In the fast-paced business world, partnering with a marketing agency is often seen as a shortcut to success. However, many business owners find themselves scratching their heads, wondering why the results aren't aligning with their expectations. In this eye-opening guide, we'll uncover the secrets and strategies to ensure you're not just working with a marketing agency but maximizing the returns you get from the partnership.
Before diving into the tactics, it's crucial to establish clear expectations with your marketing agency. Define your business goals, target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure everyone is on the same page.
For example, I want to take my business from closing 50 deals a month to 100 deals a month. To do this, on average you need 500 qualified leads in addition to coming in every month. Considering an ad budget of $5,000 your average cost per lead should be around $10. Your KPI for cost per lead becomes $10 or under(in this case).
When we provide KPIs to agencies they generally forget about the quality of leads. We have to focus on maintaining the quality of leads while optimising the cost per lead. We don't want to be in a situation where we have 500 leads as per the above example but only 100 of them qualify.
One solution that I generally present for my clients is to focus on cost per qualified lead instead of cost per lead. This gives us (as business owners) a better clarity and understanding of how the ads are performing and how much it costs to have a qualified lead.
I recommend sitting with an ads expert before you start running ads and discussing all this. The first step should be deciding what are the key metrics that we should use to judge and analyse the marketing efforts. For a business that depends upon lead generation, here are a few key metrics that you can focus on:
Cost Per Qualified Lead
Cost Per Appointment
Cost Per Sale/Deal Closed
Once you have this data, then only you can see if the marketing efforts are moving in the right direction or not.
After deciding on KPIs and metrics, the next step is to set up a weekly sync routine with your marketing team.
A weekly sync of 45 minutes is more than enough to cover what happened over the week and how our are efforts going in. Ask your marketing team to bring all the data with KPIs and metrics so it can be audited easily. I recommend creating a meeting format like this:
What went right? (Ex: $9 Cost per lead, High Quality of Leads)
What went wrong? (Ex: Low CTR)
What are we doing next? (Ex: Scaling our budget)
Last but not least, have a marketing consultant over the team. This can be a game changer for your business.
Generally, as a business owner, we don't speak the language that these marketers speak. This creates a communication gap between both parties. Also, as a business owner, you should be focussing on better things like thinking about how to grow the business and closing deals.
These communication gaps can be easily filled by a marketing consultant who can come in and audit everything for you and communicate it with the marketing team. Having the consultant as an external party makes sure everyone is on the right track towards achieving your business goals.
I work with a lot of clients to help them manage their marketing team. If you feel your marketing team can perform better, schedule a free 20-minute ad account audit by clicking here.