It is an undeniable fact that the people at the top of organisations are less ready to embrace newness than those lower down. This is because they have spent numerous years behaving in certain ways, and because of that they’ve been successful and received plaudits and promotion. A human being, faced with reward for actions, will go on behaving in that way. Like Pavlov’s chihuahua, reward reinforces successful behaviour.

When external things change that affect your business, or the operating environment changes, or the customers change, or technology brings about different possibilities, then it is hard for the aforementioned senior managers to adapt quickly. Witness IBM when faced with Microsoft, and (ironically) Microsoft faced with Google 20 years later. Also see luddites here.

What’s this got to do with digital marketing? Well, many senior marketing people have been using display ads and the like for many years and they’ve thrived. ‘Why change?’ they think (although they don’t always say that out loud). So, how do you make the case for getting into digital marketing, or doing more of it?

Here are the key things to do:

1. Don’t be offensive. Just because a senior person doesn’t tweet, doesn’t mean they’re stupid. You may know that the customers have already moved into digital but don’t scream and shout.

2. Do free things. There are lots of free things on the web that would help you get into digital without costing much or anything. Creating Facebook and Twitter pages is free. Fiddling about with your web pages so they get on page 1 of Google results is free. Paying for some Google ads out of your own little budget is (almost) free unless lots of people start clicking. But the costs are totally manageable – you set the spend limits, you are in control.

3. Get others to do free things. The world is overflowing with agencies and ‘agencies’ (one man in his bedroom) who are willing to demonstrate their wares and skills for nothing. This is because geeks have been allowed to start offering services in the last 10 years while they used to be locked behind bars deep inside IBM and Nasa. Geeks love creating new online wonderfulness just for the intellectual satisfaction. Get some to make you something for nothing, show it to the boss, and maybe the geek will get some money in the future. Where do you find geeks and agencies? Google ‘find me a geek’, or ‘find me a digital agency’, or other phrases.

4. Improve your maths skills. Marketers don’t like numbers really, as agencies usually come up with the numbers stuff. Digital marketing techniques like Social Media or e-mail can be very low cost per thousand. Research it and display the numbers in a table for your boss to directly compare the cost of reaching 100o via DM and Twitter vs ads.

5. Start small. Try a little, measure it, try a bit more, measure it again. Call it ‘innovation fund’ or something that the Board would feel good supporting. Don’t worry that suddenly all prospects and customers have changed overnight. They haven’t. They will have done in ten years time though, so it’s not an argument for doing nothing.

6. Compare the boss’s early years with today. ‘Remember when you discovered that Wordstar could be used to put together customer documents rather than getting them all printed, boss?’ You know the score.

7. Don’t be smug when it works. Now, just stop it.