I want to talk about seven questions that you should ask your marketing agency before you start with them or as you're getting to know them.
1. Who are some of your previous clients?
So first of the questions is who are some of your previous clients? You can always ask the agency who saw their previous clients are we like to specialize in technical companies, particularly IT companies and MSPs and software companies. We all like to work with technical companies across the board to explain really hard technical concepts to CEOs and business owners so they can make better business decisions. These marketing agencies can be niche down to one industry or have experience across multiple verticals. It depends on what you're looking for. I find that it doesn't really matter if the companies niche down or not. It's whether or not they can give you the results you're looking for.
2. How do you measure success and do they understand your company’s goals?
Next question. The second question is how do you measure success and do they understand your company's goals? As part of our process at Theia Marketing, during our calls with the prospective client, we like to understand our perspective client’s goals. How many clients are they trying to bring in each month? How many new clients are they trying to bring in each month? Are they trying to upsell their current clients? How many current clients do they have? So it's really important to understand the business structure and the marketing and sales goals and business goals of the clients before we can make a good plan for them. So in our calls, we like to understand our prospective client's problems before we go solving them.
We like to help our prospective clients understand how are they getting their leads at at the top of the funnel to how are they converting into clients to how are they converting those current clients or referral partners.
3. What is your pricing?
Now the third question is pricing. How has your pricing structured now? At Theia Marketing, we don't do a pay per lead basis. We have a fixed monthly cost per month and you pay for your software and your services. It’s a fixed monthly fee and our packages range from $1,500 per month to up to $20,000 a month depending on what you're looking for in terms of marketing and sales.
4. Is your content syndicated?
Now along the lines of pricing, this is an interesting question, but I guess the fourth question is, is my content syndicated? So on a lot of cheaper marketing plans you can get, you can have content delivered to your blog. But the problem with that content oftentimes, especially if you're looking at a low, a $1,500 per month price point, is that the content is syndicated, which means your content will be put across a lot of different MSPs blogs in possibly your same service space and your same geographic area. And that doesn't help you with SEO. That doesn't help you necessarily get more clients because it, it's not helping your search engine results page on Google. So you've got to ask if your content is being syndicated or is the marketing company producing original content each month for your blog.
5. Is a copywriter or content writer writing the content for your blog?
Also, another question along those lines. The fifth question is as a copywriter or content writer writing the content for your blog. Now generally the content on your blog is to educate and inform. So it's okay to have a content writer writing a the content for your blog, but it's important to have a copywriter whose job it is to persuade and have persuasive writing for your website content. That's key because you want your customers to buy at that point when you're looking at your website content.
Your website copy has a copywriter writing it because that's when your prospective clients are looking at pricing and looking to see if they actually want to use your services.
The blog content is to educate and inform.
6. What is your process to address issues?
Now the sixth question is what is your process to address issues? We want you to be really upfront with us. When you have a problem, send us an email or get us on the phone whenever you have a concern because it's very necessary to address it right there and then. We don't want concerns or problems to fester over time because they just get worse. So hopefully we can address your issue or problem within 24 hours and come up with a solution for it depending on the problem. So we like to address our issues right away as soon as we get them.
7. What sales and marketing certifications do you have?
And finally, our seventh question is what sales and marketing certifications do you have? Theia Marketing is part of the Duct Tape Marketing Network, which was started by John Jantsch. We have over a hundred partner companies who help us. I find that this network has been really helpful for us as we've grown our business.
We are also HubSpot agency partners and we love using the HubSpot platform. Our website is actually hosted on HubSpot. We use the Hubspot CMS and we also use the HubSpot sales professional to automate our one-to-one sales emails in the background. We also use our marketing professional for landing pages, blog posts and all, all of that. So we love using HubSpot and we like getting our customers to use HubSpot as well.
I find that that's been really helpful for us to keep track of our leads and who we talk to in the HubSpot CRM.
That’s the top seven questions you should ask your marketing agency when you talk to them. I hope this has been helpful. Please share with your friends and I hope to see you soon.
