Now what do you want out of me? Fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Do you want glowing things that can be framed by copywriters? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?
Rosser Reeves in Dennis Higgins’ The Art of Writing Advertising
Marketers are quick to blame agencies for their ineffectiveness. And it’s true: I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen agencies produce off-brand advertising that didn’t resonate with their customers; but hell, it looks pretty and gets likes. I’ve even seen a major agency try to get a company to fund research for an ad slogan that was not only off-brand but was impossible to understand—on the bright side, it was the first time they actually tried to gather data to inform an ad.
But, the fault isn’t solely with the agencies, it’s also with the companies hiring them. Many companies don’t know what they want to get out of a marketing initiative, so they don’t articulate it to the agency, and then the agency produces whatever the agency wants instead of what the company needs.
Every initiative, whether it’s a television ad campaign or the way you handle your Facebook page, should have a goal. And, the goal doesn’t have to be monetary. What is has to be is something that ties into your vision—what you want your brand to become.
Using the vision as a guide, you can create strategies—the overarching plans to get you to your vision—that result in a series of tactics—the steps it’ll take to get you there.
Marketing initiatives fall under the tactics bubble and must be measured in that context. Think: What do I want this initiative to do in a way that fits a strategy that pushes the company towards its ultimate vision.?
Thinking in this way makes it easy to then develop a simple metric to test the effectiveness of the initiative and be able to hold an agency accountable for the results.
Acting this way will ensure your marketing initiatives are on brand; make agencies produce better, more meaningful work; and, it will stop you from being so frustrated with your lack of return on your marketing spend.