What You Should Know Before Attending Your First Marketing Meeting
Whether you're still looking for the ideal marketing agency for your company's needs or have already started working with them, your marketing meetings are crucial for keeping everyone on the same page and maintaining your brand's vision.
Considerations for the Initial Marketing Conference
Prepare yourself first by finishing your assigned tasks.
Do your research before hiring a marketing firm to ensure you get the greatest results. At the outset of working with a marketing agency, you may not have been assigned any reading or research to do in preparation for your meeting. It's important to get to know your marketing agency before moving further. But if you've already talked to your account manager, they may have suggested doing some research on websites you appreciate prior to a web design meeting, or looking at social media to get a sense of the kind of online presence you'd like to have. No matter if this is your first or tenth marketing meeting, setting the tone and making the most of your time together will greatly benefit from your preparation.
Expound on your company's mission.
Your marketing agency is a wealth of knowledge, and they are happy to detail all of the options available to you with regards to their services. However, your marketing firm won't know what services to suggest to your business unless you share your goals with them. By documenting your company's six-, twelve-, and twenty-four-month objectives, your agency will be better able to craft a strategy tailored to your company's needs. This is helpful for business owners who are new to marketing and have no idea how different approaches would affect their company.
Bring a list of questions with you.
No matter what stage of the sales process a customer is in, we always welcome the opportunity to answer any questions they may have. Do you need to know what other projects like yours your marketing firm has completed? It's not news to them. Do you like to see more choices for the look of the website? Only if you write your advertising agency and ask for more samples will you learn this. Be sure to address any issues or queries your agency may have about your brand's needs. You can rest guaranteed that you will leave the meeting with the answers you need to feel confident about your business if you take the time to write down your questions in advance.
Introduce your business to them.
Please enumerate the ways in which you stand out from the competition. Could you give me some examples of your previous work or client references? In marketing, differentiation is a powerful tool. Think about the ways that Apple and Harley Davidson set themselves apart from the competition. Consider your company's future now. Exactly what sets these apart from one another? Want the firm to aid in highlighting or identifying?
Share your experiences with the various forms of advertising you have deployed so far.
Have you thought about how you came to have the current clientele? In the alternative, if you own a startup, how do you plan to expand your customer base? You can't just build it and hope people show up like in "Field of Dreams." In addition to the usual media purchases, brochures, business cards, and other representations of your work are welcome. With this, we can lay the groundwork for our relationship.
Establish advance what you hope to achieve by holding the meeting.
Learn to manage your finances and your expectations. That way, everyone can see the benefits of cooperating or not. Don't be that customer who the agency ignores because they can't trust you to pay on time or because you have unreasonable expectations for how quickly the creative work will move.
Avoid picking and choosing what you like.
To save money by just using one company for some tasks and another for others is to commit the moral equivalent of polygamy. Find someone who can satisfy most of your needs and stick with them. One of our customers thinks she can save a ton of money by purchasing her printing herself after outsourcing her graphic design, site development, and advertising to multiple organizations. In her pursuit of optimal performance from her vendors, she often spends too much time with any given one of them.
Inquire further about their achievements.
The best way to guarantee a successful marketing meeting is to start off by discussing the team's recent successes. In this way, you can easily keep track of what's been accomplished and what's going to need to be carried over into the next week. Analyzing past successes and failures might help you decide if your marketing team needs more people.
These are some considerations any business should make before arranging to meet with top-tier advertising firms. In this manner, you will have no trouble assembling the best team of experts.
