Amol WaishampayanAre you the Manager of Vendor Juggling at your Business?
TIME TO THINK ABOUT ONE COMPANY, ONE MESSAGE.
Juggling Marketing Vendors. Yes, that’s what most GM’s, Marketing Managers, VP’s, and Sales Managers are doing at their businesses. They aren’t coordinating marketing plans with their vendors, planning how to integrate their traditional and digital marketing, or tracking a universal marketing budget. They’re juggling vendors and in the process; losing a consistent marketing message, battling self-preserving vendors waiting to snap at each other, fighting a fragmented business brand, and searching in the dark for a way to track results.
Marketing and advertising campaigns in both the
digital and traditional spaces are all connected, from the representation of your brand
to the quality and quantity of the results your marketing dollars can produce. Executing marketing and advertising tactics with multiple single-service agencies or vendors with isolated strategies and disconnected objectives is inefficient and ineffective, and it is detrimental to your bottom line.
Think about it: Would your SEO vendor recommend a direct mail, television or radio campaign, even if it’s truly the best advice for your business? Of course not!
When you’re juggling multiple vendors, marketing messages get lost beneath each other and, even worse, beneath the competition and industry noise. Attempting to work with multiple vendors toward the same goals creates competition for your marketing dollars.
The focus of your business quickly becomes lost, and for each vendor they have one goal and only one goal in mind; get the bigger piece of your company’s marketing budget pie! This becomes more important than driving results, which hurts you badly.
From billboards to facebook ads, when you divide your marketing, you’re also dividing your brand, increasing the likelihood of disconnected, unremarkable messages reaching your prospects through various platforms and channels.
And while specialty vendors that provide either digital, creative, or media can only help you with their single marketing specialty, partnering with either; an integrated advertising agency, or building an internal team who can manage it all, keeps your marketing messaging consistent and your goals aligned and measureable!
Speaking of measurable, you may have the best-looking advertising in the world, but if you can’t track the results, what good is it? Disjointed marketing efforts are incredibly difficult to measure. When legendary Philadelphia businessman John Wannamaker said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half,” he wasn’t kidding! His straightforward admission still rings true for many business owners today.
Understanding which pieces of your marketing strategy are working and which are not is the key to any successful marketing campaign. However, if you’re relying on separate companies to create and execute various segments of your marketing, can you accurately measure the things that matter– more leads? More traffic? More sales?
If you’re the type of business who’s looking for strategic, measurable results from your marketing dollars, then it’s necessary to find either, an integrated agency, or an internal team that can deliver.
If you’re looking for an integrated advertising agency, or a strong internal resource to integrate all your vendors, here are a few ROI tips to consider during your initial search:
- Find an agency or an employee that lives in the data and has a strong creative background to effectively and collaboratively implement recommended tactics.
- Ask how they track their data – what technology or software do they use?
- What do they do with the data? What steps do they take to help you make strategic marketing decisions based on the data and analytics?
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