To some, it’s a new website or an advertising campaign or posting on facebook when someone in your team has a birthday. To us, it’s a unified plan of activities that strategically contribute to the growth of your business. Great marketing works and is an investment you’re happy to pay for. There’s no point burning money on marketing one-offs that take you in different directions every 6 months. Invest in your business with marketing management. By partnering with us, you’re able to execute on your growth goals, while allowing your team to focus on their roles.
If you have reservations about handing over your marketing to an external team - that’s perfectly normal! If your marketing is as important as we say it is, then you ought to consider who you entrust it to. Here at The Brand Shop, with a marketing framework to empower you to create a strategy, and a team of marketing professionals to execute it - we’re well positioned to build your brand.
Why should I hire an agency as opposed to hiring a dedicated internal marketer?
While an internal marketer can be very advantageous - they get to know your business intimately, have the ability to create really unique and specific content for your brand and are onsite for all of the action. One internal marketer generally doesn’t have the capacity, expertise and know-how to undertake all of the marketing related activities required to run the marketing for an SME well.
By leveraging a marketing agency, you will generally find that for a similar outlay to a single marketing manager, you will receive expert services from a dedicated team of specialists (listed below) that can be interchanged as required.
How does The Brand Shop differ from other agencies? Why should I choose you?
The Brand Shop differs from other agencies in several ways.
1) We believe that a clear marketing strategy can only be implemented when:
2) We have an internal media team, which allows us to create exceptional content in line with your greater marketing strategy, allowing you to really stand out from your competition.
Most agencies can handle marketing strategy and digital marketing execution but have to rely on other businesses for Videography, Photography and Web development. We’re convinced a great marketing strategy is cohesive so we’ve built our team to be able to manage this in-house.
3) We don’t charge you based on hours, we charge based on outcomes, which means that we will never hit you up for more money to complete a task in a shorter timeframe if it takes longer than we have anticipated.
How do we operate? We allocate points to deliverables. Our marketing plans then incorporate a monthly ‘points quota’ and at the start of each month, we sign off on the monthly deliverables that we will action for you in that month (irrespective of how long they take). Does it mean a project never runs overtime when we had planned to complete it in a month? No. Sometimes bad weather, illness, being too busy, or waiting on an external party will delay delivery (you might have been supposed to have a video interview filmed with us but couldn’t get out of the office for 2 hours because you were flat out all month). But what it does mean is that we will never fail to deliver because you didn’t have enough hours left in the month!
What is the benefit of using an external marketing agency?
An external marketing agency allows you to access individual specialist skill sets (designers, developers, marketers, videographers, photographers, email and ads specialists) without having to hire for each individual position and in a way whereby you can skew the use of a particular skill set on a weekly or monthly basis to your specific needs.
What services will be included in your marketing management packages (strategy, content creation, copywriting, web dev etc)?
Our marketing management clients have access to any combination of the following services in any given month:
Can you work in conjunction with my business consultant or other marketing agencies?
In most instances, yes we can.
If you are considering marketing management with The Brand Shop and already have other consultants or agencies working in this realm that you would like to continue to partner with, it is always a good idea to arrange a complimentary discovery meeting, to nut out how it would all work.
Can you work in conjunction with my internal marketing manager/team?
We most definitely can. Great communication and planning are the key to a long, harmonious and successful relationship between The Brand Shop and your internal marketing team.
How easy is it to move my plan up or down if my marketing needs change?
We have a minimum contract period for each of our marketing management plans (either 3 or 6 months).
Whilst you are still within this period you are able to move your plan up by providing at least 1 full month's notice (we require this notice period in order to ensure that we are adequately staffed in order to provide the additional service to you). During the contracted period you are unable to move down, however, once you have completed your minimum commitment period, at least 1 full month's notice will be required to move either up or down.
What if I sign up to your marketing plan and it just doesn’t work for my business? I am worried about your minimum contract terms.
First and foremost, our minimum contract terms are not in place to lock you into a non performant contract. They are simply there in order for us to ensure that we have the correct staff in place to manage your marketing and the marketing of our other customers - we need to have a clear idea of the minimum term that each of our clients will be working with us.
With any new implementation of a marketing plan, some components will deliver quick results (Google ads for example might start generating leads and sales immediately), and other components will take longer (SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media).
The 3-6 month minimum terms of our marketing contracts allow us the time required in order to show you the results that marketing done well can start to offer. However, depending on the marketing strategy in place and the management tier that you choose, you might only really start to see great results in months 5 & 6, even though the work that was completed in months 1-4 were instrumental in those results.
