Marketing today can be overwhelming. Digital marketing, multichannel marketing, social media, and big data are terms that leave many manufacturers wondering where to start. Because the complexity and magnitude of work can require extensive resources, many manufacturers are reaching out to agencies to assist in their communication and customer experience initiatives.
I contacted 2 agencies, MarketOne an integrated demand generation service consultant and provider, and Wilson Advertising, a digital and creative service provider, to collect some best practices on extending your agency investment. I also spoke with Don Gushurst, at Molex, and an agency customer.
How do agencies educate you about both their objective, as well as their products, sales process, and target audience? Has any method stood out as particularly effective?
Wilson Advertising: Objectives are best defined through the creative brief. That objective will only be as good as what's written. Most product information is obtained websites and brochures. It’s best when we can engage if a product expert. I like to see the facilities, especially in manufacturing, to start. Sales processes are usually explained by a sales manager in a sales type interview. They’re rarely documented which is fine. I can document. Sometimes target audiences are documented, others define through an interview. A combination of documentation and interview is the best.
Do you and the customer develop data benchmarks and performance expectations upfront? If so, how do you determine those metrics?
MarketOne: In some cases yes, but generally we are working with customers who don’t have any idea what the baseline is because they’ve never used any type of Lead Reporting before. For Lead Scoring, we will take into account current Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Accepted Leads, and Closed Leads, then continue to monitor for up to 12 months after implementation to view where optimizations need to be made. For the majority of our out of the box reporting services, we use 30 – 60 – 90 day increments post project implementation. For data specifically we offer three levels of Data Cleansing where we do discovery into a client’s data warehouse, and then utilize our internal tools or Tele Operations team, depending on the level of Data Cleansing to ensure the accuracy.
A common concern when working with an agency is that project duration and cost can exceed what was estimated. How do you control project time and cost, without forsaking project quality?
MarketOne: I would say that’s a fair concern and in my experience both as a customer and a vendor, the majority of customers don’t understand how long certain projects take when done right. The way we get around it is by giving a transparent look into timelines, and clear SOWs that state what we are including in the project and dates associated with milestones on when the project can be expected for completion. We then present that to the client for approval, so they are a part of the decision. This also gets back to my previous email in stating maturity levels that vary between various clients. Those Marketing Organizations that are more mature will have the resources to invest in a partner to augment their marketing business objectives or add additional resources to their team.
Wilson Advertising: We use a pretty detailed Statement of Works and try to stick to them, but eat a lot of time to stay under projections and still hit quality expectations. Quality and client win in the end. Most agencies do I think. Especially in design (nobody cares about copy). Scope creep is still a bigger concern with the more technical type solutions.
Agencies promise to maximize a company’s return on investment. How do you see most companies calculating ROI? Revenue? Leads? … this would probably tie back into the benchmarking and performance metrics.
MarketOne: Every company is going to say “We will maximize a company’s return on investment,” it’s a tired line that truthfully is false half the time. What I mean by that is not every project can be measured in hard dollars, revenue, or leads. In a lot of cases we partner with clients on a Managed Services agreement where we are an extension of their marketing team. This is hard to quantify in hard ROI, but it allows Marketing Teams to be more agile but allowing us to do work in an expected timeframe at a high quality of delivery (emails, landing pages, forms, campaigns, reporting). We do look at how many leads are being created before we consult with them on a Lead Management engagement. We then look at 30 – 60 – 90 days out and see how many more leads can be tracked and the improvement of the MQLs and SALs generating revenue in the marketing funnel. We aid some enterprise companies on designing and executing Lead Nurture Campaigns in a very short time frame. The value to this is hard to put into dollars, but if a company is able to get out more programs in a year due to our help, we will help them generate more MQLs which can be translated into hard dollars.
Wilson Advertising: I don't see enough here of people tying to revenue like you'd expect, especially since data is available. There isn't as much of a push to test as there should be. People either don't allow the time or think "we want to go with what we think is the best”, without really knowing.
Molex: The manufacturer should measure the ROI on the various media channels the agency selects for promoting its brand, whether it be public relations, print media or website development. Agencies today should include the capability to use analytics to assist the manufacturer in developing key performance dashboards for improving their ability to reach their targeted audience.
Manufacturers desire a collaborative experience when working with agencies. How do you ensure their voice is heard and incorporated into the final product?
MarketOne: One of the main priorities we make when engaging with a customer in any industry is to get to know their business so we can better guide them on how to get where they want to go. A large part of this education comes from knowledge transfer and introduction meetings where our clients explain their business, whether most of their business is done direct, or with channel partners. This gives us an added layer of transparency and understanding into their business model, allowing us to make better recommendations for their business.
Wilson Advertising: We utilize meetings, feedback and project check-ins. These are typically handled by an account executive and are then wrapped into a presentation that they share with the group.
Any final advice?
MarketOne: Consider the maturity of your marketing team and the amount of budget you have to spend. Are you a baseline user - either new to using digital marketing or marketing automation or have limited resources to be able to invest in anything more than initial deployment, training and some out of the box digital marketing services? Are you mature in your understanding of digital and multichannel marketing and looking to take your performance to the next level? Do you have a large marketing team and/or are global? Do you have a multitude of Marketing Initiatives being run by different teams: Social, Digital Marketing, Website, Data Cleansing, and sometimes Tele Operations? Understanding your marketing maturity will allow you to better communicate and collaborate with agencies.
Wilson Advertising: Provide a clear objective (singular), explain why you want this. explain the audience motivations, provide a framework, outline expectations, provide access to relevant materials, and be open with room to explore. Don't have preconceived ideas of exactly what you want, if you do, just give it to a designer to execute provide extraneous material. Oh, and offering what they don't like and why can be helpful as another do.
Molex: The relationship must be based on a collective passion for the manufacturer’s brand to the extent where the agency is a key contributor to the manufacturer’s marketing strategy that is centered on brand stewardship and demand generation.
Thank you to the strategy team at Wilson Advertising,Eric Butterwick, Demand Generation Program Manager at MarketOne, andDon Gushurst, Direct Global Marketing Operations Services at Molexfor contributing to this piece.