Here's What Your Marketing Agency Should Deliver In The First 2 Weeks

Speed Is Everything Today, And You Should Expect Your Digital Marketing Agency To Fly

We’ve been running Square 2 for almost 18 years, and the most common question from prospects is: “How long is it going to take to get results?”

Timing is everything in business, and today it’s more important than ever. Companies can’t wait (nor should they wait) six months to start to see work and results.

As business starts to return, CEOs and sales leaders are trying to catch up for the losses associated with the last few months. Your digital marketing agency should be able to help you catch up.

For years, agencies have been telling their clients to be patient. They’ve been telling clients and prospects that it takes six months or more before they should expect to see any sign of life from their inbound marketing program.

And that is accurate. Inbound marketing, content marketing, website optimization and email campaigns do take time.

But today, lead generation, the creation of sales opportunity, closing new customers and optimizing revenue in your current customer base is not about one single set of tactics.

Today, you need a collection of proactive demand generation and reactive inbound marketing tactics orchestrated on a platform of strategic messaging wrapped with the necessary analytics and technology to produce results in weeks, not months or years.

Today, you should expect your digital marketing agency to produce a significant amount of work in weeks, not months.

Here’s what you should expect from your agency.

In 2 Weeks, Your Digital Marketing Agency Should Be Able To Do This

To see what is possible, we’re going to show you two real engagements with real clients. Here are two 14-day Accelerated Engagements.

DINTEC, an SAP implementation consulting firm.

During their two-week Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:

• Created new strategic messaging that increased differentiation and disruption while providing a more compelling reason for prospects to want to connect with DINTEC.
• Provided guidance and recommendations on naming conventions for add-on services provided by DINTEC, making it easier for clients and prospects to understand the breadth and depth of services available.
• Defined and gained agreement around four distinct personas; built out comprehensive and detailed demographic and psychographic profiles for each of the four personas.
• Developed a strategic content marketing game plan, identifying offers for lead nurturing campaigns and proactively moving prospects through the buyer journey.
• Wrote, designed and launched two new educational content offers for prospects in the early and middle buyer journey stages designed to generate leads — one tip guide and one checklist.
• Wrote, designed and launched an infographic designed to position SAP and ERP systems for prospects in early buyer journey stages.
• Designed, wrote and installed three new landing pages with progressive profiling forms for the gated content described above.
• Set up the workflows for lead integration with their Salesforce CRM system, including notifications and lead tracking.
• Designed and wrote three visual CTA (call-to-action) buttons for use on the website, in emails and in blog articles to drive leads for the three new pieces of educational content.
• Created a detailed demand generation strategy and the assets required to launch and sustain the demand generation campaign.
• Wrote, designed and launched four email nurture campaigns, including automated workflows to make continuing the conversation with prospects easy for sales reps.
• Designed, planned and launched a demand generation campaign for paid media, specifically LinkedIn and Google Ads.
• The demand generation campaign included the design and copywriting for ads. It promoted the new educational content outlined above.
• The campaign included defining budget and setting performance expectations, as well as reporting dashboards for tracking and ongoing optimization.
• Developed comprehensive style guidelines for use of logos, fonts and colors across all digital marketing platforms and channels.
• Created a new presentation template with style fonts, colors and graphics.

To see exactly what we did for DINTEC in their 14-day Accelerated Engagement, click here to view an infographic we share with all our clients at the end of their engagement.

Tx3, a software and consulting services firm specializing in regulatory compliance.

During their two-week Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:

• Created new messaging, new disruptive and compelling headlines, and stronger differentiated value proposition.
• Designed, wrote and launched a new website homepage, including a redesigned user experience and conversion offers to generate leads. We also built the page to rank highly on Google.
• Identified a gap in the sales rep tool kit and wrote, designed and provided the reps with a new piece of educational content to directly address challenging questions in the sales process.
• Designed, wrote and launched a new infographic complete with CTA, landing page and lead nurturing emails.
• Installed a progressive profiling form that provides frictionless conversion and gives the reps the information they need to quickly qualify and follow up on the best leads.
• Created additional CTAs for the infographic that allows the offer to be promoted in blogs, in emails and on additional website pages.
• Provided a site-wide review and detailed recommendations on how to improve the visitor experience to drive additional marketing-qualified leads and higher-quality sales-qualified leads, and to close new customers faster.
• Migrated the old website to the new HubSpot CMS.
• Configured Tx3’s HubSpot portal and trained their internal team on how to use both HubSpot for marketing automation and the HubSpot CMS.
• Migrated Tx3 off of their old CRM and on to HubSpot Sales Hub CRM.
• Segmented Tx3’s entire customer and prospect databases for more efficient and ongoing marketing and sales communication.
• Provided training and onboarding for the HubSpot Sales Hub CRM.
• Created and launched new dashboards to track ongoing marketing and sales optimization efforts.

To see exactly what we did for Tx3 in their 14-day Accelerated Engagement, click here to view an infographic we provide clients at the end of their engagement.

In 30 Days, Your Digital Marketing Agency Should Be Able To Do This

Here are two 30-day Accelerated Engagements from two other clients.

MooreCo, a manufacturer of furniture for universities, libraries and schools.

During their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:

• Performed a detailed SEO and keyword audit of their entire website to look at content and current keyword performance. Provided recommendations on keyword selection for ongoing SEO and paid Google Ads campaigns.
• Transformed existing content into three new pieces of gated content — a new infographic and two new e-books — to generate more leads
• Planned, wrote, designed and SEO-optimized three brand new pieces of gated content, including three new design-oriented e-books to generate more leads.
• Designed, wrote and installed six new landing pages with progressive profiling forms for the gated content described above.
• Set up the workflows for lead integration with the Salesforce CRM system, including notifications and lead tracking.
• Designed and wrote six visual CTA buttons for use on the website, in emails and in blog articles to drive leads for the six new pieces of educational content.
• Wrote and designed three new emails to be used to nurture prospects and move them through the buyer journey proactively, signaling sales as they go for appropriate follow-up by sales.
• Wrote and designed social media marketing promotional tiles for use on social platforms to promote new educational content.
• Developed comprehensive style guidelines for use of logos, fonts and colors across all digital marketing platforms and channels.

To see exactly what we did for MooreCo in their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, click here to view an infographic we share with all our clients at the end of their engagement.

Peerless, a cyber security firm specializing in the government space. This company came to us with the intent to launch a new service offering related to upcoming guidelines and compliance requirements when working with the U.S. government.

During their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:

• Researched, wrote, designed and built two SEO-ready pillar pages focused on the terms associated with the new guidelines and compliance requirements.
• Created new strategic messages with a disruptive and compelling story that positions their ability to support the new requirements in the government market.
• Installed the new messaging on their homepage.
• Wrote, designed and launched six new pieces of educational content for lead generation on their website and for use in their sales process, including two infographics, a case study, two whitepapers and a 30-page e-book.
• Wrote, designed and installed six new graphic CTA buttons on the appropriate buyer-journey-mapped pages of their website.
• Wrote two SEO-optimized blog articles, one to be promoted in an email campaign and one to support an upcoming webinar.
• Executed a competitive SEO audit, including a reverse engineering of their top three competitors’ websites to inform their own SEO strategy and keyword selection process.
• Created new branding guidelines for content creation going forward.
• Created new visual packaging guidelines for their new pricing programs.
• Wrote, designed and installed two new landing pages to drive conversions, one for a new late-stage buyer journey offer and one for a mid-stage buyer journey webinar offer.
• Launched a new paid social campaign, including writing and designing the ads; setting the budget; optimizing the spend; and reporting and ongoing optimization.

To see exactly what we did for Peerless in their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, click here to view an infographic we share with all our clients at the end of their engagement.

Within 30 Days You Should Expect To See Results

You can see by the illustrations above that a lot of strategy work is done. A lot of foundational marketing assets are created, like content, website pages, nurtures and videos. Campaign assets are developed. Sales enablement upgrades are installed. A lot of technical setup, configuration and optimization work is done.

The next question should be: “When does all of this produce results?”

The answer is immediately.

Consider this situation: If you already have 5,000 people visiting your website and no conversions, no leads and no sales opportunities, then making all of the necessary changes to your website in 30 days means on the 31^st day you should be seeing metrics that point to roughly 50 MQLs (marketing-qualified leads), 10 SQLs (sales-qualified leads) and five to seven new sales opportunities in the second month.

That means if you close even 50% of these sales opportunities and each is worth even $10,000, you could realize $30,000 in incremental revenue during that month. Annualize this out over time, forgetting about the incremental improvements, and now you’re looking at over $300,000 in new revenue.

No waiting and no need to be patient — just new revenue growth for the company.

Why Most Digital Marketing Agencies Can’t Or Won’t Be Able To Do This

With all respect to my fellow agency owners, it’s not that they don’t want to produce results like this. But most agencies are not set up to deliver these kinds of results.

To help you understand this in more detail, it makes sense to look at how most agencies are set up.

Let’s look back in time 15 years ago, when agencies primarily did projects for clients. They found a new client and did project work for them, like building a new website, creating new content offers or helping them by designing a new brochure or logo.

Some agencies had ongoing relationships with their clients for SEO work, paid advertising or public relations. These retainer-based engagements were not typical in most marketing agencies.

It wasn’t until 2008 or so that agencies started looking at clients more strategically and started offering long-term retainer engagements that covered a wider variety of tactics.

This served the agencies very well. It flattened out their cash flow, spread client payments out over months, positioned them as trusted advisors to clients and allowed some agencies to grow quickly.

This didn’t serve the clients so well. It did help clients manage budgets, but it also forced the agencies to meter out the work, spreading it out over months. This delayed the results, as you’d imagine.

What this also did was force agencies to assign multiple clients to a single account manager or consultant. This worked for the agency but didn’t necessarily work for the clients. Consultants at some agencies handle 10 or more clients. The less clients pay, the more clients a single consultant handles.

You should keep that in mind as you search for digital agencies. If you’re getting a proposal that includes a low monthly retainer, you should expect to be assigned an account manager that has a large set of clients to oversee.

This is very typical at SEO agencies or agencies that specialize in paid advertising. They might offer very low monthly retainers; some are around $500 a month. This sounds great to the client, but the account manager is assigned more than 100 accounts.

You can be sure that the less you pay, the less attention you’ll get. The less you pay, the less experienced your team. This is the math that drives agency profitability. Some clients are OK with this and it works well. I’m not judging; just pointing out the economics of running an agency.    

There’s nothing technically wrong with this setup. Giving a lot of clients to account managers is very common. Many professional services firms work like this and have since the beginning of time.

However, it is highly inefficient. Having a portfolio of clients means you have to hop around all day working on different businesses, in different industries and with different people. This stopping and starting is highly wasteful.

If you think you’re a good multitasker and your agency consultant can be too, guess again. Here are two articles that show the research behind the myth associated with multitasking:

https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/psychology-and-neuroscience-blow-up-the-myth-of-effective-multitasking.html

https://hbr.org/2010/05/how-and-why-to-stop-multitaski

The real challenge for clients and multi-client configurations at agencies is you (the client) are paying for the inefficiencies.

When you look at this closer, you see that the large enterprise-level consulting companies like Deloitte, KPMG and Bain don’t work with clients like this. They deploy a team of people who work only with one client at a time.

This is the correct way to impact results quickly, and it is the most efficient way to work with your digital marketing agency, too.

If you want results, if you want work quickly and if you want to see the impact of new marketing, sales and customer service improvements in weeks instead of months, you should be looking for an agency that can deliver a dedicated team working only on your business for at least two weeks but for as long as eight weeks.

This includes the writers, designers, developers and consultants assigned to your business. They all should be only working on your company. This is how you should want to work with agencies in the future.