure Improvement
• Executive Leadership

You never know until you ask.

My department's morale is low at the moment. We know search is capable of great things, but we want to quantify it. We want to implement some specific metrics that will show how the work we're doing is making a difference.

We're in the process of ramping up our search department and we need to hire new resources. Spending a few days with a bunch of experienced people is a much better way to get to know them than interviewing each one for an hour.

Search Marketing Summit is all about sharing industry best practice and practical information on how to improve your ROI from search. There's no better way to get all of our people up to speed this fast - and there's a Bring the Team Discount for every SMX event.