It’s common practice in this day and age to expect digital marketing services to be purchased in “hours” by an agency that you want to partner with. Think of this as the allotted time that marketing specialists dedicated to your projects can spend making optimizations, keyword implementations, and compiling historical metrics to understand your business’s trends. Given the sheer amount of time that could get spent tweaking and refining, hours are in place to ensure realistic goals can be set by the customer and met by the agency. There are, however, a few tips that can help get the most effective use out of the hours for your advertising projects.
Communication
This is a big one. Believe it or not, communication can eat up a TON of dedicated hours when the requests are spontaneous or too many ideas are happening at the same time. This can come in the form of client requests, where more is being expected than what was originally outlined, or multiple points of contact within an organization reach out regarding the same or multiple topics.
Having a sole or limited POC (point-of-contact) is vital to a successful communication partnership between agency and business. If too many people are in touch with the agency account manager and the client is not collaborating internally, then you can end up with multiple email strings tying up time that could be spent working on the projects.
Agenda
Knowing what you want to talk about and how you want to approach meetings that involve either the internal (agency) team or the client and their decision-makers will go a long way. This not only includes having prepared notes before the meeting on what needs to be discussed but providing an agenda to all parties attending so that everyone knows just how time is going to be spent.
There’s nothing worse than finally getting the CEO or key decision-maker in a meeting and not having a clear objective and outline for how you are going to be spending the next 30 mins or hour. This time is crucial and most successful agency partnerships are built by showing the value of your work to the people of high rank – so use the time wisely and strategically with an agenda!
Strategy
This is something that seems to be a no-brainer but if not done correctly can be costly with time down the line. Understanding from the beginning what the long-term goals are and setting realistic expectations can ensure that time spent is effective. Making keyword updates or writing irrelevant content without considering the overall goal will not only yield poor results and instead waste time that could have been spent if the picture was clear as to how success would be determined.
Provide recommendations based on data rather than assumptions. Just because the client might want to rank #1 for a certain term doesn’t mean that anyone in their target audience is even searching for that query in high quantities. Be the subject matter expert but with diligent research and have the rationale to back it up. Implement improvements after strategizing the best possible outcome and what you are expecting the results to yield, and the hours spent working on the projects will be used effectively!
