7 Traits for Successful Digital Marketing Agency Client Relationships

The relationships that we form with other people are an inherent part of being human. Some relationships stand the test of time while others become a distant memory. Relationships (good and bad) are not bound to our personal lives. Every day your interactions with coworkers, customers and other business contacts work towards building strong professional relationships today.

One of the larger investments that many organizations make today is in partnering with a digital marketing agency. The job of an agency is to understand who you are as a client and translate that message in a way that helps your brand better connect with target customers. Unfortunately, while 90% of agencies say they truly understand their client’s business, only 65% of clients agree.

Since the beginning, TopRank Marketing’s company mantra has always been “Client, Company, Community, Self”. Understanding what our clients do and what is important to them has been a driving force that has enabled us to deliver (and often over-deliver) results in a way that meets or exceeds client expectations. One of the most important elements that allows us to accomplish this is the relationships that we form with clients from the very beginning.

If your company is searching for an agency partner, look beyond the surface to ensure they possess the following traits that will help you get the most out of your investment.

1 – Strive to Set Clear Expectations

Setting expectations in terms of timelines, results or processes means less surprises down the line for you. This can provide a sense of predictability that helps you to feel in control and confident in the process.

When approaching search engine optimization, for example, it can be easy to assume that once you hire an agency your search engine rankings will be boosted overnight. In reality, website optimization is an ongoing process that can sometimes take several months to see notable results and is dependent on many factors. When an agency fails to address program expectations ahead of time, they risk leaving you feeling under-served or mislead. A great agency under promises, and over delivers.

2 – Offer Transparency & Authenticity

You should be able to rely on your digital agency to give you the expert advice and consultation that comes from their collective wisdom and years of marketing experience. Long gone are the days when agencies can expect that spurting marketing jargon and mumbo jumbo will leave clients impressed. A great marketing agency will educate you on every facet of their strategy, offer honest advice and admit when the topic has shifted outside of their expertise.

With an authentic and transparent digital agency at your side, you’ll feel a weight lifted off your shoulders knowing you can lean on them as true partners.

3 – Respect Your Time

Your workweek is booked, your inbox requires constant attention and you may sometimes find yourself scrambling to get your job duties completed. Any great digital agency will recognize that long-winded emails and unstructured meetings are inconsiderate of your time. Good partners will ensure meetings bring value to those involved and are respectful of your time by:

• Sharing agendas ahead of time,
• Sticking to the allotted time scheduled
• Avoiding tangents and off-topic conversations
• Concluding with next steps for each party

4 – Provide Top-Notch Communication

In today’s fast-moving digital marketing world, you don’t always the option of waiting a few days for an email response or returned call from your digital agency. To maintain great communication, your agency contact should be:

• Responding to emails and calls within 24 hours
• Sending a follow up email to reiterate next steps following each meeting
• Conducting quarterly check-ins with you to gather feedback on program performance and opportunities for improvement

When a digital agency can demonstrate this type of attentive and organized communication, you’ll feel confident in their ability to manage the various digital campaigns you’ve entrusted them with.

It’s easy to get comfortable shooting emails off from behind a desk, but there are definite times when a simple phone call will go a long way in building that agency/client relationship. Your digital agency account manager should not hesitate to give you a friendly call every once in a while to answer a quick question or provide a progress update.

5 – Form the Personal Connection

Sometimes everyone finds themselves getting sucked in to the tasks at hand, without taking a minute to step back and get to know the people they are working with. This leads to skipping the small talk, and getting right down to business.

Meaningful business relationships are fostered through conversation beyond the work-related task at hand. An invested agency contact will find ways to connect on a more personal level by asking how your day is going, or what your weekend plans are – not for the sake of small talk, but because they truly care.

6 – Suggest In-Person Meetings

Did you know that human contact releases hormones that act as neurotransmitters in the brain that build trust and bond? You can’t get that kind of science with a conference call.

In-person meetings allow us to observe and respond to facial expressions and body language, which builds stronger, more meaningful business relationships. In a world full of conference bridges and screen sharing, your agency should make an effort to meet with you in person – even if you’re located in different states.

An agency that’s willing to make the time and monetary investment to secure occasional in-person meetings is demonstrating their dedication to strengthening the agency/client relationship.

7 – They Advocate for You

At the end of the day, you should feel that your digital agency is working diligently towards your shared goals. There should be an understanding that they are your true marketing partners. A dedicated agency will commit to providing the level of service that exceeds your expectations, and provide compelling results that keep you coming back for more.

You know your agency “gets it” if they provide results and progress reports in a format that is easily shared and consumed by stakeholders at your company. That means less work translating reports to the higher-ups, and more time focusing on your responsibilities.

When you’re in search of a digital marketing agency, look for hints of these characteristics that indicate the level of respect, dedication and organization you’ll receive in the client/agency relationship.

On the hunt for a new agency that has these traits? Contact TopRank Online Marketing to learn how we can become your digital marketing partner.

Image via Shutterstock

---

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2015. | 7 Traits for Successful Digital Marketing Agency Client Relationships | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post 7 Traits for Successful Digital Marketing Agency Client Relationships appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

How Portable Solar Power Is Set To Take Over

With increasing pressure from alternative energy sources, it is not surprising that this movement resulted in the creation of several portable solar devices. Harnessing the sun’s energy is not only friendlier to the environment than other energy sources, on a sunny day, is limitless and easy to find. Solar energy devices for attachment of portable are available to charge mobile phones, laptops and other small electronic devices. There are also outdoor solar lamps and ovens that are ideal for campers who want a less flammable source of light and food.

Solar panel technology has come a long way since the days of huge solar panels in the gardens or on top of the houses. The science behind solar panels was conveniently reduced to a much more manageable and modified to suit different situations and environments size. Small portable solar chargers are affordable and can charge not only phones, but also MP3 players and blue-tooth headset. For a person on the road, traveling around the world or someone staying in a warm climate, with little or no electricity, a solar fan is practically a necessity to keep you comfortable. Find an outlet available is not only difficult, it can sometimes be impossible, and solar chargers eliminate the need to stick to where power lines run.

One of the greatest resources for laptops is their portability. Unfortunately, the lifetime of the battery usually is not long enough to meet the needs of its users. In an effort to fill a need, there are several types of loads compact solar panels designed both responsible and operate a laptop when the outlets are not available. Some of these portable and even flexible panels can be connected to other units to increase the harness solar energy and therefore the energy they produce.

Despite its size, the solar panels that are used to harness the sun and provide power to a home is only able to use one-sixth of the potential energy. One of the latest advances in solar panel technology is tiles, which are specifically designed to absorb sunlight, near its full potential. These tiles were created by an American company and use solar energy thanks to its dark color and film solar cells in which it is thin enough to be mounted in the form of tiles. New advances in materials for solar technology increases the efficiency of solar panels up to 20%. The number of owners who want to produce their own energy through the use of solar energy is increasing every year and the industry is working hard to meet their needs.

The design of portable solar panels is changing every day.

We Want to Hear About Your Experience With Marketing Analytics Tools

As fellow analytics fans, we’d like to ask for your feedback in a short 15-question survey. Not surprisingly, it’s about analytics tools and what you as marketers need the most from your systems.

We promise this is not entirely self-serving. Not only will the results inform the topics we consider for upcoming blog posts, we’ll share the results with you as soon as they’re in. After all, what’s the point of insights if you don’t share them?

Participate in the survey here: https://sidra2.typeform.com/to/n3X3qu

And of course, sound off in the comments with any stream of consciousness thoughts on analytics tools, data exhaustion, how marketing budgets are determined, and so on.

About the Author: Maura Ginty is the VP of Marketing at Kissmetrics.

Report: Twitter Plans To Allow Tweets Longer Than 140 Characters

Twitter is building a product that would allow long-form tweets, multiple sources have told Recode.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Why Marketing Technology and Advertising Technology Need to Sing the Same Tune

"That’s why combining data-driven advertising and marketing is a big deal. It’s also why ad technology and marketing technology departments shouldn’t be singing a different tune—but working closer together in harmony."

This is from a piece out today on AdWeek entitled Why Now Is the Time for Advertising and Marketing Technologies to Converge. Written by Kevin Akeroyd, GM & SVP at Oracle Marketing Cloud, the article lays out some of the benefits of ad tech and mar tech love connection, as it were including the all-important unifying marketing and advertising data to deliver personalized content and ads across all digital channels.

But as Akeroyd points out, the most important long-term benefit is fixing the fragmented experience that consumers experience every day.

As to how to go about aligning ad tech and mar tech, Akeroyd lays out three methods.

1. Connect Online and Offline Interactions to One Customer. Connect interactions to individual consumers across all devices and channels and achieve a higher level of personalization.
2. Bridge Anonymous and Known Marketing. Connect all proprietary and third-party data to increase relevance and target more efficiently with a laser focus.
3. Adapt with Behavior-Based Orchestration. Empower the consumer to dictate their own path rather than force them in the rigid paths of your personas.

Across All Digital Channels

The importance of delivering personalized content across all digital channels cannot be overstated. That's why we created the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing. Download it today to start creating the most cohesive, valuable, and frictionless customer experience possible.

Oli Gardner Wants to Improve Your Campaign Landing Page. For Free.

Ever have a brilliant marketing campaign that just isn’t living up to expectations?

It’s easy to tell that something isn’t quite right — your poor conversion rate screams it loud and clear. But pinpointing the squeaky wheel is no simple feat.

Is your landing page the problem? Your emails? Ads? Remarketing? Do people just think you’re a jerk?

Quit wondering — we’re here to help with our latest web series: The Landing Page Sessions.

Oli Gardner, our resident landing page expert, will focus on one page per episode and help show where you might be leaking conversions. He’ll even rebuild the page with his suggested changes, and show you how a few tweaks can make all the difference.

Sound like something that could be valuable to you?

Just send us your landing page along with the ads and emails that sent people there so that Oli can evaluate your page in the context of the larger marketing campaign. If your submission is chosen, Oli will dedicate an entire episode to reconstructing your campaign.

What’s the catch?

Yo, there is no catch. What are you waiting for?! Submit your landing page today.

A New Look for Duct Tape Marketing and . . .

A New Look for Duct Tape Marketing and . . . written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Even a casual reader of this blog will notice that we’ve made a few changes around here.

Change in business is inevitable and a major overhaul of one of your primary business assets – such as a website and blog – is something that must be entered into strategically as much as aesthetically.

These days a site design can become obsolete in as little as 18 months.

It’s not just that design trends and fashions evolve, it’s that people start to expect your site to operate a certain way based on what they experience around the web.

If you’re site doesn’t scroll the way they are used to, has a linking structure that doesn’t make sense or is a mess when viewed on a mobile device or tablet you run the risk of losing the interest of folks you’ve worked hard to attract.

Here are the things we did that are behind our “why a new design.”

Community vs. lead capture

Perhaps the biggest change was to move away from the traditional lead capture practice of offering a single piece of content, such as an eBook in exchange for an email address.

Today we are asking people to join our content community. In return, they will gain access to our entire library of ebooks and premium content, such as webinar archives, as well as all future content.

My feeling is that is the way forward for content publishers like us and I believe creates a greater sense of long-term community rather than one-off trade of information.

I wrote about this idea in a bit more detail here – The rise of the content community

New URL structure

We finally moved a little closer to the modern blog structure with our URLs.

Today, many publishers have shifted the idea of a blog to true content management. The concept of a daily updated blog with dates attached has been supplanted by the practice of creating and publishing content around themes or categories without regard to date.

We didn’t go all the way with this as moving 4,000 blog posts created over the last 13 years was scary enough for me, but we moved towards this by taking all dates away from URLs and blog posts. (We had some nice help from Yoast and my host Synthesis on this.)

We will move a step closer in the future as we arrange evergreen content around core themes. I’ve written about this practice in depth here – How to create a total content system

Updated theme

We completely updated the WordPress theme on the site to incorporate more visual elements and simplified navigation structure.

Site Journey

We have several very distinct groups that look for information on Duct Tape Marketing and we wanted to make easier for these segments to find what they were looking for.

We cater to many business owners and marketers looking for tips, tricks and advice around building marketing systems and we also cater to marketing coaches, consultants and agency owners looking to grow their practices.

We put a path front and center on the home page that allows members of these groups to choose content that more closely meets what they are probably looking for without the need to search for it.

As with all projects of this nature, it’s still a work in progress but we welcome your thoughts and feedback!