What is the most important decision when it comes to fueling your growth?
Near the top is this: Hire the right support for your marketing and sales teams.
No matter what industry you’re in or what market you cater to, growing businesses are fueled by marketing and sales. Each one strengthens and reinforces the other. Marketing supplies support and collateral sales teams can use to close the deal; at the same time, sales teams are the first to encounter new customer objections and wants.
Many large companies compete to acquire the most experienced marketing talent. Over a course of years and even decades, they can end up with expansive marketing teams where every specialization is represented. Top companies achieve amazing results by creating campaigns infused with all that knowledge and talent.
You want marketing results like Coca-Cola or Apple. What do you have to do to get there?
Luckily, you don’t have to build a sprawling in-house marketing team unless you’re ready.
It’s not necessary to hire like the Fortune 100 to get strong results.
Instead, you need the insights they have.
A marketing agency can be just what your marketing team or marketing director needs to continue your growth trajectory. But how do you know if you’re choosing the right marketing agency for you? Simple: Get an insider’s view of the situation with help from a marketing consultant.
An Experienced Marketing Consultant Optimizes Your Outsourced Marketing Partnership
A marketing consultant isn’t just a marketer.
When you need high-level strategic guidance, you want someone with a proven track record in executive-level leadership. The vast majority of marketing professionals don’t have it. An experienced marketing consultant is the solution-crafter who combines deep marketing insight with an understanding of your leadership challenges.
That’s how you can quickly assess a potential marketing agency and see the total picture.
When it comes to choosing a marketing agency, the stakes are especially high.
Marketing agencies often require a long-term contract, so choosing the wrong one can financially strain you and hinder your growth. Plus, unwinding from an existing marketing agency relationship can be a challenge. A worst case situation might leave you in contention over who owns the materials the agency produced.
Before you know it, you could find yourself wrangling for control over your own social media.
Far better to avoid complications – and smooth the pathway to growth – through a focused engagement with a marketing consultant you can trust. Merging timeless executive leadership principles with a vibrant and growing knowledge of the marketing landscape makes a good marketing consultant a pathfinder to success.
The right marketing agency can ignite your growth. Your consultant helps you choose the best.
To Get the Most from Your Marketing Agency Search, Ask the Tough Questions
With any major purchase, preparation is the key to avoiding buyer’s remorse – and that’s doubly true when you need a vendor for something as crucial as marketing. Knowing the right questions to ask is essential. Before you schedule your first appointment with a prospective marketing agency, your consultant should help you prepare.
Here are the key areas to go over with your marketing consultant before you interview a marketing agency:
1. Set Some Goals
Knowing what you want is fundamental to finding the marketing agency that can provide it. Just like buying a house, defining your “must-haves” and “deal-breakers” prevents you from wasting a lot of time on what just won’t work for you. Curating your list of requirements can cut months off your search-time.
Nobody knows better what kind of help you need from a marketing agency than your own marketing and sales teams. Start there, bringing all your stakeholders together. Leave nothing off the table: The more authentic the feedback, the better you will be able to discern which marketing agencies hit the mark.
A full-service marketing agency brings many capabilities under one roof. Your engagement will look completely different if you want to outsource the internal marketing workload, level up your search engine optimization, or increase visibility with video marketing. Know what you want so you can present it to your prospective agency.
2. Set a Budget
Once you have your goals, your marketing consultant goes to work baking that into a realistic budget. Aligning your budget with your expectations ensures your agency partner is fully resourced. That fuels a virtuous cycle that benefits both sides: You hit your growth targets faster, which enables you to re-invest in more marketing.
This is also an excellent opportunity for your consultant to review your current marketing expenditures. You’ll likely discover a variety of expenses that will be replaced by your agency, clarifying what your balance sheet is going to look like post-transition. You may also find other expenditures you can reallocate to agency spend.
Aligning your marketing expenditures to your new business reality is good sense. At Andrew & West, we consistently uncover underperforming or unnecessary marketing expenditures even among the best-led companies. Dollar for dollar, that money delivers greater leverage as part of an earmarked agency spend.
3. Use the “Rule of Three”
You get better value from any large expense when you can compare multiple quotes.
A marketing consultant’s industry ties equip them to quickly curate a short list of agencies with the exact capabilities you need. Your consultant can do the legwork to vet agencies so you can narrow down your options, saving you time when the intensive interviewing process kicks off in earnest.
We always recommend narrowing the options to the best 3-5 candidates and then beginning the interview process. When interviewing is complete, you should end up with three top contenders to get quotes from.
Andrew & West Sets the Stage for Success on Your Marketing Agency Search
Choosing a marketing agency is much more efficient than building out your internal marketing function. It can take months to find the right people, put them in the right places, and get them up to speed. You can do it all faster and more efficiently with a marketing agency – if you select the right one.
Andrew & West accelerates the process by applying our understanding of your current and future state along with deep insight into today’s marketing landscape. Our consultants speak your language – clear, concise, and ready to work ourselves out of a job by delivering exactly what you need from a time-limited engagement.
Contact us to find out more about how we can help.
