Quick Navigation:
- What Is a Marketing Agency
- Misconceptions about Marketing Agencies
- A Sales Agency: Focussed Around Lead Generation and Conversions
- The Best of Both Worlds: a Sales and Marketing Agency
- Why Work With a Sales Marketing Agency
- How To Set Measurable Goals (KPIs) for Your Agency Partner
- Marketing and Sales Automation – A Must-have In 2022 and Beyond
- Partnering with The Right Sales and Marketing Agency
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Marketing, branding, and sales should go hand in hand, and you cannot create a strategy for one without incorporating the other. In this post, we will cover what is the difference between a sales and marketing agency and how they can help you achieve your revenue and growth goals.
What Is a Marketing Agency
A marketing agency is a partner to your business working on your goals and objectives. They design a strategy to achieve your targets; let them be lead generation, increased sales, or better reputation. They often create a full marketing plan for you to review and provide you with suggestions on which channels and activities to focus on. That’s exactly what our Marketing SWOT service does.
After coming up with a plan, a marketing agency will set benchmarks for each target and – after you decide to work with them – they will start measuring performance KPIs. The main goal of a sales and marketing agency is to deliver a high return on investment and help you achieve your business goals.
Misconceptions about Marketing Agencies
There are many misconceptions about sales and marketing agencies, and we have covered many of them in this post. First of all, a marketing agency is a collection of specialists who are able to understand your brand, your challenges, and offer the right solutions. Their goal is to deliver results, not likes. They are also transparent, good with collaboration, and have the solutions to the problems you are facing.
A marketing agency is not a freelancer who builds websites in their free time or sets up social media accounts as a virtual assistant. They might be great at covering the basics, but only a seasoned marketer can come up with a strategy that helps your brand stand out from the crowd and attract your ideal clients. It is also not a copywriter who can set up a few blog posts. To win customers, you need a holistic marketing strategy.
A Sales Agency: Focussed Around Lead Generation and Conversions
A sales agency is all about getting you conversions. Simply put, they will make sure that you pay much less for acquiring a customer than the profit you make from them. Let’s say you are selling online courses for £599. You have spent £1500 on the platform and course creation and £6500 on setting up the funnel. You want to make sure that you are selling as many courses as possible. The first 12-13 sales will cover the cost of your marketing, and the rest is going to be your full profit.
If a sales and marketing agency only gets you 10 sales, you have a negative return on investment, and you are losing money. That’s why a sales agency should be expert at conversion optimisation, marketing automation, and copywriting, as well as setting up impactful advertising campaigns.
The main key performance indicator of a sales agency is the number of sales, the conversion rates, and the cost per conversion.
The Best of Both Worlds: a Sales and Marketing Agency
If you would like a company partner to take care of everything; branding, marketing, and sales, you should choose a sales and marketing agency. They have the sales experience, the industry knowledge and the marketing know-how to bring your brand to the right type of people and improve not only your brand value, but also your revenue and profitability. They will assist you with setting up online marketing automation campaigns, email marketing management, as well as a sales strategy. Most importantly, they will be able to design a customer journey that suits your brand and your goals.
Why Work With a Sales Marketing Agency
There are different reasons why some companies decide to work with a marketing agency in the UK. Based on our research, the problems are more diverse than you might think. Here are a couple of telltale signs that you might be ready to partner up with a professional company that will take your business to the next level.
- Your sales volumes are not increasing and you are unable to grow your business
- You are able to get traffic to your website, but the traffic is not turned into enough sales.
- Your customer value is dropping, and you would like to maximise your sales opportunities
- Your market’s preferences and your customers’ behaviour are changing, so you have to adapt a new sales and marketing strategy.
- Your internal team has no time to follow up with each customer, and you are losing sales as a result.
- You simply would like to focus on getting the job done and getting paid instead of learning all the technical aspects of marketing.
- You have spent money on paid advertising, however, you haven’t made a positive return on investment.
- Your salespeople are complaining that they don’t get enough qualified leads, or that the quality of leads is low.
- You don’t have the budget to set up your own marketing department and handle all the activities in-house. In this case, you would need an agency to partner up with to work with you on reaching your goals as soon as possible.
- To have a second, fresh pair of eyes to look at your sales and marketing strategy and provide you with creative ideas that you and your team might not have thought about.
If you can resonate with any of the issues above, feel free to book a free marketing overview to see if we can come up with some recommendations to boost your business.
How To Set Measurable Goals (KPIs) for Your Agency Partner
It is important that you agree on the goals and measurable targets with your sales and marketing agency. Here are some example goals based on the service the company provides.
Lead Generation Services
If you engage with a marketing agency to provide lead generation services, it is easy to set up KPIs to measure the number and quality of leads. Here are some examples of what you need to get regular reports on:
- The number of leads and growth month by month
- The number of conversions (conversion rate: number of closed deals/number of leads) You can set a timeframe for conversions, based on your sales cycle: from one week to three months
- The cost of converting leads. This is an important measure that will allow you to work out whether you make a healthy profit
SEO and Traffic Generation
One thing is certain with SEO and traffic generation: it is not a one-day job. You will need to give your sales and marketing agency at least six months to deliver the results. However, you can see improvements as soon as in a couple of weeks. For this type of service, you will need to have a couple of reports to look over each month.
- The number of organic/paid visitors landing on your website month-by-month
- The bounce rate and number of pages visited by each customer
- The goal conversion rate – your agency will be able to set this up on Google Analytics or other platform
- The rankings for popular keywords used by your ideal clients
Social Media Marketing Campaigns
When it comes to social media advertising and content management, it is important that you track real results and not likes. There are a few companies that will “buy” likes that will have no long term benefit for your brand or your growth. Instead of likes, you need to focus on engagement, brand visibility, reputation, and interactions. Here’s what you should measure when engaging with a sales and marketing agency to work on your social media campaigns.
- Engagement on social media channels and brand visibility
- Your brand’s performance against your competitors
- Number of clicks received from each social media platform
- Number of comments and shares
- The bounce rate and conversion rate of your social media traffic
Marketing Automation and Sales Funnels
This service is by far the most complicated out of all, as there’s a lot of technology involved in setting up a sales funnel. You might want to grow your subscriber list, so you can contact them in the future with promotions for free, instead of having to pay for them to return to your site. You could also automate sales and optimise your conversions. Here are a few things you can measure when using a sales and marketing agency to work on your projects:
- The growth of your engaged audience
- The engagement statistics of your email campaigns
- The revenue per subscriber
- The increase or customer value
- Conversion rate improvement
- Revenue per campaign
- Cost per new lead
- Cost per new customer
- Return on marketing engagement
Of course, the measurements for each service will depend on your project, how established your brand is, and your goals. You should always sit down with a marketing expert to agree on benchmark figures and growth objectives, so they can tailor the sales and marketing strategy accordingly.
Marketing and Sales Automation – A Must-have In 2022 and Beyond
Let’s face it: we are not living in the 20th Century. Word of mouth advertising still works, but you need to reach out to new markets if you would like to grow your business. At the same time, customers’ behaviour and preferences have changed. Here are the most important things you need to take into consideration when designing a customer journey and automating marketing and sales activities:
- Customers don’t always want to pick up the phone: they might want a quote online or are shopping around. Most of them don’t want to speak to a salesperson.
- Today’s customers hate being sold, but they love buying things. Let them make the final decision. If you educate your website visitors, you can help them make up their mind instead of being pressured into the sale.
- As your business grows, you might not have the office staff or resources to follow up with every lead and past customer. It would cost you much more than implementing a sales and marketing automation system.
- People today are looking for instant gratification, they cannot wait to be called back by an agent later on.
- Every buying decision is made based on emotional sentiment. The stronger the relationship you built with your prospects the more likely they will become happy customers and eventually “raving fans”.
The Benefits of Marketing and Sales with an Agency
The technology of sales and marketing automation is constantly changing, and an agency will be able to recommend the right solutions for the size, goals, and industry of your business. Of course, you could spend a few weeks – if not months – to try and find the solution to your sales automation or content management, or set up a project team internally. However, if you want expert results, it’s better to engage with a marketing professional.
You will also benefit from the below perks of working with a marketing automation and sales funnel expert:
- Faster implementation and results.
- Lower cost of implementation (you save on working hours and staff resources).
- Correct measurements and reports that complement your existing business intelligence data.
- Technical know-how and system integrations.
- Better return on investment, as you work on clearly defined goals and objectives.
- Access to resources (and experts) to help you improve other aspects of your business.
- Saving on staff training costs and resources.
Partnering with The Right Sales and Marketing Agency
It is important that you choose a partner you trust and one that has enough case studies that are relevant to your project. You should always set up an initial consultation and find out whether the business is looking to understand your goals or just take your money.
As an example, here at LMNts Marketing we only work with clients who have a business, clearly measurable goals, and ones that trust us. This means that we refuse to work with 7 out of 10 clients, as we don’t believe we could help them. You could say that it’s selfish, but we understand that our reputation is our most important business asset. If we don’t think we could deliver results, we will give the project a miss.
Do you have an interesting sales and marketing project you would like us to have a look at? Let us know below.
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