Turn the diktat of ROI to your advantage.

Move from service provider to collaborator

The advertiser expects you to compete on the ground of return on investment. A wide-open road strewn with pitfalls and difficulties for agencies with vague promises; however, today you can—and now must—build your brand strategy by the yardstick of conversion.

Marketing Automation reduces the number of ignored prospects from 80% to 25% – Bulldog Solutions

Measure, yes, but what? As the list of performance indicators grows every day, which ones are actually relevant to monitor?

• The number of “likes” on Facebook?
• The email click-through rate?
• The number of white paper downloads?
• The CPC of an advertising campaign?
• The number of views for a video on YouTube?

Agencies often highlight this kind of performance. And yet this data in absolute value provides very little useful information. It matters little to know the number of visitors to the site and “followers” on the Twitter account; what matters is how many it takes to bring 1 new customer into the store. These are therefore ratios that must be analyzed.

HOW TO CALCULATE ROI?

Entering into an “inbound marketing” process, which aims to manage the entire customer relationship, offers the possibility of correlating performance indicators with one another, acting on each lever, and maintaining a business-oriented vision that has the merit of being clear for the client.

ROI is analyzed based on 3 expense items:

• The cost of attracting visitors to your site
• The cost of converting visitors into leads
• The cost of converting leads into customers

It is then possible to quantify:

• Cost per lead
• Cost per customer
• The calculation of the overall investment over the customer’s lifetime

75% of companies that have implemented a marketing automation solution increase their ROI after one year and 44% after six months – Focus Reesarch

KPIS ARE TOOLS FOR ITERATIVE IMPROVEMENT

KPIs, tools for measuring the performance of actions, assess the quality of the strategic project that you have put in place with your advertiser and in which they are a stakeholder. That is why it is important to define them upstream and to establish together the rules for interpreting the measurement. Measuring means knowing what objective the action that has been implemented is pursuing. Everyone must take responsibility and accept a collaborative process for optimizing the targeted performance.
Measuring performance must not become the measure of the success of the agency’s overall strategy and be limited to a binary outcome of success or failure. The agency must offer its expertise to the advertiser and analyze things continuously with them, so as to suggest the necessary areas for improvement. All of this in perfect Advertiser/Agency collaboration, because if the agency has gained solid experience across all its clients, the advertiser, for their part, masters their sales organization, their offer, and their customer feedback.

Moving from simple mention to KPI analysis is an approach that implies moving from a temporary client/supplier relationship to a lasting collaborative relationship between expert and business operator.
 

Interview with GABRIEL DABI-SCHWEBEL, Founder of the 1min30 agency

“Marketing Automation is the springboard for Inbound marketing”

What is the 1min30 agency’s approach to content?

“We started very small 4 years ago by setting ourselves the rule of producing content regularly: one blog post per day, one white paper every two months, then quickly one newsletter per week. We applied to ourselves what we recommend to our clients: we transformed our site into a media platform to convert our visitors into customers.”

How can the distribution of content created by 1min30 be optimized?

“Setting up an “Inbound marketing” mechanism is necessarily designed with Marketing Automation loops, because content serves the relationship; it is important to thank, follow up, and offer new content in order to capitalize on visits and generate leads.”

What are the results today?

“Today the results speak for themselves: 80,000 views/month on the site, 55,000 newsletter subscribers, 1,500 downloads per month now generate 4 appointments per day.

Without Marketing Automation and lead nurturing, we would never have been able to achieve such growth. Our contact base and the number of our leads give us the opportunity today to develop the first network of “Inbound marketing” agencies in France!”

Sharing results also means sharing the process

We have seen it: managing the redesign of a website on time, having creative ideas for the brand and knowing how to implement them well, skillfully orchestrating AdWords campaigns, defining a relevant editorial line for the blog, or even brilliantly setting up Community Management for your clients is no longer enough.
Companies and brands now commit only to measurable results. All agencies, whatever their specialty, must now deal with measuring ROI.

A major turning point! If this seems terribly restrictive at first glance, it has the merit of formalizing the relationship around tangible results that can no longer constantly be called into question. So you might as well take advantage of it to involve the client by getting them to sign a contract that is presented as a document setting out all the terms of the service. Much more than a detailed quote, this document must serve as a roadmap and reference in the event of a dispute.
That said, it must not be off-putting. Quite the opposite! The idea is to make it as pleasant as possible to ensure that it is read in full. Once again, the goal is to maintain the quality of the relationship.
The contract is there to reassure the client and commit them to the path of a professional relationship whose terms you formalize.    

WHAT TO REMEMBER

It is important to define the KPIs and the iterative way of working to improve processes upstream with the advertiser so as to adjust the content strategy and scenarios in agile mode.

• Detail the objectives being tracked rather than the means to be implemented.
• Only short-term milestones will be described precisely.
• The contract is not an administrative document, but must serve as a roadmap for both parties.
• The “Inbound marketing” process – structured around the three stages of traffic acquisition, lead acquisition, and conversion into customers – makes it possible to measure the entire sales cycle exhaustively.
• The performance dashboard of the Automation tool allows not only real-time reporting, but above all support for decision-making.

The 6 key factors of the connected agency: Download the complete guide

As comprehensive as it is enjoyable to read, the guide is structured and paced by advice and interviews with connected agencies. The studies with concrete, quantified cases provide you with the essential points to remember in order to grow your business: