https://soundcloud.com/newfangled-agency-marketing-matters/episode-8-the-marketing-maturity-index?
Mark:
Hello and welcome to Agency Marketing Matters, this is a bi-weekly podcast that deals primarily with digital marketing topics that are of interest to agencies. We’re Newfangled, and we’re a digital marketing consultancy that works with agencies throughout North America to help them use these different digital marketing tools and strategies to promote their own businesses. I’m Mark O’Brien, the CEO of Newfangled.
Lauren:
Hi, I’m Lauren Siler, the Director of Marketing at Newfangled.
Chris:
I’m Chris Butler. I’m the COO of Newfangled.
Mark:
Today we’re talking about a system that we’ve created to help agencies measure their growth for digital marketing. We call it the Agency Marketing Maturity Index, so the Marketing Maturity Index. Basically what it is, is it takes the six elements of our agency marketing model, which as a refresher are positioning, content strategy, contact strategy, website, CRM, automation, and the seventh element of lead development, and we plot those seven elements across five points of growth just to show any agency at any point where they are.
Say, you might be a three in your website, or a two in automation, or a one in CRM, and we can look at that and assess where the growth is today, and then watch and set goals for what a year one program might look like. Then at the end of year one, look at what was accomplished, what was not accomplished, and measure that against the initial goals, and then set a course for year two. What it really is is just a way fighting system for agencies, and also a way for them to have an understanding of how all these things interrelate.
We see that’s a really big problem that we’re trying to combat, big-picture in the industry, not just for people who work with us but people who are just interested in marketing their agency at all, is that they continually think of one-off solutions. Just today we had a call with an agency, a really good-size agency out of Minneapolis. It seems like every other day we’re trying to speak with an agency with Minneapolis.
Lauren:
Yeah, what is that about?
Mark:
It’s all about Minneapolis all of a sudden. Anyway, they found us, and they wanted to get right into automation. They were ready, and they were really excited, and they wanted to have it up and running in June. Today, the record date, is May 23rd, so they want it up and running next week basically. That’s all they’re really thinking of, they’re not thinking of those other six elements at all. We want agencies to understand that there is no one-off. In order to create a solution that’s actually going to provide results, it has to be in the context of all seven elements. This index is a way of helping agencies identify where they are and choose a really appropriate path for growth over 12 month increments. We believe 12 month increments are right. It takes that long to see real results, to set a real plan. Too much more time than that, it’s a little too far out, they can’t visualize that. Less time than that, it’s too short term.
Lauren:
I think that’s something in particular that’s been really helpful too. Oftentimes we’ll talk to agencies, and they are so used to pivoting really quickly. They get a plan or they hear about some new marketing strategy and they implement it immediately, and then they give it about four to six weeks. If they haven’t landed that latest lead, then they move on, they pivot to something else, because they’re trying and they’re passionate and they care about these things. Looking at these elements holistically, and then recognizing and acknowledging that marketing really is about the long game, is helpful when setting your expectations internally in terms of what does success actually look like when you’re building your marketing?
Chris:
There’s somewhat of a bolt-on tendency when it comes to these kind of solutions because it’s like, “Oh, I’ve gotten to the end of my rope on this pain point, so I’m just going to buy this solution and tack it on and hope that it solves everything else.” What ends up actually happening is that it just reveals a flaw somewhere else. We, I guess, two, three months ago, had our white paper and our webinar on what we were calling this “great inversion concept.” We used that as a method to shed light on all these areas of the digital marketing ecosystem that we’ve been calling it, because they were all seen through a different light probably in the last two to three years.
For us, even in the last five, we took this whole concept and basically stuffed it through the website. That’s what we had done for a long time, and that’s not because we didn’t know any better. We needed a more holistic view, and that’s what this is. What you put together in the index is more like a grand unified theory as opposed to stuffing it all through this container. That’s what everyone thought it was at the time. Everyone thought it was, “Oh, well the website just has to do all these things.”
I think by inverting it in this way, you allow for a much more holistic approach, and you see that whenever you talk to any of our agency clients. They’re actually able to make some performance strides, whereas before they boxed themselves in right away and then didn’t know what to do with it.
Mark:
What they really want, which is understandable, is a believable vision. Unfortunately, a lot of the technology vendors out there are really good at creating a silver-bullet believable vision. “This one tool is going to cure everything,” or “That one tool is going to cure everything.” They hire lots of legions of extraordinary salespeople. Everyone’s doing this, not just a single vendor. It’s all throughout the CRM space, all throughout the automation space, content services, everything else. It’s just not the truth. There’s no agency that is going to be completely solved or unburdened from this marketing issue by a single tool. It’s about the integration of all six elements, and those six elements produce the seventh element which is true lead development.
Lauren:
A point you raised earlier I think is important is the way that these things influence one another. Being able to see the correlation between, “Well, if we’re low on the positioning front, then lead development is flawed,” or “We’re not seeing the conversions through our site because our content isn’t focused enough because we don’t have our position figured out.” Being able to look at these things as they connect to one another and not evaluating each of them in a vacuum is really helpful. It really creates a bigger truth.
Chris:
Yeah, and doesn’t lock anyone in. One thing that I think we experienced for the last decade was just a constant cycle of people being locked in and then trying to figure out what to do about that. Back to when Mark and I collaborated on an article called “We Don’t Build Websites Anymore.” The concept there was just to be a little bit provocative, but to point out that the site itself was sort of beside the point. It’s this conduit for all these other things. Today, that’s no longer controversial. I think people get that. I think what’s powerful is why.
The reason why is because all these systems that are a piece of the big puzzle, they can collaborate together, and you can scale all them out in the ways that they need to, you can change them, you can change their logic, you can change what you’re doing with them without being trapped within the walls of the website, which is huge. I think Salesforce has a lot to do with that, because they have this data model and you can base everything on that, and that’s flexible. If you’ve adopted that, then it allows you to change whatever you want moving forward, which was not true five years ago.
Mark:
A key variable here that agencies don’t play with enough at all, or even acknowledge, is time. When it comes to marketing and various other activities, they’re so shortsighted. They don’t give themselves enough time to really let something develop. The idea here is progress, not perfection, to always be looking at a system and to improve it constantly and to understand what the big picture or long term goals are within that system, and to allow yourself and these tools the time to actually work for you. The truth is, the agency, when they decide marketing is a big priority, it’s because of a sales emergency.
We know that marketing is not going to solve today’s sales emergency, but it will prevent tomorrow’s sales emergencies as long as you allow yourself to think about tomorrow. So many times, agencies cannot think about tomorrow. Think about today, they’ve got payroll, they’ve got a lot of pressures. We completely understand that, but the fact is, they’re going to be in business three years, four years, five years, ten years. What does that look like? What is a really sustainable long term marketing model that will allow them to grow continually over those periods? That’s really the perspective that needs to be taken into consideration that so rarely is.
Chris:
It’s kind of like what happens to everyone who hits 35. They realize that, “Oh, that’s what a decade is. A decade’s fast. All that planning I didn’t think I needed to do because a decade didn’t make sense to me, because a decade before 25 I was 15 and I lived under my parents’ rule.” All of a sudden, that becomes so clear, and people start contributing to 401ks and putting away for the kids’ college. They actually start planning for the long term because they realize ten years goes by with or without me. It’s the same thing for any business owner, I understand that cycle, that’s pressure on me right now, I’m going to go through that six more times, easy.
Lauren:
When you think about it this way, it becomes much more digestible in the day to day. I think it’s so easy to become overwhelmed with your own marketing if it’s something that you’re just prioritizing once a quarter or once a year because that’s when you had time to think of it or that’s when you happened to get inspired by it. When you’re looking at it pulled back a little bit and you’re infusing it into the day to day culture of the business, it becomes much more digestible and accomplishable. It’s not this big mountain you have to climb every single quarter.
Mark:
We were just last week with an agency in Winnipeg, we went to visit them for a kickoff. It was an amazing kickoff, there were 15 people present from the agency, they’ve got about 70 people total between their two offices. We were leaving at the end, and one of the executives was talking to us as we were walking out, and he was talking about the decision to really finally once and for all make their marketing a priority. He said that they had an internal meeting about six months prior and he said to the company, “If we find ourselves with this tool,” it was an automation tool, “a year and a half from now and it’s just collecting dust yet again, I’m just going to have to quit. I’m just going to have to be done with this agency.”
He was being so honest and really off the cuff, and just inside baseball talk. It showed what goes on in the psyche of so many agency executives, where they’re so fatigued by the waste that goes on with the fix of the day. We always do these assessments before we work with each agency, and ask them what their vision is, what the dangers are that might impede that vision, and what the strengths are that would help them achieve that vision. The main danger we always hear about is lack of focus, that people are going to get bored and move on.
That’s the new thing that they’re all scared about. They’re the ones doing it. They’re the ones getting bored and moving on, and they’re very aware of that, and they need something that they can actually sink their teeth into and believe in. It’s fun to be the people providing that solution, but it’s also so interesting to see that no matter what size the agency is, no matter where they are geographically, they’re terrified of losing focus.
Chris:
They should be. They should be terrified of losing focus, because without a system like this that’s bigger than one person, it’s going to happen.
Mark:
To wrap up a little bit here, that’s the whole point of the Maturity Index, to give agencies a really clear visual. You can find this Maturity Index on our site. There’s a webinar on it and there’s also a white paper on it. It’s really easy to find right on our site on newfangled.com. It gives agencies a really easy way to plot where they are and to make some good decisions about what they could reasonably accomplish in the next 12 month period. Every 12 months, you go back to it. What did we do? What did we not do? What’s next? Always reassessing and resetting the goals for the next 12 month period. We’re really happy we were able to create this tool, and we hope that as many agencies as possible can use it to expand their own marketing to get more results from their marketing.
Chris:
Cool. That’s a wrap.
Mark:
That’s a wrap. Thank you all, and we’ll talk to you next time. We have no idea what we’re going to be talking about.
Chris:
That’s right.
Mark:
We’ll figure it out before then.
Chris:
Take it easy.
Lauren:
Thanks for listening.