The Three Biggest Mistakes CEOs Make When Hiring A Marketing Agency

“Every avalanche begins with the movement of a single snowflake. With each new project, my goal is to move a snowflake”.

Thomas Frey

A few weeks back, I spoke with a business colleague in Europe. He relayed a marketing horror story which, unfortunately, is pretty standard. His client had recently invested $150,000 in a new tv commercial – and their company didn’t get a single new lead from it.

How could this happen? 

Without having spoken to the CEO or knowing anything about his business, I would make an educated guess and predict this was a classic example of one of two major marketing fails:

1)    Either the wrong audience saw the ad (i.e., incorrect target market); or

2)    The messaging was wrong for the target audience (for example, a boring message, no unique selling proposition, etc.)

The same reasons could explain why the advertising campaign you've run hasn't worked either. Either the ad wasn't being seen by the right target audience (known as poor targeting), or the right people may have seen it, but the ad itself was weak and didn't light a fire underneath them to take immediate action (known as poor messaging).

This made me think about the three most common mistakes CEOs make when hiring a marketing agency – and how to avoid them.

Mistake One - Price, Price Baby

The most obvious first mistake is choosing a marketing agency based on their price. Yes, I realize this sounds like a self-serving statement but think about it. Marketing companies are meant to know how to get you more clients.

This also means they need to know how to get themselves new clients, which means they know how to create new business on demand.

No marketing agency worth their salt will be cheap to work with - because they understand their value to a company. Take the Wall St Journal, for example. Their top-performing sales letter ran from 1975 to 2003 and brought in 2 billion dollars in subscription revenue. The marketing agency who wrote the campaign was rumored to be paid over 1 million dollars - an unheard of amount in the 1970s.

When a marketing agency is inexpensive to work with, in reality, it means they're gambling with your marketing budget. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They're going to throw mud at the wall and see what (if anything) sticks. Avoid like the plague. You're wasting time and money and can unknowingly inflict significant brand damage by engaging in poor advertising.  

Mistake Two - Marketing Decision Making By Team Consensus and Fluffy Success Parameters

I love this cartoon by Tom Fishburne. It illustrates clearly the reality of having "too many cooks in the creative kitchen.

As any good leadership book will tell you, the secret to success is hiring the best people, giving them what they need to be successful, and then getting out of their way to let them do what they do best.

The other vital things you'll want to get sorted immediately (in initial discussions) are:

1)    Which one internal person in your company will have full responsibility for marketing sign-off – meaning this person will have the responsibility to approve and provide feedback on all campaigns.

Note marketing approval should NEVER be delegated to an internal group or committee (a sure-fire recipe for disaster that will result in every project running far behind schedule and the best creative ideas getting shot on sight).

You can, of course, be the approval person as CEO – but the agency needs to be very respectful of your time and ensure that the approval process is as simple and streamlined as possible. For best results, there should be one person with full authority who is fully engaged in the process and has a vested interest in its successful outcome.   

2)    What does marketing success look like for your company, and how would you measure it? Is it increased brand awareness (in which case ask the agency how they would best measure this metric)? Is it traffic driven to a website, new online leads passed onto your sales team, increased number of phone calls etc.?

You can't be expected to know the technicalities of how to measure marketing success (that's the job of your agency). But it would help if you were clear about what kinds of results would make you feel happy about your marketing investment.  

With the dismal TV advertisement I discussed above, I can't help but wonder if the marketing agency and the CEO were singing from the same hymn sheet. Did the agency even know that the campaign's goal was the number of new leads or were they thinking that the goal was brand awareness or…some other metric? Either way, there's a Grand Canyon-sized communication gap that needed to be bridged at the project's beginning.

Mistake Number Three – Looking For One Hit Wonders Instead of Building Relationship

The popularity of digital marketing is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in that any business can reach the decision-makers of just about any target market in the world, virtually instantly and for sometimes pennies on the dollar. But it’s a curse because that’s precisely what everyone else is doing too, which means the online noise is at fever pitch, and it is more challenging than ever to grab attention.  Your digital marketing now has to be incredibly strategic to attract high-quality leads.

In my experience, the most significant strategic mistake in digital marketing is that companies tend to run campaigns that immediately ask for a sale. By that, I mean they run an ad, the ad asks someone to buy instantly – and the prospect either buys – or, most commonly, clicks away to chase the next shiny new thing. It's the equivalent of seeing a pretty girl in the cereal aisle and asking her to marry you instead of asking for her phone number. 

At the most basic level, marketing is simply about trust. Do your prospects trust what you're saying? The best way to build trust is through repetitive high-quality marketing. Studies have shown it takes seven times for an ad to be seen by a person before they take action.

Ask an agency which digital marketing strategy they recommend and why.

Wrapping Up

By being aware of these common CEO mistakes, you'll ensure your marketing budget will work harder. You'll enter any new relationship with a marketing agency knowing the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them, and you'll see the right and wrong way to advertise digitally for maximum results.

For more CEO marketing tips and strategies to grow your business rapidly (and ethically), read Julie Guest's new book The Client Stampede