Top 3 Areas of Focus for This Year’s Marketing Strategy
This spring, I will be celebrating one year in business with my sister and partner. (Hooray!) After over 20 years of experience working with and for other companies, honing and developing our advertising and marketing skills, we decided we wanted to go out on our own and finally accomplish what so many larger companies are unwilling to do. We wanted to provide the best possible technology and services along with unparalleled customer service. This is our life’s work. We are committed. We are in this for the long game. We chose our focus and our team carefully, making sure we could keep our promise to ourselves and our clients. We knew, with the right approach, we could help companies achieve a higher level of success, and give these companies the freedom to run their businesses while we rocked their digital marketing for them. While this has definitely come true, and we are honored to be a part of the process, we have taken on another role with many of our clients that we didn’t anticipate. I call it being a part of the “clean-up crew”.
If your chosen field is digital marketing, you are probably snickering right now, knowing exactly what I am talking about. So, what do I mean by “clean-up crew?” We are often cleaning up the messes left by independent “one man show” type marketers, or part time in-house marketing personnel who either ignorantly set up ineffective processes and systems that no one else could possibly understand, or worse, those types who desire to be in complete control, and in order to give themselves value, everything is done under a shroud of mystery, with no transparency at all. Inevitably, this person goes into another line of work, gets a “full-time” gig, or simply leaves the company. As a result, the organization they were helping is left…helpless. While there are probably very talented individuals out there that fit the description of an independent or in house marketer, we just don’t run into those, otherwise, why would we have been called in the first place?
This is where the clean-up crew steps in. Rather than digging right into crafting a digital marketing strategy, we spend weeks trying to recover passwords, interpret code on half-built websites, and often undoing ineffective social and search marketing campaigns which at best didn’t work, at worst didn’t represent the company in a flattering or conscientious way. It is such a waste of time, resources and money for our client, but it must be done. As a result, we are now offering training to help businesses better understand the digital side of things, and we always provide a list of all logins and passwords.
So what do you do if you are a business at the mercy of the one man show marketer? First, gather information. Teach a trusted employee or partner in the company how to login to and use your social and digital accounts. Have your own personal logins to all accounts, and make sure you are the only one who knows your passwords. Know how to access the back end of your website, know how to remove someone from your accounts. Stay involved! This way, when the day comes that you have decided to transition to a digital agency, you won’t be wasting your valuable resources on a clean-up crew.
In the event you happen to be in need of a clean-up crew, we’ve gotten quite good at this….contact us!
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