Ever Wondered What We Deliver Each Month for Our Partner Clients?

Bryce Raley
By: Bryce Raley
Reading Time: 5 minutes
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When I'm out selling or even when I'm speaking into our marketing, I try and put myself in your shoes. You being the person that's reading the blog, navigating the website, following along on the social channels, and considering hiring us. I think it's usually pretty obvious to a prospective client that a marketing agency like The Squad offers creative website design as one of it's services. You can check out our web design portfolio, and see a few of the websites that we've designed over the last 8 years. It's a very tangible thing.

In the last few weeks alone we've launched this site, and this site, and this site. I almost forgot about this site and, oh, this site as well. It's easy to look at our design and development skills by clicking around to those links. You can judge us based on what you see on our website.

What's a little more difficult to judge is our ability to partner with a business for an ongoing digital marketing strategy driven by inbound methodologies. That's pretty hard for a business owner, marketing manager, or VP of sales and marketing to grasp. Many times they want to pursue the ongoing relationship with us, but they don't have a tangible way to see it. Well, that's the goal of this blog post in the next few hundred words.

Ongoing Partnerships with Digital Marketing Agencies

I want to give you a glimpse inside a real live ongoing partnership we have. You see, the dirty little secret in our industry is that you can set it and forget it. Launch a cool website, turn on some ads, sprinkle on some SEO and you're in business. It just doesn't work that way. To get sustained results, it takes an ongoing commitment to the following:

  • A solid comprehensive marketing and sales strategy
  • A content marketing initiative driven by an editorial process and built on the backbone of blogging, social, and content offers
  • An SEO game plan based on keyword research, good content, shareability, backlinks, and continual measurement
  • An automated marketing plan with email and internal workflows
  • A ongoing management for Google PPC ads
  • A constant refresh of social media ad campaigns and management of budgets
  • A plan to make website updates periodically as things change within the business

Well, it's not smoke and mirrors, and it's not set it and forget it. It's comprehensive. It's hard work. And it's rewarding when done well.

Take a glimpse inside an ongoing marketing program we have right now and see if this level of investment is worth a chance at increased leads, sales and a larger, more engaged audience than ever before.

A Sample Inbound and Digital Marketing Program with a Partner Client

This program (I'll save the name to protect the innocence) is at the $4000 investment level. They also pay a couple hundred dollars in software expenses for hosting, automation, reporting, etc. The agreement we have is month to month (as all our agreements are) but they are entering their second year. Most all of our partner clients follow the flow of a monthly strategic meeting and a weekly call. At the monthly strategic, their dedicated Marketing Consultant and Account Manager will meet with the owner, marketing or sales team. Sometimes there are representatives from all 3 areas.

During this meeting we'll address any urgent issues, cover some basic analytics, and then plan out the next 30 days of tactical work. We also reserve time to cover 60-day planning, and the 90-day outlook. This allows our team to come prepared to each meeting ready with fresh ideas for what we've heard in previous meetings, and it allows us to plan out the editorial calendar far into the future. This drives email marketing, blogging, content offer production, automation, social campaigns, and social sharing.

The weekly call is usually a 15-30 minute touch base between the Account Manager and an internal champion for the partner client. This call builds upon the monthly strategic, covers the next steps in the current week, and plans for the following week. The call is also a great place to hear about real time events, opportunities, and challenges. On the many calls I've participated in, you can cover topics like: blog ideas for the following week, determining a great social share that has to go out in a timely manner, and learning that the business is ready to kick off a webinar series. Sometimes there is a new event at their office like a lunch and learn or an open house. This call will also reveal a turnover in staff, requiring a change to the website about page, or a segmented email that needs to go out to a list about a hot new offer. This call and the monthly strategic keep us on the pulse of what's happening with our partner clients.

Each week for this $4000 level client we publish 2-3 blog posts and then share daily social content on multiple channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube. Other clients may also use Instagram, Pinterest, or even Houzz. We typically send out a monthly newsletter and about 2-3 email blasts promoting events, segments of the business, or an upcoming webinar. We write the content, coordinate with the marketing director for approvals, and stick to a very consistent publishing schedule. Part of our job is boosting key social media posts and managing a small budget geared toward building their audience, as well as promoting key events like trainings, webinars, and lunch and learns.

Not a week goes by where we don't add some new call-to-action graphics to the website, develop custom social media graphics, or build out a new landing page for lead conversions. We optimize the website for SEO on-page and we put some time into monitoring results with tools like MOZ or SEMrush.

Additional Services We Offer For Our Partner Clients

Occasionally we handle some graphic design or video work for this client and bill those hours on top of the ongoing program agreement. We do this in a very timely manner. A program of this nature would typically be between 32 and 40 hours of time investment for our agency. We work to be as efficient as possible and only bill overages when they are agreed upon.

This client has a few additional strategies we are working in as we have time within the program. Those are content updates to the website (not the blog), building out marketing automation workflows between the website, email automation, and the CRM. And, lastly, we're developing new content offers to condition the market and build our lists at the top of the funnel. These offers are usually ebooks, white papers, free guides, and infographics.

So, hopefully you can see that that's a lot of stuff to do in a month. Can all of this be done for $2500 per month? No. Can more be done at $5000, $7500 or even $10,000? Sure it can.

It all boils down to the following:

  1. What are your business development goals?
  2. How fast would you like to achieve them?
  3. Are you willing to invest money into the fast and slow burn?
  4. Do you have the capacity to deliver what you're selling?

#1 is easy. We can discuss that and make sure your marketing and sales are playing nicely together.

#2 is up to you. We can advise you, but you have to decide how much gas you want to put on the fire.

#3 is about committing to digital ads in the beginning, while organic growth comes 3, 6, 9, and 12 months into the plan. If you're content to wait, we can play the long game. If you're impatient, we have to play both.

#4 Do you know what profitable business you desire? And do you have the scale to deliver it? Again, questions we can help you answer, but ultimately the answer lies with you.

Hopefully this post gives you a glimpse of what we're like. We're a fun bunch who are highly focused on results, and we love long-term relationships with our clients. We have many of our partner clients who have been with us for 6 or 7 years. Many more have been engaged with us for 3-4 years.

If you want to get started by talking to one of our marketing consultants, then click here and fill out this short form. Otherwise, just give us a ring at 502-618-4200. Ask for Jay, Joel, Bryce, or Adam. We'd love to connect with another growth-minded business in our area.

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