Working with a third party marketing agency can be hard sometimes. We get it. You’ve put blood, sweat and tears into a service or product and now it’s time to go to market. You conduct research, go through a selection process and pick the perfect digital marketing agency. Sometimes things go great, and sometimes they don’t. Take it from us, we have been on both sides of the coin.
We’ve worked on thousands of campaigns over the last eleven years and have found there are a few things that can help make or break a digital marketing project. No one is perfect, but we feel knowledge is power and going into a project with eyes wide open can help both a client and agency have a lasting relationship.
Below are some key areas we feel business owners and marketing directors should review to help save time and money when working with a digital marketing partner.
Have One Point Of Contact
Making decisions on a marketing or web project can be taxing. It gets more complicated when multiple individuals, on the client side, are a point of contact for the agency. All too many times we’ve been in situations where 3, 4 or 5 client representatives are helping make decisions on a campaign. This not only makes it tough to know who is the decision maker, but we spin our wheels trying to make everyone happy. This ultimately leads to spending a lot of our budgeted hours figuring out who to go to for what questions.
Having one main point of contact gives us a single person to bounce ideas off of and establish a relationship with. This doesn’t mean we can’t work with a team, but having a lead on that team has always resulted in saving clients money because we can be more efficient with our time and energy.
Access To Power
Having one point of contact leads me to my second thought. Successful digital marketing campaigns rely on feedback from the client, but the client’s one point of contact needs to have the ear of all decision makers at their company. Collaborate with your internal team to understand scope and vision before, and while working with a digital marketing partner. We have seen organizations reverse course after weeks or months into a project due to the ultimate decision makers not being brought into the loop soon enough, or they had a different vision than our contact.
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- Have a conversation early between the marketing department and C-suite
- Invest time in learning each area’s vision for the project
- Come to a consensus on what are the most important ideas, metrics and dates the project must adhere to
Understanding everyone’s vision on your team before engaging with a digital marketing partner will save you more time and money than you know. This puts the client’s main point of contact in the power position to accomplish the project for his/her organization.
Differentiate or Die is Still Important
If you can’t differentiate yourself through your branding, messaging or website, then a digital marketing campaign might not be successful. The same initial elements of a traditional marketing campaign ring true for a digital marketing campaign. You need to be able to help your potential client understand why you are different and let that speak through your marketing campaign.
If you don’t feel you’ve differentiated yourself, that is ok. You might need to start to define your brand before you launch a campaign.
Give Digital Marketing Time
Just like any other marketing medium, digital marketing takes time to cultivate, process, learn from, react to and make changes. Give your digital marketing agency time to do a good job. We recommend 5-6 months when working on a project so you can have conversations about what is working and not working. To do this, you need data and having enough data takes time.
Clients Have Deadlines Too
Clients missing deadlines snowballs into agencies missing deadlines. If clients miss deadlines and we rush to get the project done, this can ultimately lead to missed goals, objectives and bad work. We want the best for you and your company. Together, we are a team trying to accomplish the same goal and all have to make sure we are good stewards of the project’s time.
At Campaignium, we strive to be trusted marketing advisors. From this article, we hope you can learn from mistakes we have encountered to help your project go as smoothly as possible.
