Meeting Your Marketing Company

Why is it important to meet with your marketing company?

We live in an age of technology, are meetings really necessary? Surely the phone and e-mail is good enough to communicate the ideas, and objectives of a marketing campaign?

Not really; 7% of communication is verbal - so if you are talking on the phone to your marketing company (or e-mail) then they are missing 93% of the message.

Based on this - it is kind of a good idea to have a meeting.

Follow up meetings are also really helpful - if not essential.

Why - simple, to get value for money.

Marketing takes time; and so often now, marketing companies will hide behind e-mails and being out of the office to not give you up to date feedback - dragging out responses so that your expectations reduce.

• From your perspective, you want results and you want them now; you are paying a lot of money and need up to date information about how things are going.
• From a marketing companies point of view they want lots of paying clients that are no trouble with all the time in the world.

These two are incompatible - as the customer is always right, you need to set measures in place - so here are a few.

• Have an initial meeting to get to know the marketing agency, but also your key contact
• Talk to your contact once a week
• Ask for reports monthly on progress
• Have a monthly face to face meeting to look at the reports.

This will make you quite an unpopular client as you are high maintenance - however marketing companies do try to take on too many clients and not provide as high service as necessary.  The reason is £; the more clients they have the more money they get.  If they have a few clients are are delivering 100% satisfaction, their profits will not be as high, but they will have more successful clients.

Outsourcing marketing is always a tricky thing as you are taking a step into the unknown - however if you meet with the agency and push for a close working relationship with them - you will push them into delivering a better service.

No marketing company will want to meet with you if they have not got results to show you at a face to face meeting - so they will have results otherwise they will look silly and be forced to explain themselves.