I was talking with a venue manager yesterday. He seemed really disappointed in the marketing agencies he had hired to do lead gen. I asked him some simple questions:
Did they discuss your ICP?
What’s that?
Your Target customer. The ICP is the Ideal Customer Profile, the Buyer. Who you are targeting with your paid ads.
Did they ask you about your Value Prop?
No.
Did you match your ad with your website?
Huh?
If the prospect is looking at venue offer, they don’t want to click over to your home page. They want to land on a page that continues that conversation.
I don’t think so.
What about the offer?
The agency said we had to create the offer.
Well, there should have been some A/B testing on the copy and the offer.
How were leads funneled to you? Leads are only good for an hour, so what was the process to send the leads to your sales operation?
Total confusion. None of this was discussed.
I could guess what happened. He said I want lead gen and the agency took his budget and bought ads. They got 100K impressions and the customer got a lot of junk they couldn’t filter through.
This scenario – or some stupid version of it – has been told to me numerous times over the years. The result is a business that hates marketing and won’t spend money on it.
Marketing firms do themselves and the industry they work in no favors by looking for quick cash. I understand that this firm was just an digital ad agency, a LinkedIn/Facebook ad buyer, but they didn’t do any discovery to understand anything about the customer’s business, who the target of the ad was, or anything to ensure success. This was a cash grab. They had to know it wasn’t going to work.
If you are hiring a marketing agency to do one thing, be aware that you have to have the rest of the components anyway: your website, the copy, your offer, your ICP, the Value Prop, the sales ops to get the leads and convert them.
I am hiring a Fiverr to make a landing page for me. When you hire on Fiverr, you know exactly what you are buying. You have to supply most of the components and the Fiverr just does that one task. That isn’t what most business owners comprehend or actually want when they are buying a marketing component, but that’s where we are – and why it is Buyer Beware