How many times have you crafted what you know is a brilliant social media strategy, only to watch it get shot down in the boardroom? You’re sitting there with data, insights, and a clear vision for success, but somehow you keep hearing, “We don’t have the budget,” or “Let’s table this for next quarter.” Meanwhile, you watch other departments get approval for their initiatives without breaking a sweat. The truth is, your ideas aren’t the problem–it’s how you’re presenting them. When you can’t get internal buy-in, your career stagnates, your team loses morale, and your company misses out on massive opportunities to connect with customers and drive real business results.
That’s exactly what our guest today is here to help you solve. Jack Appleby has spent six years in the social media marketing trenches before founding How To Hoop Forever and becoming the voice behind Future Social, a weekly newsletter that helps thousands of social media professionals navigate the industry’s most complex challenges. Jack has been a keynote speaker at major marketing events and has made a name for himself by tackling the unspoken skills that separate good social media managers from those who consistently get their strategies approved and funded.
Recap
Social Pulse Podcast host Mike Allton and Jack Appleby talked about:
- Strategic positioning techniques: How to frame social media initiatives as essential business investments rather than marketing expenses that executives can easily cut.
- Executive communication secrets: The specific language, metrics, and presentation approaches that turn skeptical leaders into your biggest advocates for social strategy.
- Budget-proof proposal frameworks: How to structure your strategic recommendations so they’re impossible to ignore and nearly impossible to reject.
Resources & brands mentioned in this episode
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Mike Allton: Now, I know you transitioned from agency work to thought leadership, let’s call it.
What made you realize that the way we present our social strategies internally is just as important as the strategies themselves?
Jack Appleby: Man, that was a—let’s call it a mid-career realization.
So, like you mentioned, I was an agency kid. I did agencies for I think 10 years before I did a couple of years in tech, and then went on to be just a full-time creator. But for me, it was really simple. I wasn’t getting my ideas made, and I was under the impress, maybe this is a little bold of myself, but to me, the team the account executives, the teams I was working with they weren’t understanding how to sell social just yet, and it was early days, like I’m working on Instagram before it’s on Android type of stuff.
So something I really focused on, let’s say five-ish years, in my career was that if I can sell my own ideas, that’s the way that I can earn more, get more of my ideas made, and understand why my ideas weren’t getting bought in, because at the end of the day, like, you said, our ideas don’t matter, doesn’t matter how smart we are unless we can actually convince other people to do those ideas.
And that is a kind of a constant pain point if you scroll around LinkedIn and see what social media marketers are talking about, either their lawyers don’t understand or their executives don’t understand, and my challenge back to everybody is it’s not their job to understand, it’s your job to sell it.
Mike Allton: Yeah, so let’s talk about that. One of the biggest challenges, I think, is selling, where a social media manager walks into the meeting with leadership, maybe it’s virtually, and they get told there’s just no budget.
What’s happening in that space when they say that?
Jack Appleby: The budget thing, it’s always roadblocker number one, right? Is there money to do things? And to me, I like to think of my sales flows as a decision tree. Is there a budget? If we believe them in, then part of our job as social folks is to be able to pitch things that we have soft budget for as an employee internally, as the tools we already have that things we know we can get gifted to create great content ,or if we want to go then seek budget, we need to make the business case for that.
And I think this is one of the big struggles that I see with young social strategist managers, is that they think a business case is I want to make great content, not a business case, that’s a content case, and it’s a selfish one of all of us, ’cause we all want to make really cool things, but we have to be able to justify it as any marketing manager or small business owner would.
What are we going to get by spending this kind of money? And once we commit to that, it becomes easier ’cause we just get past the hurdle of thinking it’s not fair and go to how do I get the things I want to get made, made.
Mike Allton: Yeah, I’m often reminded of an idea that I had for a video for the company years ago I was thinking of imagining somebody walking into a junkyard and they’re struggling to find a solution to their social media, and they’re in a junkyard and they sit down in a really junky old car, and then all of a sudden the camera switches and they’re stepping out of a Ferrari and they’re happy and they’re successful.
And I had this whole concept in mind, and I got some interest, but of course, the price tag for that kind of a shoot, ’cause we’re talking about like real people on set, with I mean, it just was thousands of dollars, and just, I couldn’t articulate it well enough. I couldn’t make the case for it from a business perspective, other than that would be a really cool video. Okay. And then what’s next?
I’m not alone. We’re not alone, folks listening, when we come into these kinds of scenarios and we have great ideas, but we have to be able to articulate ’em in a way that the C-suite of the people who are handling the budget will understand.
Jack Appleby: I think the big adjustment that I’d encourage everyone to make on the social side first is that a lot of the time, I see a strategy and then creative ideas pitched as one presentation.
So, one tactical change that you can make right away is to get buy-in on your goals and your strategies and what you’re trying to accomplish, separate from the actual creative ideas themselves.
When I was at agencies, that’s how it always worked, but then when I worked at brands or looked at tech companies, it’s rarely how it worked. And I think that’s where we all love to give a little garbage to agencies from time to time, but there are some process things that agencies do in social, I think a lot of other brands and tech companies, and sports teams could learn from because agencies have to sell themselves constantly, and that’s why I was taught how to sell social.
So just separate strategy and creativity into multiple presentations. Here’s what we’re trying to buy off on. Do you agree with this? ‘Cause you’ll find that if you want to get your creative ideas made more often, you get the strategy sold off first.
Can you think of an example from agency life where that’s what you did: talk about the strategy first, and then move on to the creative at a later date?
Jack Appleby: Sure. So, a great example of this, and this is a 10-year-old example now, but it’s one of my favorite campaigns I worked on.
Video game campaign example
It’s a video game called Dying Light. So I had just led social for a DC Comics game that was a bestseller, broke records, and we got the next campaign from WBR clients. And we were trying to figure out the right way to market a game like that, with a developer that hadn’t had a ton of success and had let down some of their fans overpromising in the past.
So, when we were looking at the landscape, and like, how do we want to market this thing? What do we want the content to be? Because we were an agency, we started with brand strategy, whether it was our job or not to, and reapproach their brand strategy of: Hey, you’re trying to be this one version, I don’t want to get too deep into it, but let’s make you the target of zombie games. Let’s make you the all-in-box store package of this stuff, bought off on that, next version. Okay? It’s an era where cinematic trailers are overrunning video game marketing.
We want to show gameplay, real and live, so you can prove to your audience that you have a good product here, ’cause right now they’re not sure you can make a great product, and we’ve seen it, we knew this time it was great. Cool. They buy off on that.
So we pitched them, the game was called Dying Light. Me and the creative director pitched them “Dying Highlights,” which was a weekly gameplay-only beta footage series where we just showed different features and actions with various creative touches. I won’t go into detail ’cause it’s zombie gore type of stuff, but because we bought off on several processes, by the time we got to that final piece of creative, it was already sold off for the most part because they had heard variations of the ideas and bought us in layers versus me pitching, “Don’t make a cinematic trailer, make a gameplay trailer, here’s why, here’s my idea for the gameplay trailer.”
It’s just too much to consume in one meeting, and you can also get the buy-off in other departments, so everyone’s on board if you’re going early, step by step.
Mike Allton: That makes so much sense. You’ve got alignment then from the very first step on through, and you’re not wasting anybody’s time.
If, for some reason, somebody has a very valid objection to, in this case, maybe staying with a cinematic trailer, and they think that’s the way to go, and there’s a good reason for it, then you’re not wasting time thinking about what that campaign might look like if it’s not a stranger.
Jack Appleby: Totally. I’ll give you something else I’ve found.
Quick strategy planning model
I have this career coaching program where anyone under 25 can get a free 30-minute session with me. (Just ’cause people need help and we can’t afford executive coaches when we’re young, and I do that a lot with freelance social media managers.)
We talk about their businesses, whether they’re running small agencies or just doing it for themselves. When I ask them about the business model, what people are paying for, nine out of 10 times, they are on monthly retainers to make X amount of content. And I ask them, Are you getting paid for strategy? What does your setup look like? What are you guys doing?
I’m like, oh, we just figure out the strategy month one as we go, and I go, How much realignment are you doing months two and three? Oh, a lot.
And what I’ve shown, a lot of small agencies and lot of freelance social managers get paid upfront for doing a strategy document that will also make your life easier when you’re selling through, because I think this is another thing that’s missed with separating strategy and creative from social, strategy can be a selling tool for creative, get them bought off on an approach.
Suddenly, budgets can also increase; suddenly, your approval of creativity increases because everyone knows what direction we’re headed before they see content for the first time.
So, for those of us listening who are working on a new campaign pitch or the next quarter’s plans or something, how do they reframe their proposals to really speak that language that you know executives actually care about?
Jack Appleby: Make your business case, make it about money, and make it about how you’re planning on selling some products.
It’s so interesting. Maybe it’s ’cause I started in video game marketing, which was largely pre-order based, maybe it’s ’cause I started the agency side. I was always taught that if, at the end of the nine-month campaign, we can’t prove that we sold a whole bunch of units, people are going to lose jobs. We’re not getting hired as an agency the next time around, so that was always built into our brains.
I think if you’re trying to do that for yourself, whether you are internal and never been asked to do that, or if you’re an agency and external trying to go win business, what you have to do is get that strategy set up like a very sound upfront. What does your client want to accomplish?
Restate their goals to them in a way that they understand, and show how your unique skillsets as a freelancer, as an agency, as whoever you might be, can accomplish those business goals.
And this can be as simple as “Why It Works” slides. Some of my presentations have just been like tweets: “Here’s the idea why it works, what we hope to accomplish, and what our sales goals are based on this.”
Mike Allton: Yeah, so I think even more fundamental than that means the individual social media manager, you listening right now, you have to understand how your actions can actually drive revenue.
It doesn’t necessarily have to drive mountains of revenue; it depends on the business model. If you’re not an e-commerce, accept that and understand that it’s going to be a different kind of look and feel for you. There has to be revenue tied to what you’re doing; it can’t be about engagement. You can’t show off the number of likes and new followers; that’s not going to move the needle for the business, and no one’s going to be impressed by that.
Jack Appleby: Yeah, something I think is interesting there is, we see a lot of community managers, a lot of young social managers, like they want to use views to justify their jobs, which at its core is true.
But if the only thing you can use to justify your success is slightly improving your above-average views. That’s hard to translate to other things. So, if you fancy yourself as a social media manager where your content is incredible, and I don’t want to worry about the ROI of my content in the business, what I would tell you is you need to be so virally successful that you don’t have to be asked about ROI, which is incredibly hard to do.
There’s a reason someone on LinkedIn asked for the top five brands in social media. Three out of the five are the same brands every single time because they’re so hyper viral, they’re blowing everyone else out of the water. What I’m not telling you is to suddenly do these crazy ROI studies, and I’ll give you one of my favorite simple examples.
Several years ago, Stake had a very unhinged approach to their Twitter account, and I forgot the guy’s name who ran it. Nathan Allach is, potentially very smart dude. People would ask him, Does this drive business? You’re talking about politics through a snack brand?
Like, how does this work? And something he’d share with other people is, listen, I have the sales data. I can show that when we went viral or had higher performing tweets, we sold more units in the next week, a couple of days. I can actually prove that, and that justifies value. So I think that’s where you don’t have to have a big slide that says ROI, if you don’t want to, but you need to cleverly find a way to show that you are creating real value for things. If it’s a pre-order product, can you prove that pre-order sales go up when your content goes out? Work with your sales team, work with your new business teams, and find ways to work together on that type of information.
Mike Allton: That’s exactly right. If you’re driving traffic, you’ve got a way to drive traffic.
That’s great, ’cause then you can track that, but if not, you have to work hand in hand with your ops team, your sales team, your data team, somebody in your organization to understand what metrics are out there that you can look at to make a correlation between your social media activity, your community activity, and actual sales.
Now walk us through what you think an internal pitch structure should actually look like. If I’m walking into my boss and I’ve got a strategy that I want to pitch, what should I be talking about in that pitch?
Jack Appleby: That’s interesting. I don’t want to caveat this, but I think we all know there are so many different-sized social teams. When I’ve had my own small businesses, I am a team of one with no budget.
I’ve also worked on campaigns where there is a $2 million organic budget for a year on a $50 million paid client, so every team’s different. What I do want to give are, let’s say, the basic concepts of how to accomplish this type of stuff.
So let’s say you’re an internal employee and you want to pitch a strategy through whether it’s a client asking for that, or whether you’re just being asked internally for your, let’s say, Q4 strategy. To me, the best way to do that is first, you want department approval. If you’re an SMM or a strategist, you want your head of social or your team’s approval to get on board and be able to articulate and defend your strategies.
Then you want to go internally to at least one more group. Is your agency getting your account executives on board? Is it getting your creatives on board? Somebody else who’s going to be affecting that work? You should all be approving and be aligned before that goes to whoever has to make the final approval to give you those dollars to do that.
I find that going step by step with the individual groups is the best way to do that, like I’m the guy who, when I was at agencies, I’m knocking on the creative director’s door, and before I’ve put pen to paper, I’m like, let me pitch you this strategic idea, like this is what I’m thinking, and get the verbal buy-off that I then write up as a one sheet, and we’ll share with them.
I’m like, Does this make sense? Do you like this? No. You want to change this? Great, then I will build a formal document.
I think that the reason I had successes on pitch teams was that, to me, it’s not that important that my personal idea gets made. I want to get the most sellable idea that would be the most creative for our shop made, so when I’m going team to team, I don’t mind if you make changes to it like I will find a way to make something strategically better somewhere along the process, ’cause at the end of the day, it’s have to represent our whole agency, not just me.
Mike Allton: Love that. Some fantastic tips in there. Talk to other people, run those pitches by other people before they go to the decision maker, and don’t have a personal attachment to these ideas. Just think about what’s best for the client or your brand, whatever the case might be, and if they need to go in a different direction, they do, you move on to the next idea.
And I would also add, if you’re like a solopreneur, have a mastermind that you’re a part of, you could have other people in the industry, friends, colleagues that you could run ideas by, or heck, run it by AI.
You set up an AI assistant that’s trained to not only know who you are and who you’re talking to, but you give it permission to push back on your ideas. It can be a really valuable companion.
Jack Appleby: It’s interesting. I feel like this debate is all over LinkedIn right now. And I think because we all work in society, and a lot of us got there because we love communities and we love engagement, and we love just talking to the people. There’s a heavy focus at all times, it feels like on comments or replies if you’re on certain networks, which, if I’m being honest, I value maybe less than any other metric.
If you’re commenting on a brand page, which none of us as professionals do by the way. We’re not commenting on brands, but then we’re talking about how we want consumers to comment on our brands. Those are usually people who have already bought into what we do as professionals. That is someone who has likely followed a brand page and then chosen to comment on it. They are well aware of us; we don’t need to spend a bunch of time marketing ’em.
In this new age of the For You page, where organic content can see velocity way outside of your own community. It’s not like old Instagram, where it just goes to my followers. Good content can now get seen by millions of people who aren’t following you. I am so much more interested in views and impressions than I am in any other metric. Yes, there’s value in saves, there’s certainly value in shares, ’cause shares increase your views.
But this is where I think social managers have to think like marketers, where most effective, and we’re doing the best work to bring in money when we are top of funnel, which by the way, if we are creating huge top of funnel, that’s where we can compare our output to say the paid marketing efforts, which helps us justify our jobs.
Mike Allton: Got it. So you’re talking to an executive, or someone else is talking to an executive, how would you handle pushback? When leaders say things like Social media doesn’t drive real business results or views, comments, whatever. Those are just vanity metrics.
What would you say to them?
Jack Appleby: I think this is where we have to go back to the marketing terms that people knew about long before social media. Brand awareness is very important. My sales strategy, a lot of the time, was for better or worse, I was encyclopedic there for a moment on what every brand was doing on social media, like, I was just so fascinated by this industry in my mid twenties. I just knew everything. So I could bring examples from other brands, I could bring in case studies, and I could bring in articles from various publications that would justify different ways of thinking and different ways of measuring. And my general sales strategy was to overwhelm you with knowledge so you believe me when I pitch you a strategy, so then you’re more likely to buy in on it from me.
So getting back to the metrics, more specifically. I will say that if you’re a solopreneur or a freelancer being brought in to make social content, and a client or someone on the decision-making team is going, why do we need this run for the hills? Like you actually have the opportunity to get out of this situation and go find a client that’s going to value your skills, ’cause I promise you, it’s going to be a bad time. You’re going to struggle to get paid, you’re going to struggle to make content that actually works that you’re proud of.
Suppose you’re one of us who’s internally on a team and you can’t run from that executive. In that case, the thing that I would say is really continue to emphasize brand awareness and show various studies of where brands have increased their actual sales through social media.
It’s not the easiest thing in the world, don’t get me wrong, like having executives who just don’t believe in it, that can change teams, that can get people who can create layoffs, but I would just focus on different ways to prove that you can drive value through sales.
Mike Allton: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and I think it’s worth repeating to our audience folks listening right now, who should then in turn repeat it to their audience, which is that social media is not easy, social selling’s not easy.
If anybody could do it, improve the results, then we’d all be doing it. We wouldn’t be having these conversations, and anybody could be an effective social media manager. But the truth is, it’s hard, it’s a challenge, it takes a lot of creativity and strategy that balances strategic, creative thinking with operations, and so on. That’s challenging.
One of the questions I’ve got for you, Jack, I’m wondering about the timing of it all. If I created a pitch, and I want to share it with my executive team, by default, I’m just going to share it when it’s convenient for me.
Should I be thinking about when it’s most convenient for them? Is there a way to identify the right moment to make a pitch?
Jack Appleby: I have a really strong opinion about this one, and this is where I just find the tactical side of let’s call it the game theory of selling to be really interesting.
So, an example, this is an argument I got into with account executives a lot at my last agency job. So I was brought in there to lead strategy for a major telecommunications brand, and the strategy documents I was making were for campaigns that could cost a couple of million dollars. So these are the first decisions that they have to make, to then buy off on.
The creative ideas for us.
And I have a really strong opinion that you have to bring someone in with the mindset that they’re going to buy something, and what I mean by that is if you try to throw a pitch into, let’s say, your weekly status meeting, they’re not coming in there with that mindset. Your clients and your boss are coming in with, Oh, I’m going to check my email while I’m doing this. This is not a meeting where there’s important information that’s new that’s coming to me.
You need to preset things, set the table for yourself, so they know what they’re getting into. And I would say even before that, I personally will never send a pitch pre-read. I don’t want them to see it without me talking ’em through it and actually selling the thing, but I will certainly float ideas past them. Maybe it’s loose. I used to send clients loose emails all the time.
Hey, here are some ideas I want to have. I don’t want to give you anything like fully away yet, but does this directionally work for you? Or, Hey, here are some things we get inspiration from. I like to breadcrumb them, for lack of a better word, into understanding where my head’s at, so they’re excited to see what I’m selling them in the meeting that we specifically set to sell them something.
Mike Allton: Love that point, that perspective. It really makes sure that you, as the individual social media manager, you’re putting yourself in the shoes of the person you’re pitching to and making sure that they’re in a position to receive your pitch.
It’s not about the time of day or week or month or year. It’s about what their expectations are before they walk in the door of that meeting, and making sure that you’re not blindsiding them with a request for $50,000 that they had no idea was coming at them, and you don’t know where they were coming from before that meeting, and what their mindset was. Do yourselves a favor and make sure that you’re doing a little bit of groundwork, a little pre-work. Yes, it’s extra work, but it’s more likely that your work pays off.
What advice would you give the person listening who maybe feels like they’ve already pitched themselves out of being a good strategist?
Jack Appleby: So I’m going to zoom us out and go a little woo-woo for a second on this. ‘Cause the bigger thought that got me to, I want to pitch my own content to not have someone else pitch it, is I just decided my career was my responsibility.
It was not my boss’s job to get me promoted; it was not my client’s job to make me look good. Every single thing that happened to me was something I would have to figure out, and I’d just be thankful if someone else looked out for me. Which is, don’t get me wrong, it takes a second to adjust to that, but I find that really freeing in that.
Now I’ve only got myself to blame if something doesn’t work out; it’s my job to figure out the next version of that. And I think that’s what made me strong at agency sales was, I wasn’t as worried about being right as I was understanding how I could sell to a specific person, and if they didn’t buy from myself the first time, I made it my mission to get them to buy something from me the second, third, and fourth time, because I would alter my approach until I figured out what worked for them.
So as we dig deeper into that and we apply that to like actual social media careers and how we’re doing and how we’re trying to pitch internally, if you feel strongly that you’ve done everything you can to pitch things that you think work, that are things that you want to make, that’s where now you’ve taken the mindset of my career is my responsibility.
You get to decide for yourself, do I want to make peace with this situation and continue here, or just keep beating at that tree until something falls? Or do I want to go off and start interviewing somewhere else? Because now you have control of your own career.
Mike Allton: Couldn’t agree more. And I also think for some folks listening like myself, we have to be a little more introspective and recognize that maybe the ideas were good, and I just didn’t do a good job executing on the pitch and everything else that we’ve talked about today or maybe the reality was not every idea was a great idea, not every idea was pitched at the right time for that particular idea. Based on other, larger things that are going on at the company or outside the company, not every idea is at the right time.
So I think that’s really terrific advice. I hope, folks, you go back and re-listen to some points of this episode and interview, and really give some hard thought to how you’re proceeding, and then take some of Jack’s advice to heart.
But Jack, you’ve been absolutely amazing. This has been, I think, such an important interview for folks listening, if they’ve got more questions or they just want to reach out and follow you, where should they go?
Jack Appleby: Yeah, I would love to talk. Listen, my job is a solopreneur, so I’m lonely all day long. Please come find me and talk to me. I’m on LinkedIn at Jack Appleby, my ridiculous name.
And then my newsletter’s called Future Social. It’s totally free. 75,000 marketers read it every week to teach. They learn about social media strategy, big future thinking of concepts, as well as many award-winning case studies, as I can pump out; it’s award season right now. So there are lots of things that have just won gold and silver.
Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you, Jack. Thank you all for listening. Of course, we’ll have all of Jack’s links in the show notes below, but don’t forget to find us on Apple Social Pulse Podcast. Drop us a review. Let me know what you thought of this episode and topic, maybe something you’d like to see us cover in the future.
And don’t forget to join our exclusive community on Facebook, the Social Pulse community, where you’ll find incredible guests like Jack, as well as literally thousands of other social media professionals in the industry that you can network with. Until next time.
