How do you get your business from Point A to Point B? It’s often the case that you have to go through all the rest of the letters in the alphabet before stumbling on Point B by accident. Fractional CMOs, marketing leadership consultants that can help your business pivot or tap into a new audience, can sometimes shorten the path to success.
By providing a strategic outsider’s perspective, they may see your business differently than you do as the business owner. Still, even experienced marketing executives need help. A digital experience optimization agency, like 3 Media Web, can act as a guide, driving those digital decisions that lead to success.
Ready to work with a digital marketing agency partner just like 3 Media Web? Reach out to our time to see how we can grow your business.
Find out how the right agency partner can support your next move below.
Why A Digital Marketing Partner Helps Your Team
A Strategy Plugin for Your Business
As a WordPress web design and development agency, we’re a big fan of plugins. When our website needs a new integration, or our digital marketing strategy needs to pivot, we can update our tools with just a few button clicks. A b2b company can thrive with that kind of flexibility.
Your teams have their priorities, and your products or services have roadmaps. When a new business opportunity arises, do you have the capacity to give it the time it deserves? A digital experience agency can often research, strategize, and implement those side projects faster than overwhelmed in-house teams.
- Fractional CMOs and digital experience optimization agencies can work hand-in-hand to drive business growth in new areas.
- When experimenting with new audiences, an agency partner can draw on their experience to find the right channel.
Take Advantage of the Outsider’s Perspective
With your head down, grinding all day and night to make your business work, it’s hard to step back to see the larger perspective. A trusted outside advisor with a deep background of problem-solving experience can sometimes see the forest for the trees better than the business owner.
There are always external pressures against a business. Fractional CMOs and agency teams are always researching new tools, testing new strategies, and searching for the next opportunity. You may be solving problems that already have a solution. Without an outsider’s perspective, you may never know––until you’ve wasted your time and budget.
Experienced Leadership Support Without the Expense
Every business needs a cabinet of trusted leaders, but the reality is not every business can support them. Growing companies working to balance budgets can’t bring new strategic support when balancing the bottom line. Innovation is time-consuming and not very efficient.
A fractional CMO supported by an agency partner can act like your research and development team or in-house design studio. That tight focus also helps to keep your special project budget-focused, so there is no distraction away from the day-to-day business.
Long-Term Strategic Help, Short-Term ROI
Business owners need answers. Research, strategy brainstorming, and constant testing are essential, but when your business is trying to get from Point A to Point B, the faster you get there, the better. Fractional CMO, paired with a digital experience optimization agency partner, can turbocharge your business with strategic leadership support.
That helps you plan for long-term growth but find valuable insights about your customers or audience immediately. The best of both worlds may already be right in front of you.
The Importance of Outsourcing
Many businesses prefer to do their marketing in-house. They feel like this gives them more control over the process. But hiring internal staff is often a bad call. Think of it this way: unless you’re a very large business, you probably don’t hire full-time staff to handle your janitorial work, building maintenance, or even your IT. Instead, you contract these services through another company.
For many businesses, it doesn’t make any sense to keep someone on staff, and if you’re highly specialized in your mission, it will distract from other work. For a streamlined business, you need to focus on their strengths, and unless you’re a marketing agency, that’s likely not your strong point.
You’ll spend more money keeping a marketer on staff than you would keep them on-call, and you may not have the resources to train them to succeed in their new role. Outsourcing your marketing allows you to hire experienced professionals who are at the top of their field and will bring their expertise to your project.
Tips for a Strong Relationship
For many, hiring a marketing agency may feel like a leap of faith. Even if they have a long-standing track record of successful projects, the process of collaborating with the agency you choose and building a successful relationship may pose its challenges.
Before you begin scouting prospective agencies, check through this list of collaboration tips to make sure you’re maximizing your chances of success.
How Do Your Respective Goals Line Up?
If you want to build a loyal base of hardcore fans, but your marketing agency thinks you want rapid expansion, you’ll find yourself butting heads. If you and the agency you hire have radically different goals for your business, you’ll find the plan stymied at every step, and you’ll see less success than you would otherwise.
Before you even begin contacting prospects, sit down and determine why you want to hire them in the first place. There are plenty of solid marketing goals your company may have, and many will require radically different strategies. Don’t worry about how you plan to get there — that’s the marketing agency’s job. Once they know what you want, they’ll work with you to devise a plan to get you there. Make sure you review things regularly with them in case your plans change.
Look for a Proven Track Record of Marketing Success
You probably know better than to hire the first agency that comes along. But you may not know what to look for. An agency that’s run several successful viral marketing campaigns may have outstanding skills within that area, but they may be unequipped to help you build strong ties to existing customers.
Take your time and get to know their strong points, as well as their team’s experience and training. With this information, you’ll make a far wiser decision.
Make Sure Their Tools are Up-to-Date
Big data has revolutionized marketing. With the most current software tools, marketers have their finger on the pulse of audiences’ reactions to marketing campaigns in real-time. By examining analytics and engaging in sophisticated research like A/B campaigns, marketers can create a precisely-honed, highly effective marketing campaign.
Despite all this, many companies haven’t invested in these tools. As part of your preliminary research, find out what marketing tools each company uses. If you find out that they don’t use the best types of tools out there, they may be behind the curve in other ways, too. Save yourself the trouble by choosing a company using the software they need to succeed.
Emphasize Collaboration and Communication
Occasional email check-ins aren’t enough. You need to remain in the flow of what your collaborators are up to and offer feedback at various stages of the process. Maintaining regular contact is important. Choose a strong, versatile collaboration tool, and use it. Don’t be afraid to speak up about what you need from the company, and don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because they’re professionals, they will figure out what you want and give it to you!
Marketing is an art, and all artists need direction. Make sure you’re having regular, productive meetings, too. A Skype or conference call may be necessary, but if possible, it’s a good idea to meet face-to-face as regularly as possible to keep everyone engaged. Weekly meetings with a quarterly report are best for many companies and make sure everyone’s on the same page and making consistent progress.
7 Things to Avoid When Choosing a Google PPC Agency
When seeking a partner for AdWords management, watch carefully to see if they exhibit any of these seven deadly sins.
1. The Yes Men
An agent or AdWords professional knows full well they will be competing against others for your business and so might feel inclined to tell you they can do everything and more. But as skilled as they might be, saying “Yes” to everything isn’t very realistic either.
A good, reputable AdWords professional will certainly tell you that they can achieve great results but will also inform you that it can take some time and patience to reach those goals. Additionally, instead of saying “Yes” to everything you ask, they should be asking you questions to get a better sense of what you are trying to achieve with your AdWords campaign. Then they can better explain the feasibility of an AdWords campaign and any possible limitations.
2. A Lack of Communication
From beginning to end, a professional Google AdWords manager should keep you up to date with the development and performance of your campaign. You shouldn’t be left in the dark at any point and should be able to walk away from an initial meeting with a fairly good concept of what the agency will do for you.
As mentioned above, the AdWords manager should be asking you plenty of questions and answering all of yours thoroughly. You might also inquire whether you will receive regular updates regarding the status and results of your campaign. If communication seems poor from the beginning, it will likely be that way throughout the entire process, leaving you to wonder just how well your campaign is doing.
3. One-Size-Fits-All Strategy
An agency that provides one particular strategy for all of its clients without any room for customization is committing a great digital marketing sin. The same Google AdWords campaign won’t work successfully for every client, so a good AdWords agency needs to offer some flexibility. AdWords isn’t an exact science, and many different techniques can and should be utilized, often in conjunction with one another, to achieve success.
4. Focusing on the Wrong Metrics
It’s good to see great numbers for impressions, click-through rates, and cost-per-lead, among other metrics. But great numbers don’t always translate into great profits. Suppose your Google AdWords manager may spend too much time on the above metrics without focusing on overall profitability and ROI. In that case, your campaign could likely be doing much better.
Focusing on specific metrics that can be easily measured has become a common showing point for many agencies that don’t want to go the extra steps and focus on what counts. And thinking that you are gullible enough to fall for a false impression of success based on those metrics, regardless of whether you are making a substantial profit, is another deadly sin.
5. Personality Conflict
This is not a sin as much as it is a common-sense judgment call — you just don’t want to work with someone with whom you don’t get along with or feel comfortable. Personality conflicts are a factor in life. While a particular Google AdWords agency may be highly recommended, if you have difficulty working with the AdWords manager, it is better to seek another agency rather than deal with the stress and frustration a troubled business relationship can often bring.
6. Lack of Experience
As mentioned above, simply grasping how AdWords works isn’t nearly enough to ensure a campaign’s success. After all, why would you want to work with an agency or individual that doesn’t have a great deal of experience and knowledge of such a complex and intricate digital marketing platform?
7. Over-Justification
Does the Google AdWords manager seem overly sensitive or defensive when you ask particular questions? Do they seem not to want to accept responsibility for any missteps or mistakes, instead choosing to justify their actions with excuses? If so, it might be best to avoid such an agency. A professional and reputable AdWords manager knows that not everything always works out as planned and will accept responsibility for mistakes or failures.
Keep these seven deadly sins in mind when starting an AdWords campaign, and you’ll be better able to find an agency that works for your business.