Don’t Accept ‘Results Take Time’ From Your Digital Marketing Agency

Now You Don’t Have To Hire Deloitte Or Accenture To Get A Dedicated Team That Produces Results In Weeks, Not Months Or Even Years

Ask any digital marketing agency and most in-house marketers this question: “How long is it going to take to get results?” The answer is almost always that it will take longer than any CEO would like. We know, because we answer this question constantly.

What you hear (and you might have heard this from your agency) is usually something like this: “Today’s marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.” Again, this is what we told clients all the time. While it’s true, it’s not an optimal answer for companies that want results fast.

That answer is also not 100% accurate. The reason marketers tell you this story is because they can’t do everything they want to do as fast as they need to do it to produce better results faster.

But what if you could remove the constraints that prevent them from doing everything they need to drive results as fast as you need?

It has been done before. Large management consulting firms have already figured this out. When you hire Deloitte or Accenture, they don’t say that you have to wait. They give you the team and the resources to get your results based on your timeline.

Now you can have a similar experience and see similar results regardless of your company’s size.

Here’s why people tell you to be patient, and how we figured out how to get you results in weeks, not months or years.

It’s Actually Your Fault

I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, but in most cases, clients want to spend as little as possible on marketing. They view it as an expense, not an investment.

We look at your current level of marketing and evaluate your current marketing metrics. Then we work with you to understand where you want to be, and we uncover the difference between what’s happening now and what needs to be happening for you to hit your goals.

Here’s an example: Today you get 500 people to your website and generate one or two leads a month. To hit your goals, you need 20 to 25 leads a month. Fair enough.

But to get to that level of lead generation, you’ll need to get over 5,000 visitors a month to your website and convert roughly 1% of them (up from the .4% conversion rate you have today). Then roughly half of those marketing-qualified leads will be solid sales-qualified leads.

The short story is you need to 10x your marketing performance, and to do this in a reasonable amount of time is going to require an investment of roughly $15,000 a month for about six months. Most clients hear this and immediately think, “Wow, that’s a lot of money.”

Their next move is to ask us to lower the level of investment. All this does is delay results even more. We can’t do as much as we want to do, so we do less work for less money, and results take longer. See the relationship between investment and results?

Your budget is a constraint. Your perspective on marketing as a cost is a constraint. Even the total investment at $90,000 over six months is a challenge to most people looking at a marketing agency.

Yet for $90,000 you would be getting 10 times the leads if you closed just 10% of those leads. You would have moved from two new $100,000 clients a year to 20 new $100,000 clients a year. You would have created a marketing machine that generates $2 million a year for just $90,000. Wow! Start looking at marketing like this and your business is going to grow.

Now, what if we could do $90,000 worth of work in just 30 days? You’d see return on your investment even sooner. We can do this.

And It’s The Agency’s Fault, Too

OK, it’s our fault, too. First, we created the ongoing retainer model to help you pay for your program, but we also created it because we handle multiple clients at a single time with our team. The people who work on your account also work on five to 10 other accounts.

That’s how agencies make money. The more clients served with the same team and the same cost, the more money the agency makes. The goal is to squeeze as many clients into the agency as possible. You’re being squeezed. This is why it takes so long to do the work. This is one of the reasons why it takes so long to get results.

Every agency works like this. But the big consulting companies don’t. When you hire Accenture, they come in with all of the people they need, they work only on your business and they get work done quickly, within your timeframe.

The reason they can do this is because the people who hire Accenture can afford to pay them $250,000 for two or three months of work. They can afford to send a team of people to parachute in and help you fix your challenges quickly.

Why can’t digital marketing agencies, revenue growth firms, sales execution companies and demand generation agencies do this too? The innovative firms can, and we do.

We’ve Cracked The Code On Results

We know that besides getting results, getting results fast is a key deliverable for every client in every industry, regardless of life cycle.

We figured it out. We can deliver a dedicated team configured just for your work and working only on your company.

Is this expensive? No, not when you realize the lift you get from adding massive improvements to your marketing and sales execution in a short period of time.

However, this kind of effort requires a significant investment, and instead of tying up your cash in this project, we found a way to make paying for it easier.

We’ve created a finance option (just like how you finance your car purchase) that allows you to pay for your dedicated team and your Accelerated Engagement over six months. In essence, get all of your work done in 30 days and take six months to pay for it.

But wait, it gets better. Having a dedicated team working on just your stuff offers incredible efficiencies.

People on the team don’t get distracted with other client work. They get to know your company faster. They get to know you better. They produce work faster and at a higher quality because it’s all they’re working on.

These efficiencies get passed on to you. So while the initial investment might look significant, it’s less expensive because of the efficiencies in our team’s focus on you.

Here’s What An Accelerated Engagement Can Deliver

You like the idea but might be uncertain about how much stuff we can accomplish in just 30 days. Here’s an example of a client that used the Accelerated Engagement to their benefit.

The client is a well-funded startup and needs to get into 10 new markets quickly. They have an internal marketing team, but with so much going on, everything is taking longer than they want.

Specifically, they have an account-based marketing (ABM) campaign planned for their top 10 markets, and their sales team is chomping at the bit to get going.

They need supporting materials to help tell their story, launch their demand generation marketing strategy, arm the sales team with educational materials and make the website experience highly interactive, educational and disruptively compelling. They need to be in these 10 markets in 30 days.

Here’s what we were able to accomplish in 30 days with a dedicated team working on only this client.

We completed the planning, creation and delivery of their full ABM campaign assets. This included strategic messaging; an ABM content strategy; copy and design for 10 digital PDFs, 10 print versions of the PDFs and 10 CTA buttons for their website; and 10 landing pages built and deployed in their marketing automation platform.

We did copy and design for 10 email banners. We also built their demand generation campaign assets with strategy, copy and design for 40 digital ads.

We completed a survey project that included cleaning, formatting and segmenting the survey target data, as well as one comprehensive survey report, including copy, design, a digital PDF and a print version.

We also produced three email signature banners, one landing page and one thank-you page (all with copy and design). We deployed all of these assets on their marketing automation platform.

The dedicated team included a senior consultant, a copywriter, a designer and an interactive developer to help with the website assets.

Our team flew out to spend a few days with the client, quickly got up to speed on their business, industry, goals and internal team processes, and huddled every day with our contact all throughout the month. Feedback was immediate and changes were highly efficient. Each week we agreed on deliverables and each week we delivered.

They liked the experience and the work so much that they invested in extending the team an extra two weeks to get more work done. Today, they’re executing their ABM campaign months earlier than expected, and the assets are working perfectly to help tell their story, engage their prospects and help their sales team close monster deals.

The CEO commented: “This worked better than we could have ever hoped. We’ll be back in the fall to do this again.”

Who’s Right For This Type Of Engagement

We talk to a lot of companies that want to work with us, and not all of them are a good fit for an Accelerated Engagement. It’s not right for every business. Here are some requirements for us to consider you for an Accelerated Engagement.

• A dedicated team member who can work with us every day. While they won’t have to be on call all day, they’ll need to be available to give us approvals, feedback and direction to keep us moving forward. This close alignment between our team and your team is one way we move so much work through the team in such a short amount of time.
• Buy-in at the C-level that this investment and this type of program is a good fit for your company’s goals and business objectives.
• A clear set of requirements. While you don’t need to know exactly how much to execute (that’s our job), you do need to know what you want accomplished during the 30 days.
• A culture of partnership. We don’t do vendor-type engagements well. We’re a strategic partner with our clients. We’ll discuss your goals and map out a plan. Then we want you to let us “do what we do” to deliver.
• You have to stay focused, at least for the period of our 30-day sprint. If you change your mind in the middle of the 30 days, you’re going to lose the momentum of the team and all the efficiencies. You can always re-sign the team for another 30-day sprint after the initial 30 days of work is completed.

It’s time to change your expectations around what you want to get from you marketing and sales execution. Specifically, it’s time to change what you expect from your agency or in-house team. If you need results quickly, now you have options.