• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 4, 2009

Marketers might feel as if they preach to the choir when trying to sell search engine marketing (SEM) to C-level executives. That's only because many CEOs and CFOs know very little about marketing and technology, according to Mike Moran, chief strategist at Converseon.

Moran told MediaPost Search Insider Summit attendees Friday that the longer marketers think SEO is a religion, the longer it will take for CEOs and CFOs to get it, because they're not terribly religious. "They are not interested in a movement," he says. "They are interested in something that will meet their company goals."

Marketers who can show CEOs and CFOs how SEO can meet their goals will get the attention and the budgets, Moran says. But don't try and teach them all about search or get them to care about referrals, page views or attribution models, he says.

For C-level executives, the focus remains on cash, generating profit and what SEO professions can contribute to their overall goal.

Moran says the things marketing measures too often are far removed from those points that CEOs and CFOs care about. And that's what marketers need to change. "If you don't change those things, search marketing has no shot," he says, pointing out that it's not true for all companies. "Search marketing will never be something discussed at that level, because they already see it has the two worst elements in it -- technology and marketing."

Marketers also need to rethink how to communicate the value of search. C-level executives are not interested in search marketing. They are interested in the value, and that harkens back to direct marketing, Moran says.

The boss wants to know the products that sold more each month sequentially. They want to know of the ones that marketers changed the pictures, which drove higher sales. They want to know the response.

The C-level executives will get SEO when they understand that the conversions translate to profit for the company. Moran says that moving the lead from the company's Internet site into the CRM system, and tracking the customer from the Web to the salesperson, will provide one way to do that.

When Moran asked the audience how many of them track conversions on their Web site, about 65% of the people in the room raised their hand. IBM, where he once worked, tracked people who downloaded white papers to tie back to the sales based on the conversion. The importance of tracking conversions, he says, has become the ability to track it back to an offline sale. If marketers cannot do that, it becomes difficult to convince CEOs and CFOs that search marketing can act as an asset instead of a liability.

CEOs and CFOs also want to know how long it will be before the project delivers results. For those C-level executives who aren't entirely "rational," marketers may need to take a slightly different approach. Moran suggests not asking them for the budget. He says to start with organic search and favors from people to support SEO until you have a couple of "high-value" case studies to show. Another way is to wrap paid search into the whole marketing budget. Treat it as a simple line item in a bigger budget.

The most difficult type of C-level executive to sell on the project may be the ones who are "fear driven." He says you can "scare the crap out of them" for not doing SEO. Make the case what a problem it won't be if the company doesn't do it. "We have all these competitors beating us to the punch," he says, pointing out that he has used the tactic in the past and it works. "There are so many consumers online that aren't finding us."