As a business owner or CEO you have probably had experiences with marketing agencies which have ranged from abysmal to pretty good – rarely is an experience fantastic! There are many reasons for this: sometimes the cultural fit between your business and the agency is not right, or maybe you entrust all of your marketing to the agency without really understanding what they plan to do for you, maybe the agency promised you the world and wasn’t able to deliver, or they just don’t get your business or target market. Whatever the reason, maybe it’s time to consider a different way of improving your marketing outcomes.
A marketing coach is a highly experienced senior marketer that can work with you and your marketing team on an on-going basis to:
- Build internal capability so you don’t have to rely on agencies all the time
- Upskill your existing team with regard to leadership skills, marketing advancements, contract and vendor management, and systems and processes
- Identify opportunities to improve performance and efficiency
- Keep the team accountable and on track for delivering marketing projects on time
- Provide feedback on strategy, briefs, website, content, campaigns etc
- Performance coach your marketing leaders to ensure you are getting the best outcomes possible.
How do you know if you need a Marketing Coach?
1. You don’t know how effective your marketing is or how much to invest in it.
If you don’t know how effective your marketing is, then you probably aren’t regularly reporting on metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost, Cost Per Lead, and your website performance among other things. We live in an age where measuring marketing performance is really easy given you have the right tools available and the right process in place. Once you have implemented a solid reporting framework you will be able to assess how effective each dollar invested in your marketing function is.
2. You don’t know if your marketing function is adequately resourced or not.
If you don’t know if your marketing function is resourced well-enough to execute your marketing plan then how can you manage your team to timelines? Do you have the right mix of skills in your team? Do you need to supplement your team’s skills with some outside help? Is your team performing at the optimal level? These are questions a Marketing Coach can help you answer.
3. You’re locked into a long term contract with a Marketing Agency and you don’t know if you’re getting good value for money.
Marketing Agencies try to lock customers in for 12 or 24 month contracts. This assists them with cashflow for resourcing. Unfortunately, what can happen is you end up having junior people working on your account and under-delivering on pre-agreed outcomes. Other times, the customer’s business is not very marketing savvy and can find it difficult to measure if the agency is doing a good job or not. There are ways to manage these scenarios and come out the other end better off and a little wiser. A Marketing Coach can help you navigate agency relationships and ensure you are getting the results you were promised.
4. You have a marketing team, but you are not a marketer and don’t understand what they are talking about most of the time.
It’s really hard to manage people to outcomes if you don’t understand what they are saying. So if you don’t know your TOF from your BOF, or your CAC from your CPL, or haven’t a clue what a bounce rate is and if its different to engagement rate, then you might want to engage the skills and experience of a marketing coach to performance coach the team and upskill you.
5. Your monthly leads and new customers are inconsistent and you don’t know how to fix it.
A typical problem that a lot of businesses experience is inconsistent leads and new customers from month to month. This problem makes it really difficult to accurately do any planning and forecasting. But an effective marketing team will, over time, smooth out the troughs and the peaks from month to month. Engaging a marketing coach who has done this before can work with your team to build a process that brings in a steady and consistent stream of leads and new customers at a forever optimizing cost.
A good marketing coach’s prerogative is to help businesses build the internal capability (people, process, technology) they need to grow and scale in a financially sustainable way. To learn more about Flipside’s Marketing Coaching and pricing click here.