Things To Do Before Investing In Digital Marketing
Not sure where to start when it comes to digital marketing? Making an investment in your business online can be a daunting task. Not only are you unsure about where improvements need to be made, but finding an agency to get your business up to speed quickly and effectively is just as intimidating. This article will cover three essential ways you can prepare yourself to maximize your relationship with the digital marketing agency you choose.
Before diving into the details, the goal is to provide additional insight into what you as a business owner should think about before moving forward with a digital marketing agency.
When you are ready to engage in marketing services, you’ll usually have your business fundamentals figured out. Spend a significant amount of time setting up business processes that are profitable, understand who your customers are, and what services tend to be the most fruitful. A lot of the time, if you lack the appropriate amount of preparation, an agency can help you, but it delays the project significantly, often by a month or two. You want to ensure meetings with your selected agency go smoothly, so there are definitely steps you can take ahead of time to get a faster ROI on your digital marketing investment.
In a nutshell, you’ll learn more about:
- Understanding your services and articulating them
- Understanding your fit in your realm of service providers
- Describing your ideal customer and expanding on your customer experience element
Understanding Your Services and Articulating Them
From a technical standpoint, you already know the type of work you do that’s most profitable, but being able to clearly articulate that to your marketing agency, and really to your future clients, is essential. Even though you’re an expert with a profound understanding of your own professional expertise, you must still be able to concisely communicate: 1) your basic services and 2) the services or customer profile that makes you the most money.
For instance, if you’re a lawyer and have been in business long enough, you’ve likely identified that there are certain types of cases, such as divorce custody battles, that may not be the best type of case for your firm. However, you may have discovered that complicated financial transactions or high net worth divorces have better profit margins, and therefore, are your ideal case types. From this, you might be able to identify a target market in your state, where the clientele is more affluent, have cases with a significant number of hours, and are able to resolve them in a favorable manner.
Next, you’d want to identify how geographical factors impact the client acquisition process. , In this case, regional presence matters because people are more willing to work with you if you are local. Clients don’t want to be driving to a remote location on a bi-weekly or bi-monthly basis just for good representation. You want to be the best representation in their area that understands the courthouse and the court systems near them.
Finally, you’ll want to fully understand why your customers choose to work with you. Your value proposition should elucidate how your services solve their specific pain point. What benefits can your customers expect? Why should customers choose to work with you? If you have a great value proposition, it introduces you to potential clients and helps you make a compelling first impression.
Understanding Your Fit in Your Realm of Service Providers
Another thing you can do to be proactive is to gather names, URLs, and the various competitive advantages of competitors in your marketplace. This consists of people or companies you lose business to on a regular basis. Assessing the competition is the quickest way to help an agency understand where you fit into the market.
To help get you started, you can refer to Porter’s Five Forces. Using this model can allow you to identify the structure of your business and determine your business strategy. Porter’s five forces are:
- Competition in the industry (i.e. number of competitors, quality differences, customer loyalty)
- Potential of new entrants (i.e. specialist knowledge, time & cost of entry)
- Power of suppliers (i.e. number of suppliers, size of suppliers, uniqueness of service)
- Power of customers (i.e. price sensitivity, ability to substitute)
- The threat of substitute products (i.e. substitute performance, cost of change)
On the flip side, maybe you’re thinking of pivoting your business into a specific service offering. Perhaps it’s a particular niche you feel is going to be more profitable. If you find there’s a competitor that’s doing that well, take that information with you and make sure your agency understands who that is. Time and time again, the best shortcut is to look at the formula someone else is using to win, and then making improvements to it.
Describing Your Ideal Customer and Expanding On Your Customer Experience Element
Finally, imagine your last three or four customers that received a lot of value from being in business with you. The kind who felt like your services were a perfect fit for them. And maybe a few customers who would have felt the same, but ended up not working out that way. Now write down their names and a couple of paragraphs about them that describe them in as much detail as you can for your new agency partner.
This process is an approach to getting closer to defining your brand. (You’d be surprised how many people haven’t begun to think about this aspect of their business.) Even if it’s a stunted attempt, it’s worth doing, because it has you looking at your existing client set, and asking, “Who do I want more of?”
There are certainly more organized methods for finding your “ideal customer” that you might conduct with the help of an agency, like doing a persona identification exercise, or completing an onboarding document; but there’s no harm in asking yourself the initial question to find what kind of customers you’d like more of.
Alongside locking down your ideal clientele, the customer experience element is significant, too. Knowing the voice of your customer will help your campaigns succeed by delivering the experiences that customers want.
Going back to the lawyer example, you could be one of two types of divorce lawyers: one that’s trying to attract clients who want to use a scorched-earth approach to divorce, or one that’s trying to attract those who want to get through this quietly while considering the well being of the entire family. Dig a little deeper to find what resonates with you and your business when it comes to your customer experience element.
Provide profiling of your ideal customer so the digital marketing agency you’re about to hire can use the right language and the right vocabulary in your ads, headlines, or page titles. It’s things like this that will let-off the right signal and help you attract a collection of clients who are truly going to appreciate your service.
You’re Almost There…You Can Do This
With your expertise in your brick and mortar business, you’re already in good shape! You can use the day-to-day data you know off the top of your head to compose a solid strategy with the digital marketing agency you hire.
Start by opening a blank document and jotting down these three headings:
- List and provide details about your 3 most popular and/or profitable products/services
- Describe your top 3 competitors and how they’re succeeding in your market
- Classify 3-5 customers that get the most value out of our business
All the answers are there! Don’t be afraid of taking the initiative to think critically about these things. Though you’re looking to an agency for help, there’s a lot of exploration of your business you can do on your own to kick-start the process. Make the switch from “I don’t really know about these things” to taking ownership of your comprehension of the business and sharing all your findings.