Do you have questions about managed marketing services? This blog answers the 8 most common questions people have about this service and breaks down everything you need to know about engaging with a true marketing partner.
Have you ever wondered "what is managed marketing?" If you have, you're not alone! Here at Impact, we regularly get questions about our managed marketing services since it's a system that's not as well known as what traditional agencies offer.
Our offering is focused on strategy first and execution second, functioning as an extension of your existing marketing team. We use our substantial resources to do research, strategize, and then, with your team, decide on the most effective path forward for hitting marketing and business goals. Only after that do we choose the best channels for pursuing that plan.
This is unlike a typical agency, which helps your team execute a single project or initiative.
We believe that this strategic approach is the best way for businesses to take advantage of the extraordinary possibilities marketing can offer. But with such a different way of handling a partnership comes a lot of questions. To give you an idea of what a partnership with a managed marketing team looks like, we answer eight of the most frequently asked questions below.
- What Makes up a Marketing Strategy?
- What Happens if it Doesn’t Work?
- Why Is Managed Marketing More Expensive?
- Have You Worked with Companies in My Industry Before?
- What Kind of Results Will I See?
- How Can You Understand My Niche Industry?
- Can We Engage in a Trial Project?
- Will I Still Need In-House Professionals?
If a strategic partnership with a managed marketing team sounds like it could make sense, get in touch with a marketing expert at Impact for a pressure-free conversation about it today!
1. What Makes up a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that involves a series of defined tactics, processes, and tools designed to create brand awareness, engage the selected target audience, communicate the value proposition, and ultimately drive sales.
By identifying your goals, conducting market research, and choosing initiatives with the help of data, you’ll be able to create a high-level marketing strategy specific to your business.
Identify Marketing Goals
Before you even think about the individual marketing tactics you want to roll out, you need to define the objectives that you want to hit. By starting with well-defined objectives, you can be more intentional when choosing tactics.
For example, a marketing strategy that focuses on driving sales actions might include running a promotion or investing in a paid media campaign. On the other hand, a marketing strategy that’s aimed at improving brand awareness might lean much more heavily on content marketing tactics that showcase the brand’s personality and establish authority.
Having goals in place also gives you a way to measure the efficacy of your marketing strategy once it’s live.
Conduct Market Research
Once you’ve defined your goals, you can start looking for realistic ways to achieve them - and this all starts with research. You need to understand who you’re marketing to, how your competitors are positioning themselves, and the general trajectory of the industry you operate in as a whole.
The market research you conduct is going to uncover insights that help you determine who your target audience is, where you have the best chance of connecting with them (LinkedIn? Instagram? TikTok?), and how you can stand out as a unique option.
By relying on research and taking a data-driven approach to your marketing strategy, you significantly increase the chance that the right people are seeing your marketing assets at the right time.
Pinpoint the Opportunity and Align Tactics
The last major step you need to take to build out your overarching marketing strategy is to identify where the market opportunity for your brand lies, and define the tactics that align with both the opportunity and the marketing goals you’ve defined at the top.
At this point, you should just let the data you’ve collected and the goals you’ve defined lead you to the marketing tactics that make the most sense.
2. What Happens if it Doesn’t Work?
If developing the marketing strategy is one side of the coin, executing tactics is the other. However, it isn’t enough to simply implement new tactics into your marketing plan. You need a way to determine whether or not the tactics you’ve chosen are working.
Measure, Track, and Pivot When Necessary
Marketing isn’t an exact science, which is why it’s important to install processes and use tools that provide insight into the efficacy of your efforts.
This is arguably the most important part of designing a high-quality marketing strategy that drives business growth. If you roll out a series of marketing tactics without any way to track their success, you risk wasting significant resources on ineffective initiatives.
With tracking in place, however, you can see which tactics are working, which aren’t, and make adjustments to the marketing strategy so you avoid over-investing in unsuccessful marketing efforts and ensure the best tactics for your goals are supported wholeheartedly.
3. Why Is Managed Marketing a Larger Investment Than Project Work?
If you have specific fitness goals you're trying to reach, you have two options. You can go to a nutritionist who can tell you to eat right and exercise. But the other option — engaging a personal trainer who tests your current physical state, helps you put together a personalized diet plan that changes as you work with them, and pushes you with a workout regimen that's achievable yet effective for where you're at now and where you want to go — is much more effective.
Neither is an inherently bad option, and the nutritionist isn't wrong in their advice. But investing in a personal trainer makes you much more likely to follow the plan and see results.
Marketing is the same. A project shop can turn out great assets. But without research, data analysis, and an overarching strategy, it's less likely to help you hit your bigger business goals.
How Traditional Marketing Agencies Work
Traditional marketing agencies are often brought on for a one-off project or a single campaign when the in-house team doesn't have the expertise or bandwidth to handle those initiatives themselves.
If you feel confident that you know everything there is to know about your audience, market, industry, and opportunity, that you have a plan for connecting marketing efforts to larger business goals, that the plan is working, and that you just need a little bit of help with one thing, then a traditional agency might be the right choice.
However, if you don't, there are downsides to consider when opting for one-off projects with a traditional marketing agency. The biggest drawback lies in their limited scope. These projects address a single, immediate need without taking into account your long-term marketing goals.
Using a marketing agency can sometimes be like treating a symptom without diagnosing the underlying disease.
Building a strong brand requires consistent messaging and visuals across all marketing efforts. A one-off project by an agency might disrupt this continuity, muddle your branding, or worse, confuse your target audience.
The Benefit of a Marketing Partner
On the flip side, a partnership with a managed marketing team means that your in-house department gets a massive infusion of support in manpower, expertise, and technical ability, supported by people who fully understand your goals and are incentivized to help you reach them.
From customizing your marketing strategy so that it’s aligned with your goals, to hand-selecting tactics, all the way to measuring and optimizing the marketing efforts in place, a managed marketing partner is just that: a partner.
4. Have You Worked With Companies in My Industry Before?
It’s sometimes easier to trust people who come in the door with some degree of familiarity with your industry. However, this can also end up limiting perspective and hindering creative thinking.
Instead of specializing in any single industry, Impact’s managed marketing service takes an industry-agnostic approach that relies on in-depth market research so we can find what's right for you, not just any business in your field. That's combined with extensive experience, expertise, and best practices regardless of industry.
Tailoring a Marketing Strategy for Your Unique Position, Not "The Industry"
Because Impact’s managed marketing team takes an industry-agnostic approach, they’re able to curate a much wider breadth of talent that isn’t industry-specific, giving them access to the best of the best.
Additionally, by conducting and relying on thorough market research, the managed marketing team doesn’t carry any personal experience bias and truly uses data in concert with your goals to customize a powerful marketing strategy and drive marketing decisions.
5. What Kind of Results Will I See?
At a certain point, any investment you make is going to be a bit of a gamble. The trick is finding ways to reduce the risk involved. When it comes to managed marketing services, the truth of the matter is that there’s no crystal ball. On top of that, the same tactic might work for one business but not for another.
Ultimately, the results of any one tactic or campaign are going to depend on a variety of factors that are unique to each brand. That underscores the importance of a set process for measuring, optimizing, and adjusting tactics once launched. It's where the ROI comes in every time, not through a magical means of predicting future success.
Trusting the Goals
When measuring results, you’ll want to look back at the goals you set at the top. These goals won’t just dictate how you measure the success of your campaigns and tactics, but will also determine what exactly success looks like.
If your goal is to drive sales, but the campaign you’ve built drives brand awareness, you can use that insight to either pivot your tactics to be aligned with your overarching goals or to reassess the intentions behind your marketing efforts.
Unique Results for Unique KPIs
It’s also important to note the danger of comparing yourself or your marketing to that of your competitors. While competitor research is valuable, your brand is unique – so you should treat it that way.
In a strategic partnership with a managed marketing team, you’ll work with experts who will help you define unique key performance indicators designed to truly represent the impact of your marketing campaigns.
Quarterly Reporting that Refines Long-Term Strategies
Defining KPIs and conducting data analysis on new marketing tactics is only valuable if that information is readily accessible and leads to actionable insights.
This is why Impact’s managed marketing team offers quarterly reporting. Taking the time to review and understand the performance of marketing efforts hand-in-hand with the client creates multiple checkpoints during which the strategy can be refined and tactics can be adjusted.
6. How Can You Understand My Niche Industry?
Every industry is unique, but the more niche your business is, the more important it is to be intentional with your marketing efforts. A managed marketing partner achieves this level of intention through in-depth market research, competitor analysis, and a thorough assessment of your current position and marketing efforts.
All of this together paints a vivid picture of your business and the industry in which you operate.
In-Depth Market Research
As mentioned above, market research is vital in optimizing marketing efforts as it provides insights into consumer preferences, behaviors, and trends.
These insights help in understanding your target audience, tailoring messages effectively, and adapting strategies to stay competitive.
Additionally, market research creates opportunities to gather feedback on products/services, identify areas for improvement, and innovate to meet customer needs. Overall, market research serves as the foundation for data-driven decision-making, ensuring marketing efforts are targeted, relevant, and impactful in driving business growth in any industry, no matter how niche.
7. Can We Engage in a Trial Project First?
Because a strategic partnership with a managed marketing team is so much more involved than what you get with a typical marketing agency, there isn’t an effective way to demonstrate all of the value that comes with a partnership in a one-off trial project.
8. Do I Need In-House Marketing Professionals?
While partnering with a managed marketing team can provide you with all of the services that a fully-fledged in-house marketing team can, it’s advantageous for both our experts and your brand if there is at least one marketing liaison who can act as a point of contact.
The marketing liaison will facilitate conversations between our team and stakeholders in your brand, have a hand in defining goals, and will be paramount in making incremental adjustments to your strategy over time. We're not here to replace your marketing professionals. We're here to make them more effective and their results more robust.
That’s a Wrap on Impact Managed Marketing FAQs
If you’ve worked with marketing agencies in the past and they’ve left you wanting more, or you just want to enhance your in-house marketing team with some additional support, consider a strategic partnership with a managed marketing provider.
By conducting in-depth market research, working alongside internal stakeholders to identify objectives, and being intentional when developing the overarching strategy and selecting tactics, a managed marketing partnership can take your efforts to the next level and beyond.
If you have additional questions about what a strategic partnership with Impact would entail, get in touch with one of our experts for a quick, no-strings-attached call today!