Stop Selling Clients Your Service

There are a vast number of agencies in today’s marketplace. And for the everyday business owner who is busy focusing on his or her own sales, internal operations and headaches, it can be daunting to figure out how to execute a successful marketing strategy that will improve your bottom line.

Thoughts running through the heads of business owners might sound like:

“Does my business need social media or SEO?”

“What is SEO exactly?”

“I still need that new website.”

“I heard a great radio ad the other day. I can definitely do one of those.”

“Everyone is doing an email blast, should I?”

“How much will all this cost?”

All of these are valid questions. But the problem comes in the execution. Selecting an agency can be hard because agencies have their specialties, and they only sell you those services: social media, digital advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), website development, etc. To them their services are the answer to your marketing challenge.

But that’s not the case. Your business is unique. It’s in a unique time in its lifecycle, in a unique market or area, a unique industry, and your business needs to stand out to drive traffic and sales.

This is why you need a team that can work with you to help give you a clear plan of action as to what type of marketing your business needs — if it even needs marketing at all.

At Idea Booth, one of our strongest — and in my opinion most valuable — projects that we work on with clients of all sizes is called a Discovery Project. The Discovery Project is a 4–8 week engagement — length ranges based on the size of the business — where we go all-in to get an understanding of a business, its specific challenges, competitors, customers, and help the company make a decision as to what improvements its business needs to make in order to meet and exceed goals.

We do this by:

• Interviewing you and your internal stakeholders extensively to understand your business challenges and goals
• Interviewing your customers (past, current and potential) to get their direct feedback about your business as it relates to your goals and challenges. Who better to hear from than the sources themselves?
• Performing research-based analysis into the industry by finding the latest activities and players, understanding their strategies, and determining how to implement those for your business
• Reviewing your local competitors and large-scale big players to determine what is and is not working

We do this because it is the only true way we can help you make informed decisions. Without knowing your business inside out, including your stakeholders and their goals, your customers, industry, and competitors, we can’t safely tell you that social media advertising will bring you more customers or sales.

What if everyone in your industry is running Facebook ads? How will you stand out? If every one of your competitors in your local area is running email marketing campaigns, do you think potential customers will want to subscribe to another newsletter? No.

At the end of the project, not only do we deliver what a business needs to do, whether it’s marketing or internal operations, we also — and this is just as important — tell you what marketing not to do. We recently worked with a client who had been paying close to $10,000 for magazine ads. After discussing with her fellow industry professionals, looking at how many leads she brought in from magazine ads, and asking her potential clients if they ever bought this particular type of service via a recommendation from a magazine ad, we were able to determine that all of this ad money was going to waste. Imagine if she was able to use that $10,000 elsewhere to reach half a million targeted customers!

So, the next time you’re thinking about your marketing, instead of listening to the agency sales person try to sell you their services and convince you that their un-unique services are right for your unique business, recognize that before you execute a specific plan, you need to take a step back, look at your business as a whole, and determine the right set of activities for you. If you need some expert insight, let us know.