I’ve been in the marketing world for a while now, coming up on a decade after starting my career in journalism. Let me tell you a story. It’s fictionalized, but it’s also not. If it were a movie it’d start with the words “Inspired by true events.”
A client comes to us with big goals. They’ve been given a directive from leadership to do any number of things—improve awareness, increase site traffic, fill the sales funnel. We kick off a program for them and for the first month or two—more sometimes—that’s what we work toward. Then, as they get farther from that directive from leadership, other things start to compete for their attention. Someone in sales asks for a piece of new collateral. Or the sales deck needs to be redesigned. Or they need a new page added to the website. And slowly that singular focus on those goals gets blurred.
It’s understandable. As a marketer, especially at a mid-market company, your table gets crowded. Your eye wanders. Or a directive from one leader starts to compete with a directive from another. When those kinds of distractions happen, it’s our job as an agency to direct your focus back to those goals you initially came to us with. Those conversations aren’t necessarily easy to have, and I spoke with Katie Long, or vice president of account service, about how we approach them and how we build the kinds of client relationships that make them possible at all.
It’s an interesting chat. Give it a watch and leave us a comment when it’s done. We look forward to the conversation.