Everyone wants to get the most from their marketing department…
So how do you get the best return on your ad spending (ROAS)?
We recently did an agency evaluation to have a look at what the longterm rockstars have in common.
At seven years as a digital marketing agency, we’ve now worked with clients in a wide variety of niches and businesses of various sizes and maturity from seasoned to fresh.
There were the traits we expected to see – those that indicate a business is ripe for the kind of support a marketing agency can provide. The things that all the marketing gurus will tell you are essential – and they are!
- Know their target audience/customer avatar
- Have a product people want, an effective website and/or proven funnel
But that wasn’t telling the full story so we dug a little deeper and plotted some additional points.
What it finally came down to was less measurable/obvious traits and more fundamental behavioural and mental outlooks that we have been able to observe through the working relationships with their teams.
The rockstars that are able to sustain results understand and do the following:
Know the value of testing – there’s no one magic bullet that always works. They are willing to continually try things out, then when markets shift and change, try more things out.
Have solid processes in place for content creation. They are regularly delivering valuable content for the benefit of educating their clients and customers.
See the relationship with the marketer’s job as one of PARTNERSHIP. They recognize that our agency has the expertise and familiarity with platforms and software to more effectively leverage their value, while they do more work IN their business, they still see themselves as a partner in the success of marketing efforts.
Also, there is a core belief that marketing will work. When we hear people during their consultations telling us that they don’t think it’ll work or they’ve never found anything that works, this is a huge red flag for us because anything that we do for them will be ten times harder than for clients who know that it will work.
We’ve worked with our share of people who were just fed up with trying to master either marketing in general or a certain digital platform and wanted us to do it for them.
And we GET IT. Truly we do.
Marketing is complex – just do a Google image search for “Marketing Strategy” to see the various attempts at distilling marketing down to a single infographic – none of which do justice to the complexity.
Not to mention that marketing in the digital age moves fast, with constant innovations and ever-changing social media landscapes.
There is so much for a business to try to master to grow a sustainable business.
But no matter how frustrated one may be with the various aspects of marketing, it’s best to avoid the temptation to pass off responsibility for an integral part of the business to someone else like a hot potato.
In fact, that’s how a lot of businesses get burned – they are so anxious to pass it off they forget to stay connected to the process of marketing and when they’ve gotten sucked in by a hack with a good sales pitch, they don’t see the writing on the wall soon enough.
Approaching a relationship with your ad agency that will benefit your business’s bottom line has a lot to do with the mindset one approaches working relationships with.
Here are the key components to getting the best from your digital marketing agency :
- Keep a curious and open mind – the agency is busy learning all about the ins and outs of your business, keep some open-minded curiosity about what they are all about
- Plan to work collaboratively – the agency is the expert in digital advertising and messaging, but you still know the most about your business – don’t be stingy about sharing information
- Aim for a relationship built on trust, and partnership rather than a transaction (this is harder if you’ve recently been burned before) but if you follow the first two points, and you’ve chosen good people to work with, your trust can be restored
To discuss the possibility of working with some really good people who are happy to take on the complexity of digital marketing in collaboration with your business request a marketing consultation today.
