One Simple Trick to Win Over Your Boss and Clients

In today’s modern marketing agencies, employees often operate as individual specialists. Each team member seems to have a specialty, and sometimes those specialities seem like mysterious types of witchcraft to the people on the outside.

Unfortunately, a client or boss who doesn’t understand what you do is less likely to view you as a marketing extraordinaire and more likely to view you as an unpredictable threat. Most especially, as an online marketer, even daily tasks you can complete in your sleep (If you’ve ever answered corporate tweets at 2 a.m., you know this to be true) can appear to be a minefield to the people you work for. Horror stories abound of companies getting taken down by one unfortunate misstep on social media or a badly conceptualized video. Sadly, this means your boss might see you as less of a digital surgeon and more of a twitchy bomb disposal officer.

Build Confidence and Win New Believers

We can win our bosses and our clients to our side, however, by sharing in our knowledge. If you take the time to teach your boss, client, or supervisor about your work, you can save yourself a lot of grief later on. Consider it an exercise in building their confidence in your field. The important thing to remember, though, is that you can’t possibly teach them what you do with the little time you have; what they want to understand is why you do what you do.

Here’s an example: say you’re working with a car dealership, and the owner rolls his eyes when you tell him that you want to start showcasing sales staff members on the company Facebook page. He doesn’t understand how talking about the staff is going to make people buy cars. The real question he’s asking you is, “Why would this generate business for us?” Provide him with some stunning examples of other similar businesses that have personalized their social media, and show him that the profiles will work because people want to feel like they ‘know’ the person they’ll be working with during such a major purchase. Chances are, you’ll get the green light to go ahead with the profiles.

Avoid Too Many Cooks In the Kitchen

The next stumbling block is the company’s Do-It-Yourself-er: that person in the office who, when armed with just enough know-how to be dangerous, starts to question the value of a digital marketer at all. Often we get roped into taking huge swathes of time to educate these DIY-ers because we feel obligated to answer all their questions, including, but not limited to:

• “Well, how do you share a photo on Facebook?”


• “How do I start up a Twitter account?”


• “Can I share a post on Pinterest if it doesn’t have a photo?”

What routinely happens is that these DIY’ers become a bit like new drivers: they’re armed with just enough basic information to allow them a driver’s licence, but they lack so much experiential knowledge that they’re dangerous behind the wheel. Avoid opening the door to backseat drivers by answering their questions with ‘why’ answers instead of ‘how’ answers.

In response to, “How do you share a photo on Facebook?” suggest they open a personal profile and experiment, then explain the reason why you post photos on the company page. A good example is: “Facebook is very visual, so photos allow us to tell the company’s story more effectively.”

Bite-Sized Updates

You might be able to build your team’s confidence in your surgeon-like skills by providing them with regular updates that answer the ‘why’ question more than the ‘how’. Consider creating a one-page PDF at regular intervals, showing some screen shots with a couple of easy-to-follow statistics beside each. This will help you highlight why your campaign direction is working, not just how you’re pulling it off.

For example, include notes that explain why a campaign had so many retweets (‘People love kittens driving cars!’) instead of overwhelming people with how so many retweets were generated (‘We scheduled tweets at optimal time periods based on statistics of the average car driver vs public transportation commuter blah blah blah.’)

If you follow these suggestions, you’ll likely see a positive change in your relationship with your boss or client. Often, specialists get wrapped up in explaining how we do our job. But for your boss, client, or teammates, they’ll learn to trust in your abilities as long as they understand the part that matters the most to them: the reasons why your work is so valuable.

One Simple Trick to Win Over Your Boss and Clients