You hired someone to handle your marketing. So why are you still spending so much time thinking about it?
Maybe you’re emailing your account manager again because you haven’t heard from them. You’re trying to figure out what they’ve been working on. The monthly report arrived, but you’re still not sure whether the money you’re spending is producing new business.
Or maybe you haven’t hired anyone yet. You’re managing the marketing yourself, spending money on Google Ads, working on your website, posting on social media, and trying to figure out what’s working. You’re learning SEO and PPC terminology you never particularly wanted to learn.
Either way, marketing keeps taking up space in your day.
Outsourcing marketing tasks is not the same as having someone take responsibility for your marketing.
You Should Be Involved in Your Marketing
Handing your marketing to someone else shouldn’t mean checking out completely.
You know things about your business that an outside marketing company can’t know without you. You know which clients you want more of, which services are most profitable, where you want the business to go, and what happens after a prospective client contacts you.
Those are strategic questions, and you should be involved in them.
But you shouldn’t have to learn the intricacies of SEO to determine whether your SEO company is doing a good job. You shouldn’t need to understand every setting in a Google Ads account to know whether your advertising is profitable.
And you shouldn’t have to chase your account manager to find out what’s going on.
A good marketing relationship should make it easier for you to understand your marketing, not require you to become a marketer yourself.
A Marketing Report Should Answer Business Questions
One of the easiest ways to see the difference is to look at how marketing results are reported.
Suppose your marketing generated 50 phone calls last month.
Is that good?
You can’t answer that from the number alone.
Now suppose your report shows that five of those callers scheduled a consultation.
Is that good?
What happened to the other 45? How many were actually potential clients, and how many were looking for something you don’t offer, existing clients, vendors, spam calls, or people outside your service area? And of the real prospects, what happened when they called? Were they handled properly by intake?
Maybe the marketing worked perfectly well. The right people called, but something went wrong when those calls were handled.
Or perhaps the opposite happened. Your staff handled every legitimate opportunity well, but most of the calls generated by the marketing weren’t good opportunities in the first place.
Those are two very different problems.
A report that simply says “50 calls” won’t tell you the difference. Neither will a dashboard full of clicks, impressions, rankings, conversion rates, and other marketing metrics.
You need to be able to follow what happened from the marketing to the lead, from the lead to intake, and ultimately to revenue.
You shouldn’t need a marketing degree to do it.
Transparency Isn't the Same as More Data
Marketing companies sometimes equate transparency with access.
Here’s your dashboard. Here are your rankings. Here are your Google Ads results. Here are your website analytics.
There is certainly value in having access to those things. But giving someone more information doesn’t necessarily give them more clarity.
Sometimes it gives them another job.
Real transparency means you can understand what’s happening without spending hours interpreting the data yourself.
What did we spend?
What did we get?
Did we reach the right people?
What turned into business?
Where did we lose opportunities?
What’s working?
What’s not?
What are we changing?
Those are questions a firm owner can use to make decisions.
The technical work required to answer them may be complicated. Understanding the answers shouldn’t be.
Why Clients End Up Chasing Their Marketing Companies
There’s another part of the problem that has little to do with dashboards or reporting.
Sometimes you just can’t get anyone to call you back.
You send an email with a question. Days go by. You follow up. Eventually you get an answer. A month later, you realize you haven’t heard anything about your marketing in a while, so you reach out again.
Soon, you’re managing the relationship that’s supposed to be managing your marketing.
The problem often begins when an agency’s sales outpace its ability to serve the clients it signs.
As an agency grows, an account manager may end up responsible for more clients than they can reasonably give attention to. Some agencies distribute fulfillment among contractors, outside vendors, or white-label providers. Employees leave. Accounts get reassigned. The new person has to learn the business all over again.
None of this necessarily means the people involved don’t care.
An overworked account manager may care very much about your business and still not have enough time to give it the attention it deserves.
But from your side, the experience feels the same.
You have to ask.
You have to follow up.
You have to notice when something isn’t right.
You have to wonder whether anyone else is paying attention.
You hired the agency so you would no longer have to supply that vigilance yourself.
What Having Your Marketing Taken Care Of Should Feel Like
It doesn’t mean you never think about marketing.
It means you don’t have to keep marketing in the back of your mind because you’re worried something will be missed if you stop paying attention.
There should be a standing meeting on the calendar. You shouldn’t have to remember that you haven’t talked to your marketing company lately and send an email asking for an update.
Reporting should be clear enough that you can see whether the marketing is contributing to the business.
Communication should happen before you have to ask for it. If something isn’t working, you should hear about the problem along with an explanation of what it means and what should happen next.
And there should be enough continuity in the relationship that the people working with you actually get to know your business.
Most importantly, you should feel confident that someone is paying attention.
Your Job Is to Make Business Decisions
There will always be technical details behind good marketing.
Someone needs to understand search algorithms, advertising platforms, websites, analytics, tracking, targeting, creative, and all the other details required to make the work happen.
That doesn’t mean all of those details need to become part of your job.
What you need is enough clarity to make good business decisions.
Should we spend more here?
Should we spend less there?
Are we attracting the kinds of clients we want?
Are good opportunities being handled properly after they contact us?
Where are we losing money?
Where is there an opportunity to grow?
Those are worthwhile questions for a firm owner to spend time thinking about.
Trying to figure out why your account manager hasn’t answered your email isn’t.
You hired someone to handle your marketing because you have a practice to run. You should still know what’s happening, understand what’s working, and participate in the decisions that matter.
But you shouldn’t have to chase someone for that information, decipher a marketing report to find it, or learn another profession just to determine whether the people you hired are doing theirs.
Your marketing company should make your business easier to understand. It should not require you to understand theirs.
If you’re in this situation right now, set up a call with me. We’ll talk through what you’re paying for and what it has produced, and you’ll leave the call knowing whether you’re getting your money’s worth and whether working with me would be a better fit.
