boglapuri: Why Great Marketing Costs Money

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It can be hard for small businesses to understand why marketing is so expensive, or why marketers continue to try to sell integrated marketing packages instead of just one type of channel such as Facebook. In this blog article I?ll explain why marketing agencies charge for what they charge so that you?re better prepared to negotiate and understand your next marketing contract.

Here?s Why Marketing Costs So Much

1) Great Marketing Requires Metrics for Success.

A seasoned marketer, whether creative or digital knows that we have to measure the success of campaigns. Most business owners may look at the wrong metrics to measure the success of their own marketing campaign.

For example, using ?Likes? as a success metric instead of looking at people that were engaged with the actual content to gage purchase intent.

Likes and followers are easy to get. The truth is if you want you can buy followers. And yes I`ve seen ?reputable? agencies buy likes and followers and then show them off to the client. Makes me angry. Likes and followers aren?t solid metrics.

2) Great Marketing Requires Creativity

This is actually the tough part. All marketing requires a sense of creativity, whether it?s creating a great radio ad that will grab someone?s attention for 30 seconds, or finding ways to build links with others in regards to search engine optimization.

For a few marketers, creative solutions and slogans come 15 minutes before a meeting. For most of us we have to sit down and brainstorm out an idea. We?ll usually go through at least a dozen ideas before we run into one that?s good and it can take days. A great idea can launch a brand and define it. Think about the ?Just Do It? slogan from Nike. Where was Nike before this? Nobody knew what they stood for before that.

3) Great Marketing Requires Research

This is a situation that happens to us a lot. Clients have a general idea of what their target market is, but the truth is most of them come to us rather blindly without a clear goal of what they want to achieve, and haven?t done detailed research into their industry.

Research in my opinion is the most time intensive phase and costly. This is because not only are we researching about your industry, the history of the company, and the brand category that your business exists within, but we?re looking at your competitors as well to make sure we do make your brand distinct. This is why marketing agencies often go through audits, because without properly understand where your business is now, we won?t be able to provide proper solutions for the future.

Could you imagine pharmacy companies putting out drugs without proper audit,research, and validity. That thought chills me to the bone.

If the marketers that you?re working with aren?t helping you stand out from all the noise and the crowd, then you have what I refer to as ?generic brand marketing.? Generic brand marketing is cheap and seems good because it?s all very conventional. Unique brand marketing costs money.

4) Great Marketing Requires Planning

Marketing requires a lot of planning in order for proper execution. A good web designer will sit down and do layouts of how the website is going to look and think about how the placement of objects will affect the user experience and purchase intent of online goods and services.

When small businesses come prepared for the type of websites that they want, it gives marketing agencies a good starting point and allows you negotiating power when the project starts.

When I?m working with my clients on a visual branding idea, I sketch out the designs, and run them by my designers to get their thoughts, we sit and brainstorm about how that design reflects the brand. We go back and forth. We don?t start designing on Adobe right away until we have something solid.

Most people can build a house. Give them a bunch of wood, cement, nails and watch them build one. But nobody in their right mind would build a house without a proper architect designing the house. Or the final result will look like a Frankenstein of a house. Proper planning ensure higher levels of success.

Every marketing agency operates a little differently and prices for services will differ a lot. It?s always important that if you?re planning to spend a lot of money for your marketing that you look around and ask for proposals from different companies. Most of all, work with a company that you feel you would have a good relationship with. Results and relationships, those are what matter most in marketing.

Photo courtesy of Michael Ely