It’s hard to believe we’re less than a month away from a new year. While it’s natural to look forward this time of year, when it comes to marketing it’s also a good time to look back. Evaluating what worked and what didn’t work in 2013 — and implementing change on what didn’t work — is a good way to move through life. It’s also a smart way to do business. Being in the business of marketing and all, we thought we’d offer up some suggestions for good ways to buy marketing in the upcoming year.
Trust
This might be the top thing that businesses overlook when they’re hiring a third party to market them. It’s understandable: you know your clients and customers better than any other person. You interact with them every day. It’s hard to rely on someone else, or a whole batch of other people, to reach out to people on your behalf.
This, though, is where trust comes in. Marketers make their living by understanding the way marketing connects with people: your customers and everyone else. They understand the psyche of buyers and the ways to really grab them. Marketing firms and agencies spend a lot of time hiring people they believe to be the best talent available, but those creatives don’t always get the chance to do what they do best.
Partnership
An ideal partner will understand a number of things:
- Your strategy: Your agency’s job is to provide guidance and wisdom not just about effective marketing tactics, but about which tactics might be best for your business. For instance, we often help clients separate a “bright, shiny object” from something that truly aligns with their strategy. As an example, a client may think they need a mobile app. They may even have sound reasoning behind the request. But in some cases, when we ask really good questions, we find that a mobile app is not the most effective use of their marketing dollars.
- Your story: Your brand—your business—is a story. It’s got a story arc, with a beginning and a middle (and hopefully not a peak or end for many, many years). Your business is where it is now for a reason. Customers love interacting with businesses today like they interact with people. Your business has a personality that should be conveyed, and a good marketing partner can help you share that personality and tell that story.
Technical skills
No matter how much your agency listens to you and respects you, they also need to have the goods:
- Design: Design goes way beyond your logo. Good design is at the heart of everything we do. It’s a mark of success. Even meetings can be run well by design. Design today doesn’t just mean “visual design.” It’s part of how a business is run day-to-day. Of course, you need to have a great brand and great packaging to be successful, but a good marketer knows that design is integral to every aspect of the business.
- Technology: This is one area that still leaves a big gap in marketing. We all use technology, but very few out there really embrace it and make it work for us. Still, though, tech exists as a major player in marketing today, and marketers should understand the importance of well thought out websites (on the front and back ends), ways to utilize CRMs, and find ways to make new technologies create better and new ways to change the way we market.
Marketing’s a big game now. It’s not just posting content online or trying to understand SEO or building a website. So instead of hiring a marketing firm and looking at them as additional employees for you to oversee, try thinking of them as partners. Partners who will go to lengths to make sure they understand not only your company in depth, but also the people who are buying from you and the people you want buying from you. When you have a marketing partner you can really trust, you’ll see results.
