If you want to be successful with working with a marketing company, specifically an online marketing company, these 7 tips will help you have long term success with your marketing and the companies you work with.
THESE ARE THE 7 TIPS TO WORKING WITH A MARKETING AGENCY
1. Define Your Desired Result
This is really important to the success of your marketing campaigns. Every marketing campaign you run should have an end goal that is mutually agreed upon by the company. And make sure your desired result is attainable.
For example, If you want to intake 5 extra cases per month, set a timeline for when you want to achieve that. Also look back at past data to show you what has and hasn’t worked in the past. Make sure to write this down and go over it together with the marketing company.
As time goes on, you may not remember everything you specifically talked about at the kickoff meeting.
2. Have Clear Deliverables
This goes both ways. There is a good chance the advertising agency you are working with won’t be playing a part of the sales process in your company.
They will have expectations of you and vice versa.
Have clear deliverables of how they will serve you and your business. Are they making you a website, doing direct mail, or running Google PPC ads?
All are different and will produce different results and require different things on the your end to see maximum gain from it.
Make sure and write down the deliverables and have them in a place where you can reference them later. Ideally this is on a contract you sign with the marketing team.
Remember that internal communication with your staff and what you talk about when they aren’t present have no bearing on that.
For example, if the staff members start talking about how they want the campaign to go. That has no bearing on the deal that you signed with the company. Which will be covered in #4 of this article.
3. Track Your Stats
This is crucial, and the company you are working with won’t take any claim you make on lead quality seriously without a well tracked and documented sales process.
Tracking your stats is a great way to see what is working and what isn’t.
Make sure to track:
- Outbound Calls
- Inbound Calls
- Voicemails Left
- Pickup Rate
- SMS Messages Sent
- Emails Sent
- Show Up Rate For Appointments
The only clients I have ever worked with that have complained about lead quality are people who don’t know their stats.
This will be helpful too as you will know the numbers for you to grow your business. And investors will like seeing this if you ever want to raise capital to build your brand.
We provide a tracking system to every firm we work with. If you want to see a sample of one please email support@immigrationfinder.com or schedule a meeting.
4. Inform Your Staff of Expectations of Them
You don’t have the same ambitions as your staff. Don’t confuse your objectives.
There is often no immediate advantage to you hiring a marketing company for your staff members. If you intake a few new immigration cases a month. You probably aren’t going to give them a raise immediately.
Make a point to reward them and make them feel appreciated. On top of them feeling better. You will have a more successful campaign.
Over 80% of leads generated online never get called or contacted. It’s sad, and it’s true. Getting your team members on board will help with call reluctance and letting them know what it will be like working with this other company will pay great dividends.
A lot of times when we work with immigration law firms, we get handed off to someone who has no idea what we are doing for them and the boss never explains their new tasks to them.
This can be a detriment to the success of your campaign. Involve them in the process. We get WAY FEWER lead quality complaints when the boss talks to the staff first in a reassuring way about their new tasks.
It’s also important to realize that online leads will require more work to intake than referrals and inbound leads such as phone calls and walk-ins. Oftentimes leads are high quality but don’t trust you enough yet to pull out their wallet and buy.
5. Don’t Spend Your Last Money
That’s right! Don’t spend your last pennies on marketing.
Doing this will stress you out and also make you sound desperate to close deals on the phone. If you have ever had a salesperson on the phone that is desperate for sale, you know what it is like to be on the receiving end of someone too stressed to run their company.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in your business when the chips are down. Don’t do anything that will stress you to the point that you regret hiring the company.
At the end of the day, you are deciding to hire that business. It isn’t on them if you make too big of commitment then can’t follow through.
Marketing can be costly, that doesn’t mean the other company is making that much money. Say you hire a marketing agency for $2,000 per month to run Google Ads with a $3,000 per month ad budget.
In this example, the marketing company has $2,000 per month to work with. Out of that they still have to pay taxes, processing fees and other business expenses.
They are running a business like you are.
If you are running an immigration law firm, when someone pays you $5,000 you aren’t walking away with all of that. You still have to pay filing fees, payroll, rent, and many other things.
Remember these guys are running a business just like you, respect that. And don’t put yourself in a situation where you can’t.
6. Have an Intake Process
Whether you work with a marketing company or not, this is a critical part of your business.
This will make it much easier to take in new clients, and also makes you look way more legit than other companies out there. Having a documented business intake process will make a world of difference when it comes to how people view your business.
This also sets the tone for people getting things back to you quickly and that your company has high expectations for the people you work with.
My guess is that you don’t want to work with people that take forever to get back to you, deliver unfinished paperwork, and don’t show up on time to meetings.
Other people feel the same way.
The advent of the internet has made it so much easier for people to shop around with high end services.
Making people feel like you know what you are doing can make or break your business.
7. Take Responsibility
At the end of the day. This is your business. Not theirs.
There is no way a different company will solve every issue in your business. If you are having issues in your personal life that affected your business. Don’t blame the Google Ads guy you decided to hire after watching his YouTube video. Be an entrepreneur and do what is needed to build the company.
If you are doing any type of business, particularly a high ticket service, there is a good chance that leads you get might be very early in the buying process.
There is nothing a marketing company can do to change the sales cycle of your business or industry.
They can only give you the chance to enter that sales process more often. However there are so many things you can do to reel old leads back to your company and build trust over time. Email marketing is probably the most effective way to do this at close to no cost.
There are things going on in your business that the freelancers and companies you hire don’t know about. A firm we worked with we later found out had an employee embezzling money. This wasn’t shared with us at the time and we found out from an employee 6-8 months after it was discovered internally.
Your personal life affects your business and the personal lives of your employees do as well.
One of the head employees of a company we work with had their spouse pass away while we were working with them. That particular employee, FOR VERY JUSTIFIABLE REASONS, became very uncooperative and mean towards us after that.
Things like that play a role in your business and aren’t to be shouldered by the marketing company you hire.
Marketing is an element to growing your business and is there to supplement your prospecting process. There is a lot of talk about illegitimate marketing agencies that don’t deliver.
Do your homework and hopefully you find a marketing partner that you can trust and work with long term!
I Hope this article and video helped you!
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