You signed the service agreement and are about to embark on a new partnership with your inbound marketing agency. Maybe you’re just looking for weekly blog posts or some help with your paid search. These are proven strategies that contribute to your marketing success, but they don’t demonstrate your ROI. By leveraging your inbound marketing agency as consultants and strategists, you can link their efforts to real dollars. Take the time to set things up and you won’t be scratching your head when you receive that first quarterly report.
It’s a big step. You’re putting part of the success of your business in someone else’s hands. Here are some ways you can make it easier for everyone and set your company up for success.
Establish an Internal Champion and Point of Contact
The key to any business relationship is efficiency and constant communication. That’s why it’s crucial to establish who will be communicating with your marketing agency on a regular basis. It can be a leap of faith to put this responsibility in someone else’s hands, but it’s often the best approach.
As the owner or manager of a company, you definitely want to know what’s going on at every level of your business. That’s all well and good, but we all know how busy you are. When we say “internal champion,” we’re talking about someone in your office who can handle the weekly correspondence, reply and approve in a timely fashion, and advocate for your needs. They can communicate what you need to know on a regular basis, between quarterly or annual reviews.
Oftentimes, it’s part of this person’s job description, ensuring that they have the capacity to devote to the job. This person is often part of your own marketing department or has some background knowledge of marketing best practices. This person can review content and strategies and approve regular deliverables. This keeps your marketing agency’s efforts on a consistent track, and ensures there aren’t any service disruptions that could potentially limit the leads they’re able to generate.
Quick Marketing Wins from the Start
Entering into a service agreement with an inbound marketing agency is a big step, both financially, and in terms of immediate results. It can be frustrating to wait as your agency builds out your strategy for the length of your contract, and the typical onboarding period can last anywhere from 60-90 days. While this seems like a long time with no clear-cut results, there are some steps both you and your agency can take to tee up future success.
One of the best ways to get off on the right foot is to ask your agency if there is any potential for some “quick wins” that can immediately improve your marketing efforts and web presence. Think of these as base-level activities that can serve as a foundation for future efforts. These quick wins help position your marketing agency as not only service providers, but consultants who want to make sure your service agreement reaches its full potential.
There are numerous quick wins strategies you can employ to start seeing the value in your marketing agency. Here are just a few:
- Examine existing content and repurpose or update high-performing pages and blogs
- Start segmenting existing contacts into distinct lists
- Build PPC and paid social campaigns
- Structure content into pillars
- Optimize pages for local search
These are just a few strategies that can help your marketing strategy get off on the right foot. Have other ideas? Ask your agency! Here are some more opportunities to consider. Find out which works best for your business or industry.
Align Your Marketing Agency Goals with Your Sales Team
Marketing shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Setting up and sticking to a lead hand-off process is one of the best ways to understand exactly where your sales are coming from and to demonstrate ROI from your marketing agency. It’s your marketing agency’s job to get potential customers to your website and convert them into qualified leads. From there, these leads are passed on to your sales department. By setting up this process, you can see exactly how these sales were closed—from the first time that customer looked at a blog post, to when they sign on the dotted line.
So, how do you do this? The best way to start is by inviting your marketing agency representatives to an internal sales meeting. Your agency can discover what pain points your sales team experiences when signing new business and what questions they get asked the most. This, in turn, helps direct new content and other marketing strategies, but also helps determine what your sales team considers a qualified lead.
Before your internal sales team meets with your marketing agency, consider some of the following points to help guide the conversation:
- Qualification: How should your agency establish marketing qualified leads (MQLs)?
- Lead Assignment: How will your agency assign and notify MQLs to your sales team?
- SQLs: How will your sales team accept MQLs and Sales Qualified leads, or reject them?
- Data: What information do both teams need to share with each other?
Using past data, your sales team can help your agency determine goals, and how many MQLs you’ll need to hit sales targets. Using a CRM can help track these goals and show you the exact number of leads your agency passes on to your sales team and how many result in sales. It draws a clear line between marketing efforts and ROI.
ProFromGo Can Help You Get More Bang for Your Buck
No matter what kind of marketing strategy works best for your business, ProFromGo is the agency to handle it. Partner with us to develop an agreed upon strategy you can understand and measure. Contact ProFromGo to learn more.
Want to learn more about aligning your marketing agency with your sales team? Download our ebook below!
