We’ve been helping agencies with effective marketing since 1995 — 29 years of experience. I’ve been in charge of sales for the past 20 years, and it’s been my job to take on clients we believe we can help the most. We’ve made good guesses and some bad ones. There were firms we took on thinking they’d be home runs, yet they got no results. Conversely, there were firms we weren’t sure about who repeatedly knocked it out of the park.
Business is a constant journey of trying to figure out the right recipe for success. That’s essentially what we’re hired to do: work collaboratively with firms to find the right recipe for their success. In our world, success means closed business through their marketing — a complex and ever-moving target.
We’re in a “what have you done for me lately?” business. It doesn’t matter what results we generated six months ago if a client hasn’t closed something recently. We’re permanently locked into a direct results-based ROI calculation with our clients. It’s intense and challenging, but it’s great because we’re doing real work. It’s hard, complicated, and always changing. But we love it because we get to see patterns.
One pattern we’ve seen is that there are two factors that most effectively determine your success in marketing: your firm’s positioning, and how fast you get a campaign into market.
How Sharp is Your Firm’s Positioning?
Anyone who’s listened to Newfangled knows we emphasize this, and we’re not the only ones. Carl Smith from the Bureau of Digital recently surveyed about 700 agencies and found that firms doing best in these difficult times are those who are sharply positioned and consistently marketing (which underscores our latest thoughts in this article.)
Being sharply positioned means knowing how focused you are in the marketplace, and it’s the most important factor by a long shot. While there are many rubrics out there to figure out how sharp your positioning is, a quick test is whether you have a targetable audience. For example, if you can’t buy an email list of your target audience without having to purchase a million emails hoping the right 10% are in there, you’re not well-positioned enough to market effectively in the digital realm.
Of course, there are other kinds of marketing, but most firms are going to market this way if they’re going to market at all. So if your positioning isn’t sharp enough so that you could buy a list of your audience, then it’s probably going to be pretty hard (not impossible!) for you to generate results in your marketing.
What Does Your Speed to Market Look Like?
The most recent pattern we’ve seen across our client base is that the ones who have had the most success are the ones who get to market fastest. That’s critically important because of the way we, at Newfangled, work.
We don’t care so much about click throughs, open rates, page views, gross metrics or that kind of thing. Instead, we measure everything based on exact individuals engaging with you — by name, face, and email. As soon as we go to market (usually at the end of month two or beginning of month three of our work together), we see:
- Who’s showing up
- How they got there
- What they’ve done since
- Who’s ready for direct outreach
- What you should talk about in that first warm sales conversation
This specificity allows us to collaborate with our clients to refine the system quickly. Is that the right person or not? Is that the right person or not? Are they doing the right things or not? How did that sales call go?
We’re getting to the real facts of the situation quickly — as long as we get to market. Experimentation and refinement, being in the market and seeing who shows up, responding to it, refining the process, that cycle is the heart of marketing. That’s when marketing is really happening. The faster you can get in the market, the more reps you’re going to have at that, because there’s an end point, right?
Yes, Marketing is Hard.
That’s why most firms don’t do it that often. It’s expensive, not just in terms of money. It’s expensive in terms of time and energy. It takes a lot. And the truth is, it’s not your day job. Your day job is to do the work you do for your clients and get paid. Marketing is peripheral to that. There’s a gap between when you start marketing and when you need to see results. If you don’t see results by a certain time, you’ll likely stop.
Let’s say we have 12 months. If you take six months just to go live in the market, we only have six months for the refinement process. That’s not a long time. But if you go live in month two, we get nearly 10 months — almost twice as long. Those extra months really matter because once we see results, marketing becomes much easier, your mind relaxes because you know it works. You’re locked in. Keep doing that for a very long time and you’re able to apply the dollar cost averaging marketing style because you’ve got the money, you’ve got the energy, you’ve got the time, and maybe most importantly, you’ve got the peace of mind that’s going to work.
What Common Factors Delay Time to Results?
The answer is being too precious and wanting everything to be perfect. We’re not condoning sloppiness at all, but so often we’ve seen perfect be the enemy of good and we can’t let that happen. Because say you craft this perfect strategy that’s exactly right and beautifully orchestrated and takes six months to do it, and then you’re finally live — and after all that work you realize oh, no one cares about this topic. Or maybe no one cares about this topic anymore and you really thought they would.
The real way to figure out what makes the most sense is to get into market and see if they care.
These Two Marketing Strategies Can Shape Your Firm’s Future
So, to recap: If you want to see real results in the shortest time possible, you need to do two things.
- Be sharply positioned. Have a specific target market. Ideally, have a very specific offering.
- Get into market as quickly as possible. Start that process of observing and refining so you reach people with the right message at the right time.
That is the work of marketing.
Want more insights like this? Connect with Newfangled on LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.