The chances are, you’ve come across the age-old adage, “too many cooks spoil the broth”, but the sentiment applies to your marketing.
Not perhaps when it comes to ideation, the more input, ideas and creativity should be welcomed and taken into consideration – but when you have more than one agency to consistently relay these ideas and provide direction too, problems will arise.
We frequently come across businesses who use one agency for web development, one for digital content, one for traditional PR, another for PPC or SEO, perhaps even one for social. Even listing that makes me feel anxious; not only has that got to be expensive, but managing all of those people and communicating with each one, your expectations, goal and overall brand purpose is draining on both time and resources.
The key to building a successful brand is often cited as consistency. Each time a customer or prospect has a touch point with your brand, whether that’s online or offline, the message is reinforced along with their perception of the business, making you memorable. The more people you allow to manage the varying elements of your marketing, the bigger the risk of your brand message becoming diluted or confused, and the perception of your brand becoming damaged.
I’m not suggesting that you take all your marketing strategies in-house, I know first-hand that there simply isn’t the time, or the expertise in-house to make them as successful as they have the potential to be. What I am saying, is limit the number of agencies that you are using, find agencies that have a great history of working alongside each other or find an integrated agency that can offer you all of these services.
Let’s not beat around the bush – the marketing industry is full of egos. We all want our customers to know that we are the best at what we do, and when you have multiple agencies working alongside each other, it’s likely that egos will begin to feel threatened.
Of course, I’m a little bias, I work for an agency that offers almost every element of marketing, and come up against the problems with clients when more than once agency are involved. Take for instance the great content and PR debate; at Datify, part of content marketing includes digital PR, which when working with national newspapers, magazines, and industry publications often crosses into traditional PR if features and comments are printed in physical copy.
Say you secure coverage in a national paper for a client, and a journalist wants comment, but the client also uses a traditional PR company. They need to consult with their PR firm before they comment and the PR firm want further details – but you know you have a very short window of time for them to provide comment, and the PR now also want to speak to the journalist directly to determine whether they think its suitable. Now it’s too late, the journalist has lost interest, or found someone else who is easier to work with.
Not only is this a minor irritation in the short term, it can also have a long-term impact on the journalist’s relationship with that brand, and may hinder them working with the business again.
Another issue that you could potentially face is the discrepancy between metrics used between agencies.
For instance, if an SEO agency and a content agency are not working towards a common goal, but instead are task orientated and using varying software and tools to qualify the legitimacy of a site where content, a link or brand mention, then one may begin to question the motives and strategy of the other.
This is turn creates doubt and confusion in the customer’s mind, who has to take valuable time to investigate the opposing issues.
But what if you just split the marketing between one agency and in-house? The same issues can still occur. Your in-house marketer and your agency need to be unified on the brand image and values that you want to portray. For example, a digital marketing agency looks after your on-site content, outreached content and PR and pitch you as a high end, luxurious brand, but you look after social media in-house and your strategy conflicts with this brand image because you use unrelated images and inappropriate tone of voice.
As a business, you may easily dismiss this as a small issue, but if you are a magazine editor who has received a pitch about your business, and they decide to take a look at your social media channels – you can kiss goodbye to a feature in the publication, and one less advocate for your brand.
The message that I’m trying to get across here comes back to consistency. It’s challenging to a achieve and maintain a high level of consistency when you are working with agencies or individuals of different understandings and competencies. Unless there is one, shared goal that each agency is working towards, say perhaps, a specified number of website visitors within a set period, then each agency will be working to merely to execute a strategy, rather than working in harmony.
If you have the confidence in your ability to create a solid, water-tight brief that is not open to subjective perception from agency to agency, then perhaps roll with it, but then be prepared to spend your time analysing a number of reports and mapping each set of data against another to see what needs improvement, why it needs improving and how this can be done.
The truth is, it’s not easy to segment your strategies between agencies successfully because often the boundaries blur into each other. Communication within one business can be challenging, communication between a range of people is a recipe for disaster, so minimise the cooks and minimise the risk.
By Amy Bull, content marketing executive at Datify
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