My marketing doesn’t work!

The challenges for advertising agencies aren’t any bigger than any another business. We deal with unruly clients, dishonest employees and stubborn vendors. We also worry about new business development, economic ups & downs and competitors, just like everyone else. So our problems aren’t totally unique, they are just different especially if you work with small business like we do.

Some things that we may take for granted is assuming that everyone knows what we know. A marketing agency has a collective knowledge that is the reason clients seek out their services. It is this knowledge that puts truly successful marketing campaigns into place for clients to reach their goals, whatever they may be. However, we sometimes take for granted that small business owners at least know the basics of marketing and advertising, but let me assure you….some don’t.

So that is part of our job. To educate and coach our clients in how any marketing initiative may work. From soup to nuts, we walk clients through the process telling them what to expect, what their responsibilities are going forward and how to improve, evaluate and tweak their procedures to make sure they are successful. Sometimes, however, that explanation can be overlooked by ourselves and, at times, the client themselves.

When the client overlooks the explanation, you can get a phone call that says, “My marketing doesn’t work!” which is the last thing you want to hear from a current client. A recent example of this happened to Encite just last week.

We started an Adwords campaign for a new client. We explained that our strategy is to start very narrow and expand the campaign so we can see if keywords and geographic area we are targeting is getting the clicks we want. The reason we do this is twofold:

1. We don’t want our clients to pay for clicks from searches that aren’t their perfect client. This is important for every business, but it is especially important for small businesses with tight or non-existent marketing budgets.
2. We need baseline data on efficiency. Once we have that, then we can expand and grow the campaign.

So after explaining our strategy and getting our client on board, we started the campaign. Unfortunately, after only a week, we received a phone call from the client wanting to entertain other ideas on how to promote their business since “Adwords wasn’t working.” For Encite (or any other marketing firm, for that matter), this is very frustrating, BUT it is part of our job. So we had another conversation with the client, reviewed the strategy again with them and moved to the next state of the campaign. Since then, their Adwords have been performing to their satisfaction and they are receiving more and more sales inquiries to their website.

We have found that in today’s business environment, instant gratification is a very common expectation from business owners when implementing a marketing plan. We continue to coach and educate our clients that although there are some options in the digital marketing world that can achieve that, the most successful marketing plans are the ones that involve consistency, commitment and confidence.

Adam OLeary
President, Encite Marketing

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