5 Things Your Marketing Manager's Not Telling You

If you own a business, now is the time to get the most bang for your buck than ever before. COVID-19 is affecting us all but the silver lining is it allows us to truly evaluate our work processes, our customer relationships and our employees.

This post, to be very clear, is not an attack on marketing managers. Marketers are some of the most vital employees for your business.

The reality is we’ve talked with a lot of marketers from many different companies throughout the United States and we’ve seen some consistencies.

So when we say that these are 5 things your marketing manager isn’t telling you, we don’t mean because they are specifically withholding the information from you, it’s that they might not know that this is vital information to help you make informed decisions.

A marketing manager is just one person who wears A LOT of hats. We know that.

That’s why this post is here to say that a marketing agency can help you not only identify areas of opportunity for your business, but free up that marketing manager to further champion your business.

Finally, before we dive into the first thing they’re not telling you, this is a not a one-size-fits-all post. There is even a possibility that your marketing manager covers all of these things already.

If that’s the case, WELL DONE TO YOU! It means you’ve hired a superb employee and you should try and keep them at all costs.

But let’s dive in shall we with the 5 things your marketing manager’s not telling you.

1. Digital marketing is 23X more cost effective than traditional marketing

It’s true. If you calculate your average cost versus the average amount of impressions you expect to get for that cost the numbers are staggering.

Many old school marketing managers believe that traditional marketing is the way to go for your business. And for some industries, that may be partially true.

The reality however, is that marketing managers are assigned a budget and should be able to maximize the amount of return they get for that budget.

If they are using traditional marketing as their primary source of work instead of digital marketing, they’re not maximizing it enough.

The proof?

Social Axcess did a study on the average cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) across different mediums like direct mail, television, radio, print and billboards and stacked that up with digital marketing cost.

Where direct mail will cost you on average $57 per 1000 impressions, a social media campaign will get you 1000 impressions for about $2.50.

This is a baseline. It doesn’t keep in mind that you have to pay to have the mailer printed and posted and you need potentially many man hours to pull it off. Social media however has no hidden cost, it only takes one person to set it up and you can actually quantify the results directly on the platform itself.

And that’s just social media.

If you’re not using search engine optimization services (also known as SEO services) for your company, you’re REALLY not utilizing the budget correctly.

Speaking of impressions, here’s a for instance.

It only costs this Agency Jet client who is using our national SEO services $0.35 for every 1000 impressions.

Can your print ad do that?

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) should run simultaneously not independently

We hear this all the time: “I want to run Google Ads THEN I want to run SEO” or “I don’t want to SEO my old site until my new site is up.” “Or I heard pay per click is better than SEO.”

Every single one of the above is a myth.

Firstly, waiting to tell the search engines about your company so you can get a web project done or so you can run ads first and SEO second places you at a disadvantage.

Doing one thing at a time isn’t helpful.

Many companies do it because it’s hard for them to keep track of everything if it’s running all at once.

To those companies we say, get yourself an agency who can help you handle it, explain it all to you, and provide results.

To quote our Director of Client Strategy, Colby Wegter: “The best and quickest performing campaigns I see for SEO clients is when they pair that with Google Ads. We get results for clients regardless but when they run both services at the same time, results are much more like a Formula 1 car instead of the sports car in your driveway.”

If your marketing manager has the “first this, then this” attitude, you need to find a marketing agency to support them.

Using different spokes on the marketing wheel simultaneously, gives you the best chance to make a last impact online.

It’s a lot easier to make a pizza with all the ingredients at once, not just one at a time.

3. They can’t actually tell you if your website is successful or not

A marketing manager should live in the data. While they themselves are an employee, part of their job should be making your company website the business’s #1 employee.

In order for them to do that, they need to look at the Google Analytics data and discern whether it’s being successful or not.

We see this all the time. A company hires Agency Jet as their digital marketing partner, we work on the campaign for a few months, traffic on the website has gone up tremendously and the client gets on a call with us and says, “But my sales aren’t going up.”

As your digital marketing agency, we can show you how much traffic you’ve received and how quality it is. But you could have the best quality traffic in the world and not see a sales spike.

Why? Your website needs work.

Think of your website as the below Venn Diagram. You’ve got three categories:

• Design
• User-Experience (UX)
• SEO

Website design is how the website looks. Is it attractive? Does it have nice colors? Is it modern?

UX is how the website can be manipulated. Are menus easy to read? Are buttons easy to click? Do images load quickly?

SEO is the engine. It promotes the site and brings people to it.

Each of these requires a lot of thought but one thing is true, without all three, your sales are not going up.

You could have all this new traffic because you invest in SEO and then find that you aren’t able to convert it.

So I know what you’re thinking: “You said earlier we shouldn’t wait on SEO to fix our website.”

It’s true! Traffic is no guarantee. Your website needs promotion month over month to survive. But while you’re promoting it with SEO, you need to constantly look at what the data’s telling you so you can make sure that when people arrive on your site, they are converting.

4. They don’t actually know what the data means at all or they can’t put a storyline to it

Much like #3, you’re paying your marketing manager to understand how to maximize the website.

Does your marketing manager know what a heatmap is? What Bounce Rate is? What a website behavior flow chart is or how to explain it?

These are basics.

Has your marketing team shown you something like this? If not, they should be.

If your marketing manager doesn’t know these things, they aren’t telling you because they don’t think you need to know, they aren’t telling you because they don’t understand it themselves.

This information is vital to help turn your website into the #1 employee at your company and to help turn your marketing manager into the champion of those efforts.

5. They don’t want to collaborate

Marketing managers are vitally important. We believe that. But some are worried that if they bring more people into the process, it diminishes their value.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Marketing managers who are afraid to collaborate are harming your business because there are experts out there that can truly revolutionize the way you market your products or services.

And it’s impossible for a single person to be an expert on everything.

Ultimately we see marketing managers as the ultimate collaborators and delegators. With the gig culture and the affordable website design and SEO options out there, there’s no reason why the marketing manager needs to do it all themselves.

At Agency Jet, we work extremely closely with marketing managers so that when the big budget meeting comes up at the end of the year, they can show the results of our SEO work and get a pat on the back for making a good decision in hiring us.

This is what we mean by championing these individuals. Agency Jet is a team of marketers with tons of experience. We know that it’s a position that pulls you in a lot of different directions.

But ultimately, the #1 goal for a marketing manager is to improve the visibility of the business. By delegating to expert designers, digital marketers, and ad managers, your marketing manager is doing just that.

Summary

What we’re saying is that a single person can’t possibly know everything out there that will help your business and many times, partnering with a team of digital marketing experts like us at Agency Jet has not only improved a company’s bottom line but actually elevated the marketing manager to be more engaged in other important projects.

We’re also huge on education. Every single call your marketing manager has with us will have them learning about all things digital marketing and in turn, this makes them much more expert on the subject, increasing the value to your business.

If you want to know more about how much it actually costs to hire a digital marketing company, want to see where your website is at with a free website audit or want to see what our clients are saying about us, check us out!

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