Working with your marketing team or agency: 5 golden rules for campaign success

Managing, planning, and executing campaigns is a team sport –  it needs input from each player and the coach. In this post, I’m going to share my key tips for refining the way you work with your marketing team and/or agency. When done correctly it’s a powerful and winning relationship that is mutually rewarding.

I dislike the terms ‘managing up’ and ‘managing down’. For me, that language encourages parties to communicate on a ‘need to know’ basis. Like any successful relationship, the ideal is to foster mutual trust and open dialogue. This leads me to the first of my five golden rules:

Sharing is caring. 

Your crucial business insights and intelligence shouldn’t remain on your desk. Your marketing team, or agency, may never ask for it but it’s essential that you share this information with them and challenge them to integrate this into their campaigns and strategies. These insights might range from the value of a conversion, a detailed explanation of your sales process or funnel, a deep dive into the functionality of a product and how it is used, or the jargon insiders associated with it. If you don’t have all this information, you might want to ensure that you set up a couple of 30-minute calls with someone who does. Empower your marketing team to come back to you with ideas about how this information can be applied or tested.

Whether we are talking about accurate forecasts, long-term plans, or optimizing campaigns, the data you provide is going to create value by adding greater predictive power to your marketing. Forecasting (accurate forecasting!) is essential to prove future value and grow your channel and business. This depends on having high-quality data that can be trusted and relied on. Ensure that everyone in the business and marketing team is looking at the same data and using the same data source. If you can’t trust the data, or you don’t trust the attribution, then make sure to say something. Do the work upfront and confront these problems first. It will hurt a whole bunch more once your forecast is off by 50%.

Your team is only as good as the data you provide them with. 

Whether we are talking about accurate forecasts, long-term plans, or optimizing campaigns, the data you provide is going to create value by adding greater predictive power to your marketing. Forecasting (accurate forecasting!) is essential to prove future value and grow your channel and business. This depends on having high-quality data that can be trusted and relied on. Ensure that everyone in the business and marketing team is looking at the same data and using the same data source. If you can’t trust the data, or you don’t trust the attribution, then make sure to say something. Do the work upfront and confront these problems first. It will hurt a whole bunch more once your forecast is off by 50%.

Teach your marketing team about the core value drivers. 

In the past, it has been hard to determine where some clients really want their team to focus. There may be 5 (or 500) products, and they all seem to need 100% of your time. This only leads to failure in the long run. Unless there is a conversation about what drives value for the business and senior stakeholders, you risk wasting time and money on areas that won’t move the needle. If a client tells me what their profit margins are, or what the incremental value of each lead is, I can use these in our bid strategies to help optimize our campaigns and effectively forecast based on what is valuable to you. This way, we can turn numbers in the platforms into money in the bank.

Talk to your marketing team as if they were running your business

Your marketing team or agency isn’t simply an activation arm that is wielded when you need campaigns live yesterday. They are a highly intelligent team that is there to support you and provide insight across the business. This means pushing them to tie their marketing activity to business goals: clicks and conversions need to become value and profit. Tests need to be reframed in terms of incremental value-added, not just CTR and CVR improvements. Challenge the team to consider tests by comparing the implementation costs with the potential growth. Are these tests positive ROI in the short run or long run? 

Don’t manage your marketing team, lead them! 

Your marketing team is another group of people that needs to be effectively led, not managed. At times you will need to drive productivity and push them hard. Most of the time you should be working alongside them growing and leading them like you would any valued employee. This includes working with agencies, sometimes even more for agencies! Those teams do not spend 100% of their time working on your business so reliable support and guidance are essential.

Conclusion

Marketing succeeds when the business succeeds. We grow as the business grows. Our goals should be your goals. Marketing is tied directly to sales, product teams, finance teams, and senior leadership. Your marketing can either be a driver of growth or a money pit. Most of the time that decision is up to the business in how they activate their marketing team or agency. Follow these golden rules and you’ll avoid many of the mistakes I have seen in the past. Success is only a click and a conversion away.