I'm Worried a Marketing Company Won't "Get" What We Do

Your business is a special snowflake, and we don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. You’ve spent years nursing it to health. You’ve crafted an intensive understanding of the clients you serve, and you’ve polished your brand identity enough to make it gleam. It’s understandable that you’re concerned that a marketing company won’t understand all the cogs and wheels that make your company tick. Handing your baby over to a team you don’t know is scary, but it needn’t be.

A successful digital marketing agency won’t have spent years getting to know your business on the day you hire them, but they will have spent years learning how to get to know the intricacies of each unique company they work with. There’s simply no other way to succeed in the industry.

Knowing Your Weaknesses

One of the most destructive mistakes small businesses make is burning through their capital before they set aside a marketing budget. Once products have hit the market, your average company has only 13% of its initial revenue left for marketing. How intelligent does that seem to you?

To Steve Jobs, it seemed pretty idiotic, so he handed his campaign over to marketing legend, Regis McKenna in the Eighties. Until then, he’d not enjoyed much success, but the right marketing company changed that. The 1984 campaign is still as legendary today as it was when it went live. It redefined Super Bowl advertising and Apple, thrusting the corporation into the big league.

Steve Jobs might have been a genius, but that doesn’t mean he was a marketing genius. Recognizing that that particular hat didn’t suit him is what drew out the soul of Apple because that’s just what great marketers do.

Soul Branding

Marketing isn't a soulless enterprise—quite the opposite. Laurence Knight coined the term ‘soul branding’ to describe marketing that reflects the values and goals of a company. If you want to know how successful that approach has been for his marketing company, ask Dove. The Real Beauty campaign he orchestrated increased sales by 700% in only two months.

Unilever’s iconic campaign demonstrates the inevitable effects when marketers delve beneath the skin of a brand prior to strategy creation.

Big Data, Big Returns

Demographic definition is one of marketers’ biggest priorities. The practice has evolved to such an extent that marketers now use a complex system of analytics to get to know your buyers, but sometimes marketers have to go beyond that. When Dropbox was still an expensive failure, it was a marketing company that helped Drew Houston to understand what his product did.

That seems almost too fundamental a task for an entrepreneur to miss, yet Houston didn’t have the first idea how to explain his brand to others, let alone himself. It was marketers ‘getting’ what he did that shoved Houston into the spotlight of an entire generation. If climbing onto the Forbes 1000 sounds like a stellar prospect to you, it's marketers who have the understanding needed to achieve it.