How to work best with a marketing agency or consultant

When you are a busy business owner, outsourcing your marketing is a great way to help you gain visibility, awareness, and generate leads for you, while you are busy with the day-to-day operations. However, you need to go into this relationship understanding that even though you aren’t doing all the work, you still will need to provide feedback and input as part of the process. To make this experience a positive one for you AND your marketing agency or consultant, here are some tips to help manage your expectations.

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Understand your objectives

Before you start, you need to know what your objectives are. This will determine your entire strategy and the tone, styles, and brand elements that will be used in your marketing tactics. Awareness is different from lead generation so saying you want awareness and then expecting it to flood you with leads is not going to work.

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Super CLEAR Communication

There needs to be clear communication from you. Constant mind changes or switching direction helps no one and will cause confusion and frustration with the person you are working with. We are not mind readers and nor can we work miracles overnight so the clearer your communication and briefs, the more effective your marketing will be.

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It is a partnership

Think of your marketing consultant as a partner in your business. They have a vested interest in making your working relationship a success. Include them in plans about the future direction, new products you want to launch, and changes that might impact your marketing. They are not a slave to you (and demanding something at 6 am won’t win you any friends), but they will work alongside you to bring your objectives to life if you value the relationship.

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Your input will be required

Thinking you can just dump your thoughts on them and leave them to it, isn’t a great way to start a relationship nor will it help the process or outcomes. You will be required to provide feedback and input along the way. This might be initial brand ideas, colours and imagery, tone of voice and style, content ideas etc. If possible, provide relevant examples that fit with your size business and give them some guidance on what you are after eg: don’t provide examples of teams if you don’t have one yourself because the content won’t be fit for your purposes

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Give it time

Unless you have engaged them for one-off lead generation or sales-focused project then often the tactics you might be using will require time to get results. Nothing happens overnight and expecting to see massive results in a couple of months will end in disappointment. Depending on how advanced you are with your marketing efforts, you will usually need to start with creating and building the foundations which can take several months

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Be realistic You need to manage your expectations. If your goal is to have some visibility and awareness then expecting LinkedIn posts to generate a bunch of sales in your first month, is not realistic. Visibility and awareness take time and is a very different objectives for lead generation. And don't listen to others (your best friends 20-year old son who has done a 2-week social media course is far from being a reliable source).

Listen to their advice

Why hire an expert if you are going to ignore their advice? Makes no sense! Do you ignore your accountant or Doctor when they tell you what you need to do? It is certainly OK to question, gain clarification and ask for further explanation to help you understand. They are offering advice based on their experience and knowledge. They do this stuff every day, and things constantly change so they will be providing guidance based on current best practise.

When working with a marketing supplier, put yourself in their shoes and think about how you want to be briefed or start with your own clients. Having a clear understanding and being on the same page makes all the difference.?

If you want a no commitment way to get a plan together and help you with ideation or strategy, then the best way to start is with an Exploration Session

Exploration session