Does Your Marketing Agency Know How to Sell?
…Or, Is It Checking Off Boxes to Justify Fees?
Digital Activity vs. Sales
Does your marketing agency know how to sell your services or does it check off digital activity boxes to justify fees?
Ask a marketing agency about its plan to sell your services or products to B2B or B2C audiences.
Increase Traffic or Increase Sales?
Ask whether the agency’s work will increase traffic or increase sales. There’s a monumental difference.
The Marketing Square is only concerned with selling client services and delivering a sales plan for profit. Our Michigan and Florida clients trust us as their partner to help bring in new business.
Talk in Dollar Amounts
A marketing agency capable of producing new clients will freely talk in dollar amounts based on sales experience within a business category.
The Marketing Square has brought in ongoing five, six, and seven-figure cases for law firms.
What Is the Focus?
An agency tells you it will do everything required of a digital marketing firm including:
- Website build
- SEO
- Content
- Social media
- Increased traffic
- PPC
Sales is missing from the top of the list.
The Marketing Square helps clients get new business by focusing on strategy, reaching target audiences, and finding the quickest way to sales especially when a business is struggling.
Urgency and Scarcity Tools
Don’t fall for the urgency and scarcity tools used by marketers to instill fear and try to prove you need a website rebuild.
The Marketing Square doesn’t use those tools. We review your existing website and marketing assets to find out what’s working and what’s not helping.
Beware of Website Performance Reviews
Beware of website performance reviews with tools that trigger FOMO – fear of missing out – showing you everything that’s missing, wrong, dated and preventing your website from appearing in search results. Tools include:
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Google Lighthouse
- Selenium
- WebPageTest
- Siteimprove
- Seobility
Reports Mean Nothing
Reports mean nothing without context and a team that can repair and rebuild a website for speed and performance to serve your best interests.
Don’t pay attention to the scary reports unless you’re also relying on an Internet quiz to determine your IQ.
Look at the colorful reports, view the negative results understanding that they’re meant to create anxiety to coax you into paying for a website.
Talk to References
Talk to a marketing agency’s references to find out if the agency produced revenue for other businesses like yours — like in size, like in services.
Did They Increase Profit?
Profit is the only reason to invest in marketing. Ask whether the marketing agency has a history of increasing profit by bringing in new clients and how long it takes.
What Is Success?
Ask the marketer if new clients are the mark of success from the work, or, do they get more excited about KPIs?
Be clear before you sign a contract that you expect revenue, sales, and profit as signs of success.
Category Experience
Marketing experience within your business category is mandatory. The agency has to know how to approach the field to position your brand online against competitors.
Who are your competitors and do you know whether their services or products are comparable, better, or worse?
Can They Sell or Do They Check Off Boxes?
If an agency talks about the importance of traffic, likes, views, follows, backlinks, keywords, etc., then they’re checking off boxes of activity to justify fees.
Ask whether the agency has a sales plan and what expectations and forecasts are offered.
Will there be realistic market share pursuit?
You’ll recognize a hamster wheel of activities discussed and shown in status reports. You should be reviewing new clients that came directly from marketing, not traffic sources.
Status Meetings with Sales Reports
The only thing you should discuss in status meetings after six month is sales. How many people called or texted or chatted and then, became clients?
You should recap with the agency how many calls and points of contact originated from the marketing work performed.
Strategy and Unique Selling Point?
Ask the agency for ideas on your strategy, a new tagline, or what they see as your Unique Selling Point (USP).
Spit balling ideas is fine but they have to know strategy and how to identify a USP to sell your brand online.
No Strategy? No Deal
If an agency hasn’t asked your strategy, target, goals or USP, and can’t tell you the average case, client, or contract brought in for clients similar to yours, don’t hire them.
Your business will not perform online or offline no matter how many traffic reports you read.
Ask for Previous Average Sales in Your Category
Ask whether the marketers can sell services like yours? What is their average sale in selling services in your category?
Margins and Hard Costs and Sales
If an agency is not asking you about margins and hard costs and fee structures and how digital sales factor into the bottom line of your business profits, you should be concerned.
Reading Traffic Reports Or Meeting New Clients?
How often are you reading traffic reports vs. meeting new clients?
After three to six months you should know whether a marketer is spinning tall tales and keeping you busy with data instead of delivering new clients to your business.
There’s a problem if you’re only getting traffic reports showing website visitors and activities.
If there are zero new clients or viable calls to discuss, it’s time to cut ties.
Strategic Traffic
You want strategic traffic which may be very light traffic. Heavy traffic does not equate to lots of clients.
You Want the Right Traffic
Anyone can increase website traffic. But can an agency draw the right traffic and prospects or are they sending you traffic filled with shoppers and people who want the lowest price?
Every website visitor will not be a client. Think of how many websites you’ve looked at with no intention of buying a product or a service.
Marketing Activities Do Not Guarantee Clients
Marketing activities from link building, blog and social media posts, likes, follows and views do not guarantee new clients. Nor does a top of search engine position.
Activity may increase traffic, but only strategy drives targeted prospects to a website. You need an agency that knows the difference.
Do You Need a New Website?
You may not need a new website. The Marketing Square reviews websites to find out whether the current website can be salvaged with redesigns, upgrades, and new functionality.
Forget Traffic Reports! Watch for KPIs
The Marketing Square shows clients how to identify key progress indicators that show new contact are on the way to becoming prospects.
The Dark Side of Marketing
Ask your agency if they use white (organic, ethical) or black hat tactics. (Are they buying links, followers, likes, views, and reviews?
Are they:
- Working with link farms
- Creating throw-away websites
- Posting blogs on irrelevant platforms
- Using simplistic AI-written content
- Posting recycled graphics and pictures
About The Marketing Square
The Marketing Square has been selling services for clients online and offline learning by doing, testing, researching, and showing clients what works based on experience.
Marketing Square strategies position businesses in front of audiences moving them to act when and where they’re most receptive.
Our thought is that CEOs should be with clients. Attorneys should be in court or providing legal advice. Scanning traffic reports is not the best use of a professional’s hourly rate.
We Won’t Take On Clients We Can’t Help
Being responsible for increasing a clients’ profit and generating business revenue is not easy. But we know how to do it and we won’t take on clients we can’t help.
If we don’t believe your business is viable or that we can increase profits with the work we offer, we won’t take you on as a client.
