If you’ve tried outsourcing your marketing before, the chances are, it’s failed, miserably. In this article, we explore the common pitfalls of outsourcing your digital marketing to an agency or contractor. Marketing does not need to be hard or expensive, but it easily can be if goals are not agreed to upfront, and a clear direction set.
Many times when we have met with companies, they tell us that it was slow to get started. Often, this is because the company does not have a clear goal in mind. Knowing exactly what you want from your marketing agency helps a lot. When we say clear, we mean, detailed to the letter what you need.
If you’re unable to quantify your marketing or sales needs, it is going to be very difficult for your marketing company to deliver results for you that you’ll be satisfied with.
Often when you start working with a new company (in any speciality), there is a period of learning. It would seem logical to assume that a marketing company knows how to market your business, it’s products or services, but they know nothing upfront about what makes your company tick, and more importantly, your secret sauce. The chances are, the reason you’re looking for a marketing company, is for them to guide you through a process of self-discovery, helping identify your secret sauce.
If you had everything all worked out, you probably would already be happy with your current marketing agency, or you would be running your own marketing in-house. I suspect, if you’re looking for a new marketing agency, you do not know your secret sauce, or your existing agency is no longer meeting your needs. If that is the case, it will take some time for your new agency to get up to speed, and work with you to define your point-of-differentiation. If you know this, you can share it with your marketing team and they’ll be able to move faster, but if it’s wrong, it will slow down progress towards the goal or goals that you agreed upon.
There are a number of workshops we work through with our clients and most of the time, we find they haven’t considered where their magic is. For us at Bravesight, finding the magic of a business helps us define which channels and messaging would best generate new business for our clients. The wrong campaign, with the wrong message, in the wrong channel, will cost a business, both in lost time, wasted money, and lack of results. Every business I have met would like to avoid this!
Usually, yes. If you want to have a steady stream of leads or sales and know what your cost of sale is, then it’s probably cheaper and easier to have someone else take care of this for you. If you’re interested in marketing, have someone on your team who is great at the below list, then you probably will want to have this in-house. We’ve found companies with a single person that is expected to generate all the demand for the business is set up to fail, this is because that person is really a team. If you’re the poor person doing all this, it’s likely you’re heading towards burn-out (we’ve seen this happen in many companies). Here is that list of jobs your marketing company will help you with, each is usually a person in the team:
If you’re in need of a marketing team to generate more demand for your business, why not give us a call, or try one of our free tools yourself to work out where your gaps are in your marketing.