Google Algorithm Update Checklist

Google’s latest algorithm update announces that page experience signals are now to be included in search ranking. These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page, and combine Core Web Vitals with Google’s existing search signals.

We look at the 5 key areas to address in optimising your website for page experience and search.


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Campaign Checklist: Getting the most out of your LinkedIn campaigns

Whether you’re new to marketing or an experienced marketeer, you need to be considering LinkedIn campaigns as a powerful tool to connect with your target audience.

We’ve created this Campaign Checklist to help you get the most out of your LinkedIn campaigns.

It covers everything from:

  • Account set up
  • Campaign set up
  • Audience
  • Bid and Budget
  • Creative
  • After the campaign launches

Learn more and read the full checklist below.

If you’d like to talk more about developing your marketing strategy and developing your brand’s authenticity, get in touch today on 0345 241 3038.

It’s time to humanise your marketing approach: why the H2H marketing trend is the key to better customer relationships

In the age of AI, machine learning, big data, and sophisticated automation, human-to-human marketing, or H2H, has emerged as an antidote. Recent times have been trying, to say the least, so where this new model succeeds where others previously failed is the primary focus is on nurturing human relationships and building trust.

H2H differs from B2C and B2B marketing methods. Rather than assessing audiences on data sets, it looks past these segments and focuses on building authentic connections with the people within them; after all, businesses comprise groups of real people.

Why does this matter, and aren’t most of us already doing it?

Well, yes and no, true authenticity comes from real conversations and honest relationships. So, while the individuals in a business might be strong advocates for rapport building, the brand they represent could be anything but, which isn’t exactly seamless in terms of a customer experience. Smart businesses put their people front and centre and speak to their customers with warmth, opening up an honest dialogue about their needs.

The pandemic has been something of an accelerator for H2H

You may have noticed an increase in H2H marketing on LinkedIn, we’ve certainly noticed a growing openness from brands, with many more businesses being honest about the challenges presented by lockdown and remote working, and of course, a welcome, wider conversation around mental health and employee wellbeing.

Brands that actively demonstrated their human-side during the pandemic hit the right note with customers. Pret a Manger offering NHS staff a free hot drink and 50% off other products, addressed what was going on in the world and inspired a sense of togetherness beyond a normal customer transaction. A Kantar survey of more than 35,000 consumers during the crisis revealed that 78% of consumers believed brands should help them in their daily lives, and 75% said brands should inform people of what they’re doing to help. This shows a growing expectation from brands to demonstrate their values and play their part in a compassionate and human way.

It’s also interesting two-thirds (64 percent) of consumers worldwide said that they would buy from a brand or boycott based solely on its position on a social or political issue. That’s not to say you should become an activist for issues you’re not passionate about; it’s simply demonstrating the power of alignment of beliefs and values.

Learn from the disruptors

Disruptor brands have always known the value of authenticity in marketing; speak to your customers like friends, encourage them to participate in your world and become invested in theirs. This is why some brands have enviable memorability, think Dove‘s long-running ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, it was designed for the people who actually buy the product and was based on creating a unique and relatable experience; changing the way beauty products were marked long before the Instagram and influencer marketing boom.

What do businesses need to do to embrace H2H?

Corporates need to think about the future and move from customer-centricity to human centricity not to miss the opportunity. It all starts with a conversation, so it’s important to encourage your organisation’s thought leaders to stick their head above the parapet and join the conversations that matter to your customers. If you’re not already doing it, think about how your culture and brand align. If you’re a fun and caring business behind a corporate façade, it’s time to step forward and change your image. Your customers will thank you for it.

If you’d like to talk more about developing your marketing strategy and developing your brand’s authenticity, get in touch today on 0345 241 3038.

Need vs Nurture: The Critical Role Demand Generation Has to Play

Need vs Nuture

Imagine a perfect sales cycle where you could design a sales strategy furnished with known entities and completely transparent customer behaviour patterns. For example, suppose every last one of your many loyal customers made a healthy, guaranteed minimum annual spend with you every March. In that case, you could happily run your business at a predictable profit as a result. You could readily update your audience with new product information, solidifying their trust and loyalty. But even in this seemingly blissful scenario, what happens when you want to scale your business? You’ve already tapped into your organic audience; how do you then grow beyond that loyal base? There will be people who need your product who are happily buying from a competitor. There will be others who might be the perfect client, they have a clear need for what you provide, but they are new to the market and need education and convincing on even investing in the first place. 

So even in a comfortingly predictable scenario, there are limitations. The reality, of course, is starkly different but the point remains the same. Your future client base comprises prospects at various points in their journey with varying awareness levels of your products and services. Equally, your lead sources will vary from those who googled you with a specific need and proactively contacted you on your website, to others who you actively targeted as part of a campaign and followed up with a call or an email. You have no idea who will account for more of your revenue in three years. 

A successful Demand Generation strategy encompasses the whole journey from serving those with a need for your services to closing customers who are convinced and ready to buy. 

Prospects who find you: 

Even people who actively seek out what you provide need to a clear rationale to buy from you. That means your content and digital strategy needs to deliver a premium user experience, engage and educate your audience and convince them to request more information. Even at this stage, if your audience doesn’t feel like you are invested in their challenges and can’t see any direct benefit from browsing your website, then you are likely missing out on conversions. 68% of B2B customers prefer to research independently online but 90% of those searching haven’t made their minds up about a brand before starting their searchThis gives rise to a valuable opportunity, gather insights and serve the content your audience wants to see, show them why they should buy from you. 

Prospects with a defined need for your services: 

Perhaps they’re not ready to buy just yet and need to be nurtured. You need to earn trust and build confidence in your services and approach and vitally, stay in regular contact with valuable content. Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot are hugely beneficial in managing this process, giving you a clear view of your prospect database and the level of engagement within prospect accounts. Research shows that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales and lack of proper lead nurturing techniques could be to blame. 

Prospects who are happy with their current service with another provider: 

Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the provider that responds first, which is a compelling statistic for two reasons: firstly, it demonstrates just how responsive you need to be to win out over the competition. Secondly, it highlights that perhaps your competitor was merely responsive and you could offer a more personal service, far better product/service features or you’re culturally more aligned. There’s only one way to find out, actively target and nurture prospects consistently. If they’re happy with their current provision, respond with engaging and timely content that shows you understand their challenges and their industry. This way, when their contract is up for renewal, or you check-in with a call, they’ll have far greater brand recognition, which is the perfect platform for building rapport. 

If you would like more insight and guidance on putting together a demand generation strategy that actively nurtures prospects through your funnel, get in touch today on 0345 241 3038. 

Why outsourcing Sales and Marketing to a single provider makes perfect sense

The argument for marketing and sales alignment has been well-documented in recent years. The growing popularity of account-based marketing and sales enablement is testament to a shift in perception across the industry. And there’s a wealth of research to back it up, in fact by aligning sales and marketing, your business could generate 208% more revenue and enjoy 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates.

By working together and understanding each other’s roles, metrics and goals, marketing can attract and nurture better quality leads; glean insight from their sales colleagues and in turn, deliver better quality and targeted materials to help get deals over the line. Equally, sales can commit to following up marketing qualified leads and feeding back information of where that prospect may be in the sales cycle so they can target them with appropriate content. The result is a well-oiled machine that nurtures long-term relationships and results in higher conversions.

And while it seems like a no-brainer, in theory, organisations struggle to make it work for many reasons. In under-resourced teams, dedicating time to sales and marketing alignment feels like an arduous and time-consuming activity that will take time to mature and deliver results, so it continually gets de-prioritised in favour of the next big campaign. When you outsource to a single provider, you instantly access an experienced team dedicated to delivering against your marketing and sales goals and who are skilled at developing a delivery plan that meets your specific needs.

Other businesses don’t have a system supporting shared visibility of campaigns and customer journeys, making collaboration difficult and again, time-consuming. Sometimes it’s merely an imbalance in teams. There may be only one or two dedicated marketers in a sales first organisation. They might lack a content marketing specialism or require further training or experience to support sales confidently. An outsourced partner has already nailed this; they’ve already built a high-performing and aligned team and follow established processes, and have complete visibility of shared systems.

And then, of course, some organisations don’t have any sales and marketing resource at all. If they’ve already outsourced, joining the two functions means close-management of third parties and contractors, which comes with an administrative burden and challenges around contrasting systems and processes. By outsourcing to one expert partner, you can avoid the headaches of managing multiple suppliers. You can make your budgets work harder and have the benefit of working with a team where both sales and marketing are on the same page and know the full details of your campaign.

Supporting the entire journey, with complete visibility throughout

When you outsource sales and marketing to a single provider, you get a joined-up approach proven to succeed. Experienced marketers and campaign managers will use demand generation or account based marketing strategies to drive awareness in your desired markets, nurturing leads through a consistent campaign of engaging content across paid social, email marketing and relevant blog content. These leads will then be handled by expert sales representatives skilled in building rapport, communicating your brand and your offering professionally and reassuringly. The big difference is that all of this activity is overseen by marketing and sales experts who have deep expertise in delivering complex, multifaceted projects, sharing metrics, a CRM and everybody agrees on what constitutes a qualified lead.

How we make it work

Here at Air Marketing, we have the in-house skills, technology and processes to deliver value at every point in the customer journey. We’ve grown from a telemarketing agency into a comprehensive outsourced sales and marketing solution. We offer everything from demand generation and marketing support to complete end to end sales campaigns, SDR as a service and lead generation.

If you would like to know more about how we can deliver aligned sales and marketing initiatives for your business, get in touch: call 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Our top tips for creating your 2021 SME business marketing plan

Create your 2021 SME business marketing plan

A year ago, as people sat down to write out their predictions for marketing trends in 2020, nobody could have predicted global shifts in remote working that have changed the way that all businesses connect with their audiencesSMEs have certainly been affected by the pandemic – McKinsey research showing that 80% of UK SMEs have seen a revenue impact from the Covid-19 crisis. This makes an investment in marketing strategy even more vital for SMEs, with a focus on bringing in new customers and reaching new audiences. 

Looking ahead

We can look to the future with hope and research suggests many SMEs are doing just that. A Veem report showed that 53% of small business owners actually expected to see uptake in their business in 2021This is a really encouraging sentiment that demonstrates that for many SMEs, the opportunities that existed before the pandemic still exist. It’s just having a plan to navigate the barriers. That’s where we can help. We’re experts in helping SMEs define and connect with their target market and helping them grow. 

Here’s our 5 top tips for shaping a pandemic-proof marketing plan that’ll help your business fly in 2021: 

1. Digital is the new normalget your house in order

Digital experiences have much higher value than they did pre-pandemic. This means your website and your social media presence needs to be on point, on message and showcasing the benefits of your products and services. User experience remains very important – your call to action and customer journey needs to be clear. Make it easy for customers to get in touch with you online and offer an experience that is as seamless and enjoyable as possible so they stay with you for the whole journey. 

2. Develop a content strategy 

If getting your online presence updated is the equivalent of cleaning a house, then an apt analogy for developing your content strategy would be all the valuables inside. Your content strategy is your plan to communicate what your customers need to know and would find useful in ways they’ll enjoy consuming. 

For example, a blog is a meaningful way to combine product benefits with industry insights and will help drive organic traffic through to your site. If your customers enjoy reading your blog, they’ll share it. If it genuinely resonates with their challenges, they will visit your site. You can publish it in more than one channel and adapt messaging and themes for your social content. 

3. Up your social game

This neatly brings us on to social media. It’s more vital than ever that small businesses are active and engaged on social platforms. This means engaging on your page and demonstrating that you can solve a customer’s problem and care about their experience. It’s a shift from transactional selling to a relationship based one but it’s a valuable differentiation to make and one that will ensure greater customer loyalty and advocacy in the long-term. We can help you develop targeted social campaigns and shape messaging that will resonate with your customers on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. 

4. Authentic and socially conscious

Influencer marketing is set to continue growing in 2021 but don’t worry if you haven’t got an A-list budget, some of the best performing posts on social come from users and advocates. 2020 has seen a shift towards heightened value on meaningful digital experiences, increased authenticity and higher engagement with socially conscious brands. This is a natural reflection of the times we live in, so don’t be afraid to stand for something. If being a brand activist isn’t for you, that’s okay, just work on communicating with your customers in an honest and straightforward way and if you can get them to sing your praises on social, it will resonate with your desired audience.

5. Boldly uncover new opportunities

In tough times it’s tempting to play it safe and refrain from starting something new; the catch 22 is that new activity is exactly what will guarantee a healthy supply of new customers in 2021. If your inbound enquiries have dropped off, we can work with you to create demand generation campaigns that will build and nurture your key prospects and relationships and convert them into engaged customers. We use all of the aforementioned tactics and mediums plus more to deliver relevant content and messaging to your target audience and produce marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for your sales team to follow up. 

If you’d like to talk more about how we can help you create a marketing strategy that will ensure your business grows and thrive in 2021, get in touch today on 01392 796 702. 

The Power of Multichannel and How to Use it For Success

Imagine if you could only rely on one method to communicate the benefits of your product or service. Think of how you would need to simultaneously build brand recognition, demonstrate the benefits of your product, and consistently engage with the customer using that same method of communication whether they were ready to buy or not. Think about your preferred brands – imagine if everything you had learned about them had been as a result of a one-off radio awareness campaign aired over two weeks. Would they still be your preferred option? Would you feel the same investment in that brand if you hadn’t been furnished with tailored product knowledge to influence your buying decisions? Or received an email with an irresistible offer, followed by a social post that made you smile? The answer is, probably not. Multichannel campaigns are arguably your prospect’s preferred choice. Research shows 67% of B2B buyers tend to research content before making a purchase and 64% of B2B buyers will read two to five content pieces before making a decision to purchase.

Creating awareness and maximizing exposure

Multichannel selling is the second approach. It’s promoting and selling your products on more than one sales channel, taking an integrated approach that allows you to increase your prospective customer’s exposure to your product through telemarketing campaigns, digital campaigns, social selling, video prospecting and content sharing. It’s more than reaching out to prospects through traditional methods of communication – it’s generating awareness in the online communities they already use and meeting them where they already are. It’s a smart way to build brand and reputation, communicate a product or service’s benefits and drive interest and enquiries.

A blended and personalised approach

Our team are experienced in designing sales and marketing campaigns that carefully consider all the variables at play. When working with senior c-suite decision makers, or targeting large enterprises with complex organisational structures, our team know that a transactional approach isn’t the most effective. Instead, they create selling sequences of personalised activity that deliver valuable messaging designed to subtly influence and place the service benefits at the front of the prospect’s mind. When our sales specialists follow up with a phone call, they know some of the valuable product benefits and brand credibility have already been seeded. This is particularly valuable for our clients with high value products, which may have longer than usual sales cycles, meaning a longer-term nurture approach is required to keep their prospects engaged – and this has to extend beyond a single campaign.

Why we’re different

Here at Air, we have the in-house skills, technology and processes to execute multi-channel campaigns. As a specialist end-to-end sales agency, we don’t believe in a templated, cookie-cutter approach. For us, no two campaigns are the same. That’s why we’ll work closely with you to understand your sales goals, your target market’s challenges and their customer’s pain points so you can tailor your campaigns and messaging to cut through the noise and strongly resonate with key decision makers in your desired market.

With Air, you can be assured that we’ll design and deliver a multi-channel approach that helps you deepen your brand recognition and increase your customer touch points, in a meaningful way, so that your combined sales and marketing efforts have the maximum impact and reach without creating arduous processes or unnecessary workload for your internal team.

If you would like to know more about how we can help you discover new markets, land high value accounts and improve brand recognition through a multi-channel approach, get in touch here or call us on 0345 241 3038.

What It Means to You, to Work With a HubSpot Solutions Partner Marketing Agency

Air Marketing are an official HubSpot Solutions Partner. Our team are very proud of this because for an ambitious agency looking to grow, we love the idea of being affiliated with such a huge, successful brand. 

But – what’s the benefit of this affiliation to our prospects and clients? Because ultimately, they are more important than just a great title. 

We completely agree, we are not the sort of agency that runs after fluffy titles and affiliations just to make us sound good. In fact, that is the exact thing that we advise our clients not to do, so we certainly wouldn’t be doing it ourselves. As part of our partnership discussions with HubSpot, we did a lot of our own exploration to fully understand what this partnership means for our prospects and client base. 

So, what does it mean? 

The biggest and most obvious benefit is accessing HubSpot. There are many, many different CRM systems available on the market but there are very few at sensible price points for B2B businesses that allow marketing, sales, service, and IT teams to collaborate, removing friction from the buyer’s journey. HubSpot use inbound as a methodology for growing your organisation. It’s based on building meaningful, lasting relationships with your prospects and customers through valuable content and experiences. It’s also about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you. 

Alongside this inbound methodology, the other big benefit is having all touchpoints under one roof creating ‘one version of the truth’. By this we mean that many businesses fall into a similar situation where – sales use the CRM (when they remember), marketing are working from that CRM but also from an emailing platform, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google AdWords, WordPress etc and service or Account Managers are using spreadsheets or another separate system to manage clients/customers.  

This structure means that data is stored in many different platforms so you may not see a clear picture of your prospects or clients/customers – not being able to see a clear picture means you’re restricted in making overall decisions on customer journey, touchpoints and marketing success because your data points are not joined up. Whereas, getting all this data within one platform opens up huge opportunities to understand more about your customer journey, your marketing and sales touchpoints and the ability to pull reports on this data to better understand and compare it.

As HubSpot Partners we are constantly understanding more efficient and effective ways to manage your marketing within this platform. This means that we are focused on crafting programmes of marketing activity which is entirely focused on delivering results aligned to your objectives. Utilising the HubSpot platform to deliver, optimise and transparently report on this activity. This is something that we have been passionate about since inception but partnering with a piece of technology that enables us to achieve this more efficiently is of huge benefit to our prospects and clients. 

Do you have to use HubSpot to work with us? 

In short the answer is no. We are always open to working with clients who use other CRM systems or are launching themselves so have CRM in place. But it will always be our recommendation to have a system, like HubSpot, that allows all your data to be kept in one place to make our marketing efforts and your marketing investment more efficient to deliver success. 

If you are looking for guidance on your marketing strategy or activity, or you’d like to discuss HubSpot as a CRM or lead generation tool your business, get in touch to find out more. Call us on: 0345 241 3038, or send a message to our CRM Manager, Shaun Weston, on LinkedIn.

How to Build and Leverage Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

We all know the phrase first impressions count. Thanks to social media, that first impression now happens before your first meeting with a client. Your social presence, specifically LinkedIn, is a fantastic opportunity for you to breathe life into your business, showing people the personality behind the brand.

Research shows a direct correlation between time spent on developing your personal brand and consumer trust. 82% of customers trust a company when their senior management members are active on social media (GoGulf, 2013).89% of top performing sales people say social networking platforms, such as LinkedIn, are important in closing deals and are part of their sales strategy (SuperOffice, 2020)So this tells us the old adage still rings true – people buy from people and connections matter.

Check out the competition

This is an important litmus test. Before you can start developing your social strategy and content plans, it’s vital to research what your competitors are doing on LinkedIn and use it to your advantage. Look at their most successful posts. What types of content do the people in your desired market engage with? What are the key themes that people are discussing? Think about how you could create content that responds to the conversations you’re seeing in the comments, or start a conversation that matters to you.

Define your tone of voice

When everyone is talking, it’s hard to cut through the noise and make an impression. It’s not about being bold and extrovert. Ithat’s simply not you, it won’t ring true with your audience. Try to find your authentic voice, own your material and don’t be afraid to voice your opinions. Remember, you’re an expert in your business and there’s nobody who knows that story better than you. If you need help telling it, that’s OK. A trusted provider can help guide you on that and draw out the key elements your audience will find most engaging.

Getting started

A basic but important first step is to ensure your profile is up to dateAs mentioned previously, first impressions count and if your profile doesn’t reflect your current role or campaigns you’re working on, it’s going to jar with your audience. Take control of this and let people know you’ve got it covered. Think of it as your own personal elevator pitch. Let people know that connecting with you will open the door to interesting content and opportunities.

Consistency matters

It’s easy to get caught up with posting furiously when you start out because enthusiasm is high, then letting it slide during more hectic times. Consistency is the key to success. An easy way to stay on track is to put together a content schedule. Planning ahead doesn’t mean a dearth of creativity – mix up scheduled content with more spontaneous posts that capitalise on topical industry news.

Content rules

Everyone talks about engaging content but think hard about what this means to you. Maybe you’re a natural storyteller who finds it easy to weave the fabric of daily business life into anecdotes and thoughts that spark ideas. Maybe you’re a direct person who sees something incredible and can’t help but hit share. Whatever your preferred methods, write content that’s enjoyable to read and include relevant hashtags for your industry and target audience. You can even see how many people are following that hashtag just by searching for it (no magic required!).

Get connected

LinkedIn is all about connections; even the biggest influencers send regular InMails and invest time and attention to growing their network through quality, shareable content. They do it because they know it’s the key to staying relevant and part of the conversation.

Join the industry groups that are relevant to your business. This is not only great for refining your content strategy; it provides valuable insight into your customers challenges. If you see a conversation where you can solve a customer problem or offer relevant advice or insight, don’t be afraid to join in. The same principle applies to companies in your target markethit follow, pay attention and engage with their posts.

Connect to people you’ve met at events and webinars. You have a golden opportunity to check in and take that conversation forward. When you’re connecting to people within your industry and target audience – always use a personalised messageThe personal touch will be appreciated and give you the opportunity to have a meaningful on-going conversation that could lead somewhere mutually beneficial.

Don’t forget to review the ‘people also viewed’ section. The great thing about LinkedIn is even with a free account you can build a solid base of qualified contacts, and a little desk research can help you build out a decision-maker map that could be extremely valuable for future campaigns.

Beyond the basics

If you have a company page, utilise the 100 credits available per month to invite your connections to follow the page. 1 invite = 1 credit. When the invitation is accepted, the credit is returned for you to use again, and you’ll receive 100 new credits on the 1st of each calendar month. Don’t let them go to waste as this is a quick and effective way to grow your audience.

If you have the means, it’s worth upgrading to a Premium account or Sales Navigator to take advantage of additional features such as CRM integrations and custom lists. Consider sending regular InMails to engage with your audience – it’s a valuable campaign tool you can easily align with any other regular digital communications and email marketing campaigns.

Invest the time and you will see the benefit

Schedule time in your day to work on your personal brand. If you don’t have the time and headspace to give it the attention it deserves, we can help.

Air Marketing help individuals and businesses unlock the power of a thriving personal brand. We build intelligent marketing capabilities using a mixture of proven marketing tactics to reach your target audience and produce marketing qualified leads for your sales team.

If you’d like to talk more about how we can drive tangible results from your social channels and personal branding strategy, get in touch today on 0345 241 3038.

What to consider when looking to outsource your marketing for the first time

This is an interesting question that came up recently whilst we were speaking with a prospect. Having never worked with a marketing agency before, it’s understandable that you don’t know, what you don’t know. If you’ve only ever had internal marketing resource before it can be difficult to know how that translates into an agency relationship, and how to outsource your marketing effectively? If you are not a marketeer yourself but you are responsible for marketing (we’re thinking of some roles such as MD’s, Commercial Directors, Sales Directors, Revenue Directors) being able to truly test and measure any marketing resource can become more challenging. Questions that have come up in these conversations before having been the likes of: 

What makes you the right agency?

How will it work having an agency working with our internal marketing team? 

What should my internal team work on, and what should I outsource?  

Having discussed this in detail with prospects on many different occasions, we thought it would be really helpful to share this with you all. Now for us, sales and marketing are hand-in-hand functions. Ultimately, they are the revenue engine for your business and therefore they have to work together, not separately, for optimal effectiveness. For this reason, we find it is important to begin with your business aspirations and direction. 

Do you know your direction? 

The level of detail in answer to this question varies hugely amongst different businesses. The automatic response for many is, growth. A direction, but for us not a very clear one. What we’re looking to understand from your direction is: 

  • What is your overall business looking to achieve? An increase in 20% revenue on last year? An increase in 30% profits on last year? Sustained 10% yearonyear growth? These are all examples, but by providing us something much more tangible to understand your level of business growth, gives us important insight into the mindset of your business.
     
  • Next up is sales. What are your sales team looking to achieve? What are their targets and how is this split up? What percentage is from retaining revenue, new business and customer upsell/cross sell strategies? This is more important information for a marketer. The sales targets will link back to that overall business target, and in the same way your marketing targets and activity should support your sales targets. If we know that more than half of your targets are focused on client upsell/cross sell strategies, then we need to work with your sales team to target this market. In that example, we may focus in on CRM focused email marketing, providing Account Managers with the sales collateral required to help upsell/cross sell conversations, and look at web traffic behaviour utilising practices such as re-marketing to your current customer base.
  • This all then comes down to understanding your direction with your marketing. As mentioned above, your marketing targets and activity should clearly align to sales, thus the overall business. But you need to clearly set out what marketing should be working towards. How many new business leads do your sales team needSo, what are the channels to be utilised to obtain these leads? Can you clearly see a conversion rate from previous activity of MQLs (marketing qualified leads) to SQLs (sales qualified leads) to then proposal and purchase? If so, what is that typical conversion rate? This will inform us of how many MQLs are needed to feed your sales team. If past data tells you that traffic to your website converts at x% depending on the channel, how much more traffic do you need to attract to the website to meet the targets your sales team have? If you have personas for your target audience and you know that one is lower value but required continually to help run rate and one is high value but longer term pipeline – you need to create unique strategies to be reaching both of these concurrently to maximise effect. 

We’d recommend being prepared with understanding your direction before detailed conversations with an agency, as this will help the agency to really understand what you need from them. You can then move on to understanding ways of working with agencies.  

Ways of working with agencies  

Every agency will be slightly different when it comes to this, but we’re going to give you the example from us at Roots to Market 

We have clients who utilise us typically in 3 different capacities: 

  1. They look to us to create their marketing strategy and then to deliver it for them. This maybe the case if they have no marketers in-house and don’t wish to hire in-house, or if they have junior marketers who would really benefit from the support of an agency to work alongside.
  2. They already have a marketing strategy defined by their Marketing Director or Commercial Director and they are looking for an outsourced team to deliver against it as they don’t have any other marketers in-house and don’t wish to hire in-house.
  3. They have an internal marketing team who have defined and are delivering against the marketing strategy, but they have an element of the activity that they don’t have resource for or don’t have the specific skills in-house to execute themselves. In these cases, we slot into their marketing team to deliver an aspect of their marketing alongside the rest of the team. 

Each of these examples will pull on different members of our team and their skill sets and will require different approaches. But from our experience we’ve found it vital to be as flexible as possible and cater for different client needs.  

We’d recommend exploring what an agency can offer you in terms of ways of working from the outset to ensure that it will work with your current business set up and what you had in mind.   

A final thing to then consider is… 

Understanding how to measure the success of the relationship  

Marketing is an investment after all, so although you may not get to the numbers within this conversation being able to understand the ‘how’ of the measurement is required.  

We often find that within this part of the conversation we discuss KPI’s/targets that can be set before activity begins between us and the client, reporting methods and frequency, examples of other successes, ‘what good looks like’, how detailed and integrated the reporting can be, etc.  

It may take time to agree and sign off on all this detail to your relationship but starting the conversation so that both parties understand where each other are coming from allows you to go away and further build on this.  

We’d recommend being honest and transparent from the beginning on this measurement of success. It can really damage a relationship, if goal posts are drastically moved during activity because they were simply incorrect from the outset. There will be aspects of marketing which are still more difficult to measure such as offline advertising, but this should be discussed before the activity begins to ensure everyone is on the same page.  

Get in touch 

We hope that if you’re wondering what to consider when looking to outsource your marketing for the first time, then this has been helpful.  

At Roots to Market, we offer tailored, blended services of inbound and direct marketing, automation and complete tactical campaigns, dependent on clients’ needs. If you’d like to talk more about how we can help you with your outsourced marketing activity, get in touch today on 01392 796702. You can also read more about our results here.