I think the majority of marketing people are a bit like me – very protective over the brand they look after, and unwilling to let go of some of the responsibility to an external force. I was much the same for my years spent in-house – this combined with my natural proclivity towards having control over absolutely everything meant that no matter how busy I was, I clung to everything with a death grip.
I learned my lesson – and although I’m now on the darkside, the agency side, I’m here to tell you that trust me, we can all be friends, and we can all work together to make your business successful.
And guess who looks good when the business is successful? That’s right, you.
New perspectives
Marketing people usually work better when they’ve got other marketing people to bounce ideas off of – I know I do, and many of my peers do. No matter what you’re marketing, you’re marketing it to humans – so it’s useful to get the perspective of humans during the process of trying to put together a campaign, email or tweet. Bringing in an agency gives you access to a perspective from outside of your business – they usually bring with them years of experience in marketing for various industries. And you bring expertise of your business and your industry. Together, that can make for creative dynamite and campaigns that might not have been possible previously.
Getting shit done
One of the worries around outsourcing any part of your department or role is that the external force will try to oust you – to convince the business that they’re cheaper and more effective, and you’ll be sent packing. Well, that’s not how we like to do things. Sure, we will happily help smaller businesses with no marketing resource by being their virtual team. But in bigger organisations with an established marketing resource, we need you, marketing people, on the inside, helping us get shit done. For an MD or business unit leader of a 200+ seats business, marketing isn’t the only thing on their list of priorities. As an external entity, if we don’t have a conduit – that can make getting stuff pushed through the business difficult for us. Having access to a champion of marketing on the inside is invaluable in these larger organisations – and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Making you look good
As I’ve already alluded to – as an external party, a marketing agency usually has little agenda other than getting results for your business, which in turn forges a long-term partnership. Certainly we as an agency sign ourselves up to strict KPIs and objectives – more traffic, more leads, more customers. We’ll set these with you, making it a shared goal, and 99% of the time, when those goals are met, guess who looks good? It’s not us – it’s you. The senior leadership will likely have little to no interface into the marketing agency – but they do with you. You can take credit for everything we do – we won’t mind – because we came up with the strategy and put together the activity together. And yeah ok, we were down in the engine room shoveling coal – but you were steering the ship.
Embrace the agency
I’m here to tell you that it’s OK to accept help – you don’t need to be all things to all people as a marketer. We’re all on the same side – we want to work with you to grow your business. We learn from you, and you learn from us, and together we can really come up with some great strategies and campaigns that will stand out.
No matter what you need help with – content, inbound strategy, running an ABM campaign – Inflowing will happily work with internal marketing teams to understand your goals and challenges. Let’s see how we’d work together – get in touch for a quick chat.
