There Is No Magic Bullet: Effective Marketing Requires a Holistic Approach and Expertise
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Corey Halstead
Owner, HALSTEAD.
Let’s face it, no one is an expert in everything. As the owner or manager of a design/build or landscape firm, there are some aspects of running the business that you excel in, and others where you are better off hiring an expert. Most likely, marketing falls into the latter category, as it involves so many areas—content creation, branding, advertising, website development, social media, etc.—to carry it out effectively. You may have staff who specialize in one or two of these areas, but you are likely missing essential elements needed for the big picture unless you have an extensive marketing department.
When you partner with a marketing agency, they become an extension of your existing team. They fill in any gaps in expertise and channel the focus of your marketing efforts while steering you clear of common and potentially expensive pitfalls. After all, if your company is not up to speed on the best ways to optimize your website’s search rankings, launch a social-first advertising campaign, or even maintain a Facebook page for your company, your efforts can do more harm than good (i.e., wasted budget spend and turned off prospects).
“Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.”
— Milan Kundera, writer
The right marketing agency will make it so you can focus on what you do best. Here’s a lesson learned for when a partnership can work well—or fall apart.
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The Situation
They said that they “can’t keep wasting money.”
A rocky relationship with a marketing team can lead to unrealistic expectations, and disappointment.
This is a tragedy.
An effective marketing team can have a profound impact on a service company of any size. The right marketing team can drive growth, profitability, and brand recognition.
So, what’s the right way to build this partnership? I can tell you that it’s built on a clear understanding of what to expect from your marketing team, as well as knowing the resources and support that they will need from you.
Recently, a particular business owner reached out to HALSTEAD to learn about our services. This person had worked with other marketing companies in the past and had found that the others “didn’t produce results.” She said that they “can’t keep wasting money” on agencies that weren’t adding value to their business. By the sound of it, the company was in a tough spot. This owner was in trouble, and the company needed to bounce back quickly.
I listened to the owner explain that the business hadn’t been getting calls, and they weren’t winning the projects that they did get the chance to bid on. The conversation pivoted to talk about Google Ads or Facebook Ads, which sounded like jumping the gun. I took the time to explain how the foundation of what we do is an industry-specific marketing system that is entirely built around having a solid and reliable website.
While we were talking, I had a look at their current business website … it was terrible. Unfortunately, the site was outdated, poorly designed, and not optimized for mobile devices. More importantly, the site did not communicate with the type of homeowner/potential customer who would invest in a luxury outdoor living space.
Ideally, a website redesign isn’t necessary to get an effective and strategic marketing program going. Rather, we are often able to leverage a new client’s existing website and hit the ground running on layering ROI-producing services, such as SEO, on top. On the other hand, I am also not comfortable taking clients’ hard-earned money without producing results. In my mind, if I were to run Google or social ads with this particular customer’s current website, I would be doing them a huge disservice.
“So,” I explained, “you want to start with website design.”
The owner was vehemently against this proposal. She said that her business did not have the budget. In fact, it had been hard for them to find funding for any marketing. She needed what little budget she had to go directly toward lead generation.
First, though, I really wanted her to see why we have this system and why it works. I explained that because the current website was in such rough shape, any traffic they did manage to get from Google and Facebook ads would not convert into leads. Who would trust a company to produce a luxury outdoor space for them when that company cannot put forth a decent website? Aside from the smallest amount of branding and market awareness that the ads would generate, they would waste marketing spending if they don’t generate potential customers.
We both took the time to dissect some of the things I noticed were lacking in her business’s website. It couldn’t be viewed on a mobile device, it lacked crucial landing pages for any ads to redirect to, and there was no contact form to be found. Every single ad-directed landing page needs to include a contact form in order to convert that site’s traffic!
Additionally, I explained that even if we added contact forms and landing pages, the site as a whole was still far behind compared to competitors. There were no professional photos of completed work, only faded images of the last day on site.
Still, the owner said that her budget did not allow for the proper fixes for any of these things, but she did allow HALSTEAD to add contact forms. Still, the site was not mobile-ready.
“Okay, at this point,” I explained, “we can try Google Ads.”
I told her that we could give the ads a go and see what happened even though all the desired components weren’t in place for a proper marketing system. We decided on a six-month plan to get traffic flowing onto the site.
Fast-forward six weeks, and I received an email from the owner stating that she would like to cancel our contract because we were not delivering enough conversions. We had only truly been able to track conversations on the website through Google Ads for about three weeks. The three-week delay was due to their website company struggling to link the analytics to the site.
Six weeks into our six-month plan, all of our previous conversations about the challenges we would face securing conversions went out the window. What were we left with? All the blame heaped on the marketing company for not having an instant fix for a business with 15 years of zero proper marketing functionality.
A Rare Occurrence
Twice is exactly how many times this sort of situation has happened at HALSTEAD over the years. Both times, it hurt. Both times, we exchanged emails with the owner explaining the intrinsic challenges that we knew we would face and provided the results of the ads with click-through rates well over industry standards.
Click-through rates (CTRs) measure the number of clicks on an ad you get per number of people who see it. For our industry, the average CTR is 1.4%. In both cases, the ads we created were performing beautifully, but the users driven to the site were not calling or filling out contact forms. Long story short, after we suggested the next step in our marketing plan, the customer would go dark. Weeks would pass, and then they resurfaced to cancel.
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The Solution:
What exactly should be the role of your marketing team, department, or agency? What should you expect from them? Whether your team is in-house, outsourced, or a combination of the two, your marketing team has five core functions:
Understanding your target market and competitors. Marketing should always start with the market—your niche and your region—and you should expect your marketing team to give you detailed descriptions of your target markets and your top competitors within those markets.
But you already know your clients and competitors, right? Probably not. Unless you are already doing systematic, structured research and analysis, you’re kidding yourself. Anecdotal experiences aren’t always right. A marketing firm that specializes on your industry can provide you this research and allow you to make decisions based on marketplace reality, rather than just hunches and wishful thinking.
Providing a growth and profit strategy. Once you know your company’s place in the market, the next step should be for your marketing team to help craft a strategy to promote growth and profitability.
This strategy should clearly define your company’s competitive advantages and show whether you are leading with premium products or a value-driven alternative. Knowing this will be a crucial part of positioning your brand. How do you want to be known in your area, among your target clients?
You will also need a marketing plan. A plan will map out exactly how you will build your brand’s visibility and generate new opportunities in your business model for converting leads into clients.
Expect to be challenged with new thinking and bold choices.
Input on which services to offer and how to price them. Historically, some landscape firms have left critical decisions about what services to offer and how to price them to the accounting department or business owner. However, pricing decisions are crucial to any growth plan. Decisions should be informed by the overall research strategy mentioned earlier, not by client requests.
Why? Because it’s much too easy to overextend yourself by trying to be everything to every client. That’s a sure way to lose focus, increasing costs as you struggle to provide an ever-expanding range of services. A good marketing team plays a vital role in helping to maintain balance and stability.
Generating new leads and opportunities. Who doesn’t want a steady flow of well-qualified new business opportunities? Fortunately, that’s exactly what your marketing team should be doing for you. While some companies let the sales team take care of lead generation and nurturing, that is simply not the best use of their skill set.
Lead generation and nurturing can be a lengthy process. It can take months, even years! The sales side of the business is almost always needed to look toward the short term (“What can you close this month?”). Your marketing team can help you look ahead, over a longer period, and guide its efforts with clear, trackable metrics.
Also, be patient. Lead nurturing can take some time. Your company will need new customers next year and the year after, so don’t focus on immediate results.
Monitoring and optimizing implementation. This is the piece that makes everything else possible. If you can’t measure your results, you run the risk of losing sight of your progress along the way. Building a genuine brand and a full pipeline can take time. With the appropriate tools and collaboration, your marketing team should be able to track lead generation, nurturing, opportunities, proposals, and closes. This entire pipeline can be optimized over time.
If you are not tracking results, it can be too easy to continue lackluster programs or discontinue efforts that are actually working. Tracking is the key to visibility and making the most of limited resources.
“There’s no magic marketing bullet. Hire a partner, not a scapegoat…”
The first client I told you about surprised me in how she chose to handle the lack of conversions, especially given how much work we put in upfront to make sure that we were all on the same page.
But the overall outcome, I must admit, was not surprising. Over the years, I have learned how to notice the red flags and warning signs. The real answer here is that I should not have taken on these clients in the first place.
When a potential client comes to you with several stories of failed marketing partnerships, has zero investment in the marketing plan process, and nothing to show for these past attempts on their website, it almost always paints a picture of the actual problem at work. That’s not to say that there aren’t ineffective marketing agencies or that design/build firms don’t sometimes spend money on the wrong partnerships. But when all the points of contention align and combine with a dire budget situation, it’s merely a set-up for failure.
So what can we learn here?
Yes, it is critical to work with a vetted agency, and to know what to expect from your marketing team and work with people who understand your industry.
But perhaps the most important lesson to learn from this story is that there is no magic marketing bullet that will, in one fell swoop, solve years of neglect in a company.
A $300/month ad budget will not revolutionize your business overnight. There’s simply no way that haphazardly committing to a marketing plan will result in long-term success.
Rather than blaming others and running on fear, these clients could have worked with us to get over that first hump. And that was likely just a couple of tweaks/optimizations away. But instead, they quit.
Don’t expect to make up for decades of marketing neglect with a few weeks of Google Ads. Do expect that when a well-oiled marketing system is deployed and continually optimized, it will revolutionize and power your business well into the future.
Marketing is a complex formula of art, data, and science. It’s a craft of creating emotion and driving action in people. Unpredictable, everchanging humans. With the right marketing expertise at your fingertips, empowered to craft your digital presence for you, you can refocus your time and energy where you excel most—creating and constructing beautiful spaces that people appreciate.
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Time for a free consultation?
Let’s jump on a call to outline your strategy—on the call, we will identify the necessary components of your strategy and the associated cost ranges for the services. Consider it 20 years of industry-specific advice in one, jam-packed call.
