What Your Big Marketing Agency Is Not Doing for You

Marketing Ain’t Always Pretty

Marketing is not a glamorous or sexy profession. It is an all-hands-on-deck, roll-up-your-sleeves, git-r-done daily slog to keep your business alive and well.

It is work. Repetitive, never-ending work.

Big agencies are more likely to sell you on a seductive version of marketing. Let’s put some beautiful people in a room and do some creative brainstorming. Let’s do some brilliant branding, design something captivating, and come up with the best tagline since “Where’s the beef?”

Then we can all sip some hand-crafted cocktails and wait for the money to start rolling in.

If you’re a marketer, you know this is a fairy tale. Creativity is great, but you’re not going to get a promotion because the agency you hired designed a gorgeous ad.

Marketing only matters if it can produce results. Can it bring you more leads? Increase your sales? Impact your profitability?

If not, you might as well just be sitting around petting kitty cats.

In a recent article on this very point, Peoplewave CEO Damien Cummings wrote:

Agencies should understand that their role, and their entire existence, should be dedicated to help marketers do their job well. This basic point seems to have been lost somewhere along the way.

Here at Roger West, we love to be creative and sip cocktails too (and we’re pretty darned beautiful), but we tend to focus more on what we consider the day-to-day “block and tackle” side of marketing. The stuff that gets results.

This means focusing not just on generating leads, but nurturing those leads over the long haul. The most efficient way to do this is by setting up automated tasks and workflows in a marketing automation system, so you can score your prospects’ behavior, set up email drip campaigns, send notification emails to your sales staff for follow-ups and more.

It means creating landing pages and running campaigns over and over again. It means considering some outbound email marketing because it works.

It means creating content – actually writing and designing blog posts, case studies, eBooks and presentations for our clients – because that is what is going to lighten their workload. Not a catchy new tagline.

So if your glamorous agency is all smoke and mirrors, let’s talk. We’ll get in the trenches with you, help you through the daily grind, and deliver results that matter.