Talk finance to get the budget you deserve

Anna says: “Integrate SEO into the business better so that you can talk finance and get those CFOs to give you a budget.”

Is it an SEO’s fault when they don’t get the budget or a CFO’s fault?

“It’s a bit of both. There is a balance and tension between CFOs and CMOs. Apparently, 40% of CFOs don’t think that CMOs and marketing people can speak business, and marketers also don’t think that finance people understand marketing.

There’s a tension that is difficult to overcome. I recently did a talk at brightonSEO about why your CEO hates SEO. One of the interesting things about business is that a lot of the C-suite are from a finance and operations background. They’re used to working in a very ‘spreadsheety’ way. They understand input and output, which is why they understand things like paid marketing a lot better.

They put some money in, and they have a spreadsheet of last click, and that is what has come out of it. Last click is the bane of my life. A lot of places where I’ve worked focus on last click and assume that paid marketing is doing all the work. They don’t understand that there are different weightings given to the marketing along the funnel.

There is a lack of understanding from the top about how marketing works: that it is a chain, and there is a funnel. In some businesses, there can be 12-15 different touchpoints in a journey before you get that person to a sale. If you cancel all the rest, then the last one’s not going to happen.

You can overcome that lack of understanding by providing some Marketing 101 to the CFO, the finance team, and the chief operating officer. Give a basic marketing lesson on the funnel. We assume that people at the top know this simple stuff. What’s a marketing funnel? What’s long-term and short-term marketing? How does it all work? Actually, about 50/60% of those people are from operations and finance backgrounds.

Even ex-marketeers have probably been out of marketing for a long time. Have a refresher on what marketing is and what the marketing funnel is like. How do we get people to buy stuff from us? When I did that and took the time to explain that to people, they found it really interesting, and they got it.

Don’t just do it once. Teach them about different areas of marketing because they do want to know about it and they’re interested, but people just don’t take the time to give them that knowledge. Also, don’t assume that people have knowledge just because they’re in the C-suite, because they’re all from different backgrounds.”

Do CFOs just not understand the marketing team at all?

“The problem is, if the CEO doesn’t understand the CMO, they don’t understand SEO, and they don’t understand any of the facets underneath their team.

As marketers, we sometimes want people to just trust us, and we believe that they should know what we’re doing. We can sometimes gatekeep our work. Why should you have to explain what you’re doing? It is frustrating.

However, keep in mind the fact that they’re from very different backgrounds and they have no idea what that team is doing.

For poor old SEOs, it’s one of the hardest. Organic marketing is harder to track, harder to quantify, and more long-term, so the C-suite struggles to understand it.

I remember reading about why SEOs are quitting or not enjoying their roles, and it was all around management, feeling misunderstood, and not feeling appreciated. There is a real disconnect between everyone that is incredibly difficult, and there’s a lot of tension there. SEOs are feeling vulnerable because, if they’re not feeling appreciated, they think they’re going to lose their job.

Sometimes they do. In the last two years, we’ve seen swathes of people being made redundant. It’s been incredibly difficult because people don’t value marketing.”

If SEOs feel misunderstood is that the CMO’s fault or the CFO’s?

“It’s both because there’s no compromise on either side. CFOs don’t go out of their way to find out about marketing and CMOs don’t go out of their way to tell people about marketing.

CFOs think it has nothing to do with them, but they won’t give you any budget at the same time. There’s a bit of blame on both sides.”

How do SEOs articulate their frustrations and get them solved?

“It’s about being pushy and nagging, unfortunately. The only way that I’ve managed to do this is by getting involved and putting my foot in where it doesn’t normally belong. Turn up to C-suite meetings, finance meetings, and meetings with commercial teams. I will pop my head in everywhere. No matter what role I’m doing, I will be everywhere.

Particularly when you’re starting out with a business, make friends with everyone. Just because you’re lower down doesn’t mean that you’re not important or you’re not involved. It’s easy to let your head of marketing do all of that work but ask if you can go along. Show that interest.

The Digital Marketing Association (DMA) recently talked about the bewildering number of metrics that we use in marketing. They were saying that, when people enter the awards, there are about 170 different metrics that they use, and only around 6% of those are business metrics.

When you go to these meetings, you find out how these teams work out success. What figures are they using? What facts are they using? They want to know sales increase, margins, etc. Then, you start to understand the language that they’re using so that, when you’re doing your marketing reports, you can speak their language.

I think it was Tom Fishburne who said that SEOs are from Mars and businesses are from Venus.

When you go to these meetings, you will start picking up the language for how they measure success. Then you can translate the traffic to a page into success. Can you look at the uplift in sales from that particular product to get a real business metric that CFOs and CEOs can understand?”

If an SEO is attending a meeting with the CFO, and they are given two minutes to explain the value of SEO and how it works, what should they say?

“That is tricky because it does depend on your C-suite, and whether you’ve done the education process or not. If you’ve not done that, it’s much harder.

They want to know about sales, so you have to talk about it with sales as the quantifier. How much are you going to uplift sales in the next few years? Are you going to get a good return on investment?

All CEOs want to hear about return on investment, so how can you talk about SEO in those terms? If they’re going to give you £50,000, what return on investment are they going to get on that?

It is going to be difficult, and it’s a bit of an estimate with SEO, but look at 1-year, 2-year, and 3-year returns. If they went and bought a piece of equipment for the business, that’s what they would do. They consider how many sales they think they would get from that in 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years – and how much they are going to get back for their investment.

There is no point in investing in anything if they’re not going to get a return. That’s business. It’s incredibly hard for some SEOs to look at that, so how can you be clever at measuring it?

When I was at Game, they wanted to sell gaming chairs that year, so we did a little experiment around how many gaming chairs we could sell. We had this gaming chair hub that we wanted to increase the SEO for. We did a digital PR campaign that linked to it, and we showed an uplift in traffic to the site. Then, we correlated that against the uplift in chair sales.

With digital PR, it can be a little bit easier to show a quick uplift. Through that, they started to understand how SEO works. Then, we could do the more long-term stuff, which would have the same uplift, but over time. You’re working them through it and guiding them along the journey.”

What are smart business goals for SEOs to work towards?

“Smart goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Instead of increasing sales, you want to increase sales in enterprise customers by 20% by the end of 2025. It has a specific uplift, it has a time frame in which you need to do it, and it normally has some sort of focus as well.

From a marketer’s perspective, if you need to hit these enterprise customers, you need to do content around enterprise. You look at how much traffic you get from them, and you might decide that you need to get a 20% uplift. How much content do you think you’re going to need to put out to get that uplift?

The problem is that you’re not always supplied with smart business goals. You might just be told that they want more sales, so you do have to force it. I’ve actually taught business owners how to set a smart goal because you cannot translate a generic goal into success. How do you know that your SEO has been a success if there are no specifics in the goal?

You have to force it, and you may have to sit down with them and work out a smart goal together, particularly for small businesses. Don’t be afraid to meddle where you need to be.

We want to stay in our lane, but sometimes you just have to meddle and get in there. Make that CEO or MD create a smart goal that you can work with. Otherwise, you are always going to fail because there’s nothing to measure you against.”

How do you make sure that the smart goals you are setting are realistic?

“Work with the rest of the marketing team. We tend to map out the entire funnel, and we do this with the C-suite as well. Look at how many people are coming out at the bottom and what the conversion rates are, then work your way back up.

If you have a 10% conversion rate from the bottom of the funnel, and you need 750 sales to come out of the bottom, then you need 7,500 to come in at the top.

Get those rough numbers. Even though they can’t attribute the sale to them, they know that, if they’re getting those numbers in at the top of the funnel, they then have to work with the people who are working further down to figure out whether they are converting them or not.

You have to constantly look at whether you are converting, and whether they are converting at the same rate. If not, are you feeding the right people in or is there a break in the funnel somewhere?

Also, it’s about being realistic with your goals. If you’re not hitting your goals and you’re struggling (even if it’s not an SEO issue and the sales team isn’t converting those leads), CEOs and CMOs do not like surprises. Keep them abreast of things. Make sure you’re having those weekly or monthly catchups with everyone, and things are not being hidden. Otherwise, you start getting into trouble.

Marketing is connected to the rest of the business. If people are not converting, it might be a problem with the commercial team. They might have overpriced things, so you’re not going to make the sales.

Marketing is a whole business activity because you need to be connected with those other teams. Make sure you’re not siloing yourself, you’re being nosy, and you’re meddling.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Work on smarter goals. If you are trying to work with goals that are not clear, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time doing stuff that’s not taking the business forward. You’re taking it in different directions than it might need.

Stop everything. Sit down with the person who needs to give you those goals and spend that time translating them into some tangible smart marketing SEO goals. That way, you’re going to have a real focus and it’s going to save you so much time.

I am going to caveat this. If you’ve got a CEO or MD who changes their mind every 5 minutes, that is quite difficult, and you have my sympathies. You can only do what you can do. Maybe find a better CEO or a better business to work in.”

Anna Bravington is Co-Founder and Strategist at Those That Dare and Innovation Director at Oxford Innovation Space, and you can find her over at ThoseThatDare.com.