Actively producing and publishing new forms of content is a critical aspect of any search marketing and content marketing strategy. Offering online users information that resolves their specific issues or provides solutions to particular questions demonstrates to search engines that your brand is able to provide a quality experience for online consumers.

From a search perspective, adding new content to your branded properties serves as a catalyst for increasing search visibility, keyword rankings, and online authority.

However, while in-house marketers understand and recognize the benefits of content development, getting your own company to add it to your search marketing efforts can be difficult as its success depends on a significant initial investment of time and money.

For marketers who understand that their company’s online success depends on their ability to publish fresh forms of content on a regular basis, here are five tips for how you can create a compelling argument for including content development as part of your marketing strategy.

1. Sell success, not traffic

Any great marketing executive knows that the product on hand has very little to do with your ability to make a successful sale.

A product should never be the focus of the sales pitch. Rather, it is the benefits that exist because someone bought into your services and how successful or better off someone will be because of the pain points you are solving.

So when it comes to pitching your boss on the concept of content development, make sure you understand what your company is all about in the sense of what their long-term goals are and how their online experience has influenced or supported their ability to reach these goals.

Once you understand the scope of your company’s current search campaign, create a story that illustrates your company increasing its profit margins by successfully tapping into new markets that exist throughout the digital world.

The success of any content development campaign ultimately falls upon how many leads or how much revenue has been generated through this channel, not really the rankings you were able to reach or the volume of traffic you were able to capture each month.

So when you are pitching your company on the benefits of content development, talk about how your company will be able to expand its reach and increase its profit margins, not how it will increase their authority or backlink count.

2. Show competitive landscape

One of the most powerful ways to persuade any company to invest in content development is to show them how their competitors are performing. Demonstrate to your boss how your competition is successful and continuously absorbing a larger share of the market because of their content development efforts.

Creating a presentation that neatly outlines your company’s top three competitors and compares their strengths to your weaknesses is an excellent way to clearly articulate the demand that exists for your company to get on board with publishing content on a regular basis.

Great comparisons to point out are:

• Volume of indexed pages (type in “site:examplewebsite.com” in a search engine box without any prefix attached to find out how many pages are indexed in Google)
• Search rankings for competitive target key phrases
• Volume of social audience
• Degree of consumer engagement (volume of social shares, comments, testimonials)

These particular points are compelling because they all directly lead to the ability to maximize conversion and sales opportunity. If your company’s competitors are robust in size, appear ahead of you in search listings, and have a tremendous social audience to constantly reach out to with calls-to-actions, then you have a phenomenal argument for how they are stealing your company’s opportunity for growth and that the solution is to exceed their efforts by developing content on a regular basis.

3. Have a set plan ready to go

After you outline the competition’s success, make sure you then provide a sound solution for how content development will actually affect your company’s position in the industry, as well as their profit margins.

Create a content calendar that outlines four to six months worth of content distribution in order to give your boss a clear visual for how the entire process would apply in theory.

Align each day’s topic with your company’s current keyword strategy and explain how each article will support and increase their visibility and authority for key phrases they depend on for conversions.

Offer a diverse set of topic ideas and show how they align with your company’s target audience and their interests.

Mix in evergreen topics that contain “Top 10,” “Best,” and “How-to” advice with themes that represent hard news to demonstrate how content development will help position your company as an informational destination for consumers to utilize when searching for solutions and services alike.

If your company invests in pay-per-click advertising, you can make an even stronger argument for content development by demonstrating how much your company currently spends in their paid program and showing how much money they could save per year if they improved their organic search rankings.

Providing your boss with an idea of how much money the company could save each year is a tremendous motivator for investing in content development and organic search practices.

4. Set clear expectations

While you are outlining your plan of action for developing content on a regular basis, make sure that you do not offer or promise anything that you do not have direct control over.

Set clear expectations with reasonable goals and deadlines to give your boss a clear understanding of how the process will flow and when he can expect results.

If there are multiple parties who will be affected by your content development campaign, make sure you bring them into the conversation. This will improve your boss’s confidence in the campaign by showing them that there is a set team capable of handling the work involved.

5. Follow through

Once you are able to successfully convince your company to invest in content development, make sure that you stick to the outline you offered during your pitch presentation.

Offering weekly and quarterly progress reports that show vital organic search metrics (traffic, click-thru-rate, conversions), keeps your company informed and supports trust between you and your employers.

Include details that represent how traffic levels have increased each month and align this increase with specific landing pages or articles that have been responsible for capturing online consumers.

This provides your boss with specific evidence that proves how their investment in content development is providing value to the company while also giving them the opportunity to convert new visitors into new customers.

Seeing the whole picture

It is easy to initially get caught up with concern over the amount of time and money that is necessary for producing a quality content development program.

However, by clearly articulating and aligning the benefits with your business’s online goals, you are able to offer your boss a visual demonstration for how investing in content is going to increase the company’s conversions and profit margins on a monthly basis.