Category: Blog
Top 4 Reasons That Make Full-Service Marketing Agencies the Wrong Choice
Having spent my 15-year career at full-service agencies, I have a good grasp of how well-meaning agencies can miss the mark with meeting client needs.
Here’s how:
- Not everyone needs full-service marketing support.
Some clients don’t need a full-service offering. They may only need support for content marketing, branding or website design. Choose an agency that’s flexible to support your needs, and is willing to work within your budget to provide service for your top priorities. - Full-service marketing agencies can sometimes mean a lot of overhead.
When an agency is fully staffed with full-time employees in every department spanning from Account Planning, Account Management, Creative, Production, Media, and Digital, there is pressure to keep everyone busy and billable. So, if an agency wins a retail account but only has bandwidth within the financial services team, then the agency is forced to assign “experts” from a different vertical to support the retail business. - Full-service marketing agencies can lead to bloat.
Again, when an agency is fully staffed with full-time employees in every department, the number of agency personnel that attend client meetings and internal meetings can start to grow over time. And, not all these agency personnel are critical to the business or add value. What does this mean for the client? Hourly rates of all those that attend the meeting can really add up, so a one-hour meeting with 10 agency people may cost you $1,500 and up. - Full-service agencies can mean lots of layers.
Full-service agencies with lots of layers can mean that you’re left to deal with junior account people or have junior creatives and copywriters assigned to your account. While a senior executive was present at the new business pitch and was instrumental in convincing you that you’ve chosen the right agency partner, you may never see that senior executive again.
Now, there is a way to benefit from a full-service agency without experiencing all the downsides outlined here. You can work with an agency like Catalyst, founded by senior marketing professionals who possess varied expertise in the fields of high tech, consumer packaged goods, retail, healthcare, higher ed, and real estate. Our full-service offering means that we can evaluate your marketing needs, help you prioritize, and develop and execute a strategic, holistic marketing plan…without the costly burden of full-time, in-house employees. Instead, we have a pool of skilled resources that we assign based on industry expertise and project scope. The client benefits from having one point of contact, with access to a range of marketing experts, sourcing only what’s needed and strategically driving the marketing plan to generate results.
Interested in learning more? Ping us!
The Art of Customer Success
Coming from a world of sales, account management and customer success, I have been fortunate to understand the value and differentiation of client facing roles, as well as the value they bring to a customer. Most sales organizations build a team of account executives to identify and acquire new business. Once the contract is signed, customer service representatives manage the client through the duration of their contract. What most organizations lose sight of is how to proactively engage customers, ensure they are adopting the product/service and help them achieve their goals. Many organizations recognize this gap, but it’s often too late.
Albeit, all of these roles are critical in building a healthy business, Customer Success is increasingly playing a fundamental role in the prosperity of an organization. A recent report by Gartner asserts that 89% of respondents expect customer experience to be their primary basis for competitive differentiation by 2017. Customer Success can be the leading factor in customer satisfaction and renewal business. They provide the face to the customer relationship and the glue that connects the company to the customer. They are seen as the trusted advisor/white label partner with a holistic view of their client organization.
It is the job of the Customer Success Manager to understand the key performance indicators most valuable to the customer. From that moment on, the main focus is to ensure they are on the right path to reach those success metrics. Questions such as, “What is the business problem you are trying to solve” and “How will you define success” are critical to set the stage.
Even though a Customer Success Manager is focused on adoption and satisfaction, they are also tasked with identifying champions within their client organization. Creating that “stickiness” and loyalty from the start will result in increased renewals, cross-sells and up-sells given the customer is solving identified business problems and achieving success.
At the end of the day, Customer Success managers must retain and grow revenue while achieving the highest level of customer satisfaction. They need to anticipate the customer’s needs and provide solutions based on their business strategy to improve their overall success. It’s an exciting time for Customer Success, as the impact of this profession is gaining momentum.
How is your organization measuring and nurturing Customer Success?
10 Public Relations Tips We Learned From our Friends at Business Wire
No marketing plan is complete without public relations. Like all aspects of marketing, PR has evolved dramatically over the last few years and we compiled a list of good tips our friends from Business Wire shared with us during our recent lunch.
Here are some of the things we were reminded of, plus a few new nuggets we didn’t know:
- Your headline should be 70 characters or less. The reason? Search engines cut it off in most digital displays so make sure your headline is concise, compelling and within this character limit.
- Add web links to the first 2 paragraphs of your release. Odds are good only the first two paragraphs of your release will be read, so make sure you don’t miss your opportunity to direct traffic back to your site right up front. (But make sure you’re linking back to relevant content and not using vanity links.)
- Add images or infographics. Sixty-seven percent of people are visual learners. Plus visuals also help transmit messages to people’s brains faster. So it’s critical to add a visual element to your release to increase the chances of your news being picked up by a media outlet.
- Videos are also a great idea. But if you do include one, make sure it’s only 30-45 seconds long. The press spends a lot of time scanning news to see what’s interesting and worthy of pickup. Videos grab the media’s attention (even more than static images) and increase your likelihood of being shared.
- Add Click to Tweet. This clever concept allows your readers to share a specific quote from your release on Twitter. Not only does this encourage engagement, but it’s a great way to use your audience to promote your story.
- The summary of the release (or the first sentence), is as important as the header. This is the copy that’s displayed just below the title on search engine rankings, so make sure your first sentence is concise and understandable. And avoid jargon!
- Include a web link to the press release on your own site. In other words, don’t redirect them back to the media distribution outlet you used to post it. Instead, redirect your audience back to your website where they can view your release and poke around at other pages on your site.
- Don’t miss the opportunity to add social sharing buttons. You want to engage your audience, so encourage them to share your news. Make sure to thank those that spread the word.
- Don’t forget keyword phrases. Google is moving away from providing results based on just keywords, to being an engine that answers questions. So use this to your advantage and include long tail industry-specific phrases that answer the questions your customers are asking.
- Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are the only bad days to put news on the wire. It used to be that the ideal time to put a release on the wire was Tuesday morning right after the opening of the market. Thanks to the digital age, people are consuming news all day every day. But the weekends do show a dip in pickup and readership, so shoot for Monday through Thursday to promote your news.
Got a PR tip to share? We’d love to hear yours.
10 Signs You Know It’s Time to Get Marketing Help
Most marketers have more on their to-do list than they have hours in the day. But, they keep chugging along hoping that their list will dwindle down and become more manageable. Unfortunately, the list doesn’t get shorter, it gets longer with competing priorities and looming deadlines.
When do you know it’s time to say uncle and get some marketing help?
- You’re in meetings all day long.
If you spend your days sitting in meetings, preparing for meetings or scheduling meetings, then you’re not making a dent on your to-do list. In fact, your list grows with meeting outcomes and follow-ups. Ask yourself what on your to-do list can get delegated while you’re locked up in the conference room.
- The sales team keeps complaining about the lack of quality leads.
Not all leads are created equal. And, time is money. So, if leads are handed to the sales team and those leads aren’t ready to convert, it creates friction between sales and marketing. Understanding which channels are driving the most qualified leads takes time and implementing a lead scoring methodology takes even more time. This strategic and analytical work can be outsourced to reduce frustration and create harmony.
- Putting out fires is all you do.
A small fire can become a wild fire quickly, especially if you don’t have enough of the right people putting them out or problem solving on the spot. Ideally, you have experts on your team that can anticipate these blazes before they occur so you can reduce the frequency of disruptive emergencies.
- There’s no marketing plan.
Your marketing team is doing a ton: email marketing, social media, print ads, events. But, it’s sporadic and there’s a lack of integration across all channels. A marketing plan will create cohesion in messaging, timing, and delivery method so that each communication and tactic builds on each other for maximum impact and performance.
You have all these specialized needs but don’t have the budget to hire subject matter experts to fill internal skill set gaps. And, you don’t necessarily have the same needs month over month.
- Web traffic, foot traffic, conversion rates, or sales revenue are trending downwards.
If it feels like you’ve tried everything and nothing seems to be working, it helps to have an outside perspective review the analytics, interpret the data, and recommend (and implement) strategies to optimize your marketing program.
- Marketing technology eludes you.
Marketing automation, CRM, and content management systems are changing the marketing landscape, and companies that invest and adopt new technologies gain a competitive advantage through improved marketing performance. But, it takes time and experience to vet, demo and decide on which tools make sense for your business. Get help figuring out your technology stack and implementing it.
- You lack a social media presence.
Your company may have a LinkedIn page, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel and/or Pinterest account. And you post on these channels when you remember to do it. That’s a good start. Now what? A social media strategy complete with which social channels make sense for your target personas, tactics to grow your reach, and an engaging content strategy will maximize the impact of your social media efforts.
- You know you need digital marketing but don’t know where to start.
Digital marketing covers a lot of ground: web development, email marketing, PPC and display advertising, SEO. It can be overwhelming. Good news is that you can get help developing and implementing a digital roadmap with clear priorities and outlined steps that will drive leads.
- You can’t track return on marketing investment.
Marketing budgets are constantly scrutinized because results aren’t correlated to marketing efforts. And, well-meaning marketing departments are scrambling to meet demands from several business units with no clear direction on how those demands will translate into increased revenue.
There is a silver lining. You can get marketing help from agencies that offer a wide range of marketing services to reduce your stress level and allow you to get more done faster. They can even advise on which key performance indicators to track and create a meaningful report for increased visibility into what’s working and what’s not.
Want to learn how? Download our eBook
“The Complete Handbook to Outsourcing Marketing.”
Marketing Strategy: The Missing Link in B2B and B2C Success
Earlier this month, we hosted marketing speed dating events where companies came to talk to us about their biggest marketing challenges. Surprisingly, the #1 challenge for companies across the B2B and B2C spectrum is strategy or, more accurately, lack thereof.
Why is Strategy so Necessary?
Strategy provides a foundation for all of your marketing efforts. Do you ever feel like you’re doing all these marketing activities like sending emails, dropping postcards, advertising on Google, and posting on social media but you’re not seeing an increase in business? It’s most likely because you don’t have a strategy in place that clearly articulates your goals (qualitative and quantitative), your audience, your product offering and its benefits, along with a plan for how to achieve your goals, by when and for how much.
Without a strategy, it’s easy to get distracted by shiny objects. Shiny objects come in the form of new marketing technologies, new advertising channels, new social media platforms or simply being exposed to marketing tactics that have been around but were not part of your toolkit. Adding new marketing initiatives to your growing list of campaigns won’t necessarily translate into increased revenue or higher ROI. In fact, you’ll likely spend more money without a tangible return, further eroding profit margins.
Imagine, as my business partner, Amanda, puts it, riding your bike with a blindfold on. You’re pedaling away with no clear direction of where you’re trying to go, no understanding of which path is the most direct and no idea what roadblocks stand in your way.
Having a marketing strategy in place will provide you with clarity on how all the marketing tactics fit together, a framework from which to gauge all future marketing opportunities, and a compass to guide your business’s growth.
So, How do You Go About Creating a Strategy?
First, prioritize your marketing objectives. Are you trying to convert more prospects into leads and more leads into buyers? Are you trying to drive more foot traffic into your retail location? Are you trying to increase your brand awareness? Are you trying to attract more website visitors or grow your database? Having a clear vision of your marketing objectives is critical to developing a sound strategic plan.
Now that you have a clear objective, it’s time to devise a marketing strategy. Think about the following:
- Who’s your primary and secondary audience? What do they look like demographically, behaviorally, and psychographically?
- What’s their buyer’s journey? What information do they need at each stage of the process from Awareness to Consideration to Purchase?
- How do you stack up against your competition? What makes your product or service truly unique?
- What’s your marketing budget?
- How will you measure success? Write down your performance metrics and associated timetable.
Then, outline your tactics by marketing objective. Your tactics may consist of email campaigns, public relations, online and offline advertising, content marketing, direct mail, loyalty programs, events, and social media.
Have a Strategy? Now What, Right?
A marketing strategy is only as good as how well you execute it. If your marketing strategy sits on the shelf collecting dust, you’re leaving potential customers and revenue on the table collecting dust too. Don’t let that happen to you. We’re happy to help!
Marketing Tools We Love: Our Favorite Plugins, Apps, and Software
At Catalyst, we are always on the hunt for newer, better, faster, more efficient tools. Finding the best plugins, apps, SaaS, etc. can be a job in itself, given there are so many startups creating newer, better, faster, more efficient tools for people like you and me.
We have a set of go-to tools that we use every day, and we also recommend to our clients when they ask us for advice on their tech stack. Here’s our list of tools we love and why.
Marketing Automation
We’re adept at using several marketing automation tools – Marketo, Pardot, ClickDimensions, Silverpop/IBM Marketing Cloud to name a few – but HubSpot stands above the rest. Heads above. And for many reasons. First and foremost it’s because of their CUSTOMER SERVICE. They will take your call day or night. Weekday or weekend. And their support is free. In addition to exceptional customer service, it’s so freaking simple. Kudos to the product development team, because this is the best marketing automation UI we’ve ever used. We also love the keyword research and SEO tools. The only downside to HubSpot is the database constraints. So the larger your database, the more you’ll have to spend.
This is a great tool for sending emails and building landing pages. It’s intuitive and easy to use, for the most part. While they have reporting functionality (we especially like the Lifecycle Report), we’ve found data inconsistencies. But we’ve been told these bugs are being fixed. They are integrated (and owned by) Salesforce, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re already running Salesforce.
Our favorite part about Marketo is its ability to handle and clone complex campaigns. The system is robust and a bit complicated, so the learning curve can be steep.
Email Marketing
We like MailChimp because it’s easy, intuitive and inexpensive (at times, free). It offers A/B testing capabilities, a wide range of email templates, straightforward web interface, built-in analytics, robust workflow process, powerful segmentation, responsive chat and email support and a free starting plan with reasonable rates as your list size increases.
Constant Contact is intuitive too, and for those that need an additional hand, they offer phone, chat and email support. You can deploy email marketing campaigns, surveys and polls, and social campaigns (for example, app for Facebook collects more email sign-ups and delivers trackable coupons).
Email Finder
We like this email address extracting tool the best because we have found it to be the most accurate. It’s not perfect, but it does provide a confidence rating telling you if there’s uncertainty. So if you’re wary, you discard the email addresses that have a low confidence percentage.
We have this app loaded on our browsers, but we find there isn’t a lot of data integrity. Because of that, we use this tool as a backup when Email Hunter gives us a low confidence percentage.
Website Traffic Tools
What we like about SumoMe is it provides an easy way for you to grow your opt-in email list. You don’t have to be a graphic designer and you don’t have to have HTML skills. You simply download the app and pick the pop-ups you want on your website. A word of caution – use popups sparingly. There are few things more annoying than a site riddled with popups.
This is an alternative to SumoMe, but it only works with WordPress websites. Plus it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles as SumoMe.
Sales Automation:
Outreach and Salesloft SalesDialer
Both of these SaaS products take the repetition out of sales for sales teams. Here’s how they basically help your sales team. Once your sales team writes a series of emails (many people call this a sequence or a cadence), they can load them into the sales automation software. Both products give your sales team the ability to use dynamic fields so that each email can be personalized with the recipient’s first and last name, their company, industry, and other such relevant information. Once loaded, the sales team can then schedule the sequence to be sent starting on their preferred date and time, and then the subsequent emails can be sent at a specified pace. If the salesperson gets a response, that prospect can be automatically taken out of the sequence, and the salesperson will be notified. This makes it so much easier for the sales team. Salespeople also love the fact that they can gauge a prospect’s interest by tracking whether an email was opened or a URL was clicked on. As a bonus, they have great analytics so you can A/B test based on message effectiveness, time of day, day of week, etc. We’re big fans.
Email/Document Storage/Collaboration/General Office Tools
Google Apps makes it so easy for small business owners like us to run our business every day. Google Hangouts for meetings and VoIp calls, Google Drive for file storage, and Google Slides for presentations so we can collaborate and build presentations together “live” even if we’re not in the same room, state, or country.
Content Quality Management
This tool is mainly for enterprises, but it’s worth noting. Acrolinx helps your writers be consistent with not only the same terminology (which is especially helpful for tech companies with a bazillion product names), but it also guides the writer’s tone of voice. This is amazing linguistic technology that helps companies speak on brand with one voice.
We heart Grammarly. If you don’t have this free app installed on your computer, you’re missing out. It’s 1000x better than Microsoft Word’s Spelling and Grammar check and it helps you adhere to those grammatical rules we’ve all forgotten. And if you’re competitive and like to play along with gamification, you get a weekly report telling you how awesome you are. Last week my vocabulary was “more dynamic (unique/total words) than 96% of Grammarly users.” That’s just bitchin’. (I wonder if that counts as a dynamic word?)
Web Analytics and Keyword Data
Thank you, Google, for offering this glorious FREE tool that is constantly tracking all of our web data. We are completely obsessed. And we are completely obsessed with monitoring it for our clients’ sites. The data continually shocks us. It makes us pivot every single week, which we see as a good thing.
This is a great tool for tracking your keywords and your competitors’ keywords. You can run pretty robust reports that provide a lot of data. It’s worth the subscription if you’re managing a lot of keywords or if you’re managing a lot of sites.
You may have heard about the “Alexa Ranking.” In the simplest of terms, it’s a metric to show your site’s performance compared to all other sites on the web. This rank is important, but not terribly, especially if you’re just starting out. But what is important is the data this tool tracks. It’s a great tool to get intelligence on how people are coming to your site and your competitors’.
Conference Calling
Did you ever think you could say you LOVE a conference calling service? Neither did we. But we LOVE Uberconference. First of all, it’s free. Which is great for a small business owners. Second – it’s EASY. You can use their call-in only feature, which works like a traditional conference call bridge, or you can call in through your computer. Participants can all share screens, mute themselves, mute others, and see who is sharing, muting, etc. There’s also a text chat feature which comes in handy when you don’t want to interrupt the speaker but have a question. They also have some fun “on hold” music that will make you smile.
Webinar Platforms
GoToMeeting has come a long way. In the early 2000’s it was buggy. Now it’s highly functional and easy to use, although not very customizable.
This is another good webinar platform, but it costs more than some great free or low-cost options.
Social Media
We like HootSuite. If you’re managing social media accounts on behalf of clients, or just for your own company, it makes it easy to collaborate with other team members, schedule posts ahead of time, and to measure engagement per post. You can also use it for social listening – so you really understand what people are saying about your brand or company.
Sprout Social is another great social media tool. The reporting and analytics are more sophisticated than HootSuite, so you can drill down into a little more detail, and we like the cleaner design.
CRM
Ever worked with a complicated, hard to use CRM? Many of us have, and we don’t need to name names. That’s why we’re fans of Pipedrive – if you’re a small business. It’s intuitive – loading lists, categorizing based on pretty much any kind of filter, and visualizing your sales funnel are all a snap with Pipedrive.
As with most Microsoft tools, this is just plain easy to use. Plus it interfaces with a lot of the Microsoft applications. So, cheers to easy, and cheers to easily integrated.
Okay, so this one was a little hard to put on the list. But it warrants its presence. It IS the CRM of all CRMs. But we do not recommend this for startups – it’s like using a sledgehammer when a hammer will do. This is a tool for the medium-sized companies and up, who have sales reps that are eager and willing to use a complex tool that will keep all of their stuff straight.
Design/Desktop Publishing
Want to create gorgeous visuals for your social media accounts, presentations, or blog headers? Try Canva. They have a free option but also a relatively low-cost option if you’re using it for work. There’s no need to learn photo editing or desktop publishing software. Canva is drag and drop, and they give you lots of beautiful inspiration if you’re looking for a template to use.
PicMonkey helps people who are not trained designers to edit photos. It’s a good free tool that’s more task-oriented, and less inspiration-oriented, than Canva.
Website Building
Many web designers will say this is their website platform of choice, and there are so many tools that integrate with it. It’s often the best choice considering all of the other technologies a client is already using.
At Catalyst, we love Weebly because it’s great for startups who don’t have big budgets for custom web design. Weebly gives you beautiful template options, and then makes adding your own content an easy, drag and drop experience. It empowers our small clients because they can quickly and easily update menus, blogs, and content. Many companies will eventually grow out of this, so just know that you may need to upgrade at some point.
Project Management Tools
This is the poor man’s project management tool. It’s simple, intuitive, and the user interface is great. But this tool is not for complex projects that have a lot of resources and a lot of tasks.
We like Basecamp because it functions as a central repository for files associated with any/all of your projects, and so much (even email) can be managed within the app. However, it can be a bit clunky and if your email is tied to it, as you will get a lot of Basecamp-related emails that may feel repetitive if you are already up to speed from working within the app.
Got any other tools, apps, plugins that we should be using at Catalyst? Tell us about them in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!
The First Day with Your Marketing Agency Shouldn’t Be Your Best Day
I’ve heard people say that the agency’s best day with a new client is the first day. And, the agency’s stature steadily declines in subsequent weeks, months and years. It’s as though the new car smell wears off and all you’re left with is a monthly payment.
This worldview is a head-scratcher for me. In my experience, relationships with clients grow stronger over time as you face adversity together and successfully overcome business and marketing challenges. Your clients come to trust and respect you and defer to you as their advisor and go-to. It’s always been my mantra to make our clients look good to their boss, whether their boss is shareholders, the CEO or CMO.
If your client-agency relationship isn’t getting better with time, like wine, then it’s time to re-evaluate. Have your needs changed? Has your marketplace changed? Or, have you simply outgrown your marketing agency?
Before you reach out to new marketing agencies, ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I have the marketing strategy nailed and need help executing? Or, do I need a marketing strategy to pull our disparate marketing activities together?
- Do I need an agency that can both strategize and execute?
- Which marketing skills do I need to grow my business? Which of those do I already possess in-house and which ones do I need to outsource?
- Does the marketing agency need to be located close to me?
- What marketing and industry experience are important to me?
- Do I need a large agency or is a smaller, more nimble team a better fit for my organization?
- How often would I like to meet with my marketing agency to feel like an important and cared for client?
- Am I open to learning about and investing in marketing technologies that will increase efficiency and improve marketing performance? If so, how important is the agency’s knowledge in martech to me?
- How will I define the success of my agency relationship, quarterly and annually?
- What do I feel comfortable spending in order to meet my marketing objectives? Are my revenue goals on track with my marketing budget?
Once you answer these questions and start to outline your requirements, create an evaluation guide you can use when vetting marketing agencies. Be sure to identify which considerations are more important to you so you can weigh those responses more heavily. If you’ve done your due diligence, your client-agency relationship will stand the test of time–and adversity.
| Ready to determine if we’re a good fit for your company? We’re happy to chat with you! |
Convert Prospects into Purchasers with the Right Content
Do you have prospects who are stuck in one stage of the buyer’s journey? It’s time to develop specific offers that take prospects from Awareness to Consideration to the Ultimate Decision to buy your product or service.
Awareness: At this early stage of the buyer’s journey, prospects have identified a problem or challenge and they are searching for educational content to better understand and articulate their pain points.
They may be trying to:
- Troubleshoot or solve an issue
- Mitigate or prevent risks
- Improve, optimize, or upgrade a process or piece of software/hardware
Given this mindset, develop free, downloadable (and, at times, gated) offers that provide valuable educational content.
- FAQs
- Blogs
- White papers
- Tip sheets
- eBooks
- Analyst or research reports
- Checklists
- Infographics
Consideration: Now, your prospect has clearly diagnosed his or her problem and is looking for possible solutions or methods to solve the problem. This is your opportunity to present your product or service as the solution that addresses your prospect’s specific pain points.
Here are a few examples of demonstrative content tailored for prospects in the Consideration stage of the buyer’s journey:
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Explainer videos
- Product/service spec sheets
- Worksheets
- Case studies
Decision: When your prospect is ready to make a purchase decision, he or she is carefully weighing options and the pros and cons of each. At this stage of the buyer’s journey, your prospects are attempting to select the most appropriate solution to solve their problem by comparing, testing and reviewing similar solutions.
Make it easy for them to choose your product or service by offering useful content that clearly illustrates your brand’s (feature/function, price, customer service, etc.) advantage.
- Comparison chart
- Vendor selection guide
- ROI calculator
- Free trial or consultation
- Live demo
- Coupon
- Reviews
- Testimonials
By the way, it’s not enough to develop lots and lots of content. Be sure you have a keyword strategy (we can help!) and test and optimize every step of the way. Measure to see what works, continue to A/B test, make improvements and refine the content to increase its value to your prospects and increase your conversion.