10 Questions That Reveal the Truth About a Marketing Partner

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0:32Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ductate Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and no guests today. I'm doing a solo show. Here's what I want to talk about. It really chaps me when I run across a business owner that is getting ripped off right and left by their marketing partner, marketing agency. I'm not saying that all marketing companies are evil. I'm just saying that there are a heck of a lot of them that are providing very little for a lot of money. And I think business owners are really getting fed up. And so today, what I want to do is I'm not going to teach you everything you need to know about marketing so you can do it yourself.

1:10I want you. I think it makes a ton of sense to hire marketing partners. That's frankly, the business we're in. If you want to hire us, give me a call. But what I do want to do is equip you with the right questions that you should be asking any marketing partner that you are considering. In fact, I'm going to call this episode 10 Questions That Reveal the Truth About a Marketing Partner. They don't have to have the answers for all of these exactly the way I'm going to describe, but boy, there are certainly some red flags that should be waving violently if you ask these questions and you don't get an answer that is satisfactory.

1:47All right, here's the first question. When somebody is pitching you on doing your paid ads, doing your social media, doing your analytics, all the things that marketing partners do, you want to know if they're going to set up any accounts for you, if they're going to collect any data for you, who owns the accounts? So in other words, there are lots of paid media partners out there that run Google ads for folks and they will set up the account for the client, put it in the client's name, connect the client's credit card to it, maybe collect, connect to obviously the ads pointing to the client's website, but the agency actually owns the account.

2:26It comes time that you feel like you're not happy with what's been going on. Okay, great. We'll part ways, no hard feelings, but we keep the data. We keep all your ads. You've got to start over from scratch again. Do not let this open. In fact, you own everything. No negotiation. In fact, I ask this question, number one, because if somebody says, oh, no, I've seen people on websites. It's like, oh, you want to leave us? Okay, fine. But your website's down now because we own it. So that's non-negotiable. That's like number one. If you're talking to a service provider and their model is to somehow own all of your data, own all of the assets that they create to you, and then they just rent them to you, Yeah, it's only$200 a month for a website, but we own it and you can never leave us.

3:11Or if you do, you have to start over again. So you can see why that one's kind of a biggie. All right. How do you define success and how often do we review it? Don't settle for the SEMrush report that they send you or the Google Analytics report that they send you once a month that just has a bunch of numbers on it, but no insight. It just says, here's how much traffic we got this month. Okay, great. What does that mean to me? So you really want to know how they're defining. I mean, most businesses, how are we going to know we're getting more business? How are we going to know this is working?

3:42Just getting more traffic to the website is not getting us more business, is it? So you want to really know, understand that vanity metrics are worthless to you. So you have to understand how you define success, but then you have to understand how they're going to translate that and calculate that or give you the expectations of when you can expect it. Leads, conversions, revenue, right? That's what you're really after. Okay, number three, how do you connect tactics to strategy? Now, my experience is a lot of folks will be saying, well, the tactics are the strategy. Wrong answer. So the difference between selling tasks versus selling outcomes is what you're after.

4:25It's how people get the random marketing that we see out there. Do they have a system? Do they have a framework? Do they have an approach that says, month one, we're doing this, month two, this, month three? Because if all they're doing is coming and saying, oh, we're going to do all this magic behind the scenes, black box stuff, trust us, it'll be worth it. You probably need to look elsewhere. We've always been month to month with our clients. So we don't ask for a contract. We keep our customers for years in many cases. But a lot of firms are dead set on, you're going to sign a one. I've actually seen people sign three-year contracts without having any experience of whether or not it's going to work.

5:06And then they're locked in. So another next question you want to ask is, what happens if somebody wants you to sign a contract? What happens if you want to end the contract? It's just not going well, right? We're not getting the results. You aren't doing what you promised. We're not going to pay for six more months, right? So watch out for those hidden fees, lack of transparency, traps. I've always felt like a good partner, somebody who really is confident in the work that they can do, will end on good terms. We'll walk away. We'll say, okay, no hard feelings. All right. Who will actually do the work day to day?

5:41Now, you don't have to draw the line on like, you know, a lot of people read my books and they think, oh, I want to work with John. And maybe they will in a certain case. But our approach has always been kind of team approach. But what you want to do is make sure that, you know, you aren't sold kind of like on somebody's approach or working with somebody and you build a relationship. And then all of a sudden come time to do the work. It's like, oh, meet Bob and Susie over here. So at the very least, you want to know who they're going to work with and say, hey, I want to meet those people up front.

6:15I want to get to know them a little bit, not just be handed who I'm going to work with. I would actually ask somebody to give you a sample of their reporting. And again, what you're looking for, you want to see how they report, how they think about reporting. But you also want to see, are they providing insight? Is this just a complex bunch of numbers that nobody can really make head or tails of? Or are they actually providing some insight? So today, increasingly, this question wouldn't have been on my list two years ago, three years ago, maybe. But how are they using AI? And what's still human-led?

6:51AI is going to be built into everything. Everybody you talk to is using it in some form or fashion. Maybe not well, but everybody is using it. So there's no more like, I want to know what's AI generated and what's human generated. I think you unfortunately can tell what you want to see is things that are on brand, on voice, that are authentic, that have good marketing practice, have case studies, have experience, have expertise built into anything that you're doing. So you just want to know how they're, you want to know, be familiar with how they're using the tool and how they're going to bring that tool to you because marketing really needs to be integrated into systems, into operations.

7:32You know, there is the marketing, there's the marketing strategy side, but then there is the marketing operations side as well. And increasingly AI is playing a big role in that. So you want to know what's happening, but you also want to know that they are effectively using all the tools that are available. How will you collaborate with my team? If you have folks on your team that are doing some form of marketing, if you have other partners that you're working with that do aspects of marketing, you want to know that they have an integrated approach. You want to know how they are going to collaborate and interface and lead, quite frankly, if you're hiring them to do strategy and to really kind of run your overall marketing.

8:14Do they have a process or what is your process? we're going to assume they do, for creating strategy before you execute. If somebody comes in and they immediately start talking about the things they want to do. Now, granted, there are things that are broken. Every business we've ever worked with has some foundational things that I know I'm going to fix. I don't care if we spend one second on strategy. We know their Google business profile, for example, needs to be claimed and optimized or fixed in some way. So there are things that need to be done. But if they aren't talking first about understanding your ideal client, about creating a message of differentiation, about understanding the customer journey of how somebody in your business or your industry makes a purchase.

9:00If they aren't talking about that first, and not just talking about it, but actually have a framework that will allow them to discover that and implement it into your business. Because any of the tactics, any of the campaigns that you run should be greatly informed by anything that was developed in strategy. All right. The last one, will you teach me along the way? So this one's a tricky one. A lot of business owners will just tell you, I don't really care what you're doing out there. Just get it done. But I think increasingly business owners are looking for education. And I don't mean that they want to become professional marketers.

9:35I just mean they want to understand why are we doing what we're doing? Why does my website or my homepage need to have all of these elements on it rather than just cramming it down their throat? I believe that you want to work with a partner that is maybe leveling up your team, leveling up your experience of marketing and explaining why they're doing what they're doing rather than just hoping that you'll accept it and sort of abdicate marketing to them. Okay, so if you're thinking about hiring a marketing partner, particularly somebody that's going to provide marketing leadership, kind of bring all the pieces together for you, think about these 10 questions.

10:12In fact, we'll put all 10 of these questions in the show notes for this episode. If you go to Duct Tape Marketing and find the podcast there, we will definitely have it as a bit of a checklist format for you. I think if more business owners took the time to ask these questions, it would weed out the fly-by-night people that are just charging you$5 ,000 a month for smoke and mirrors. And it would definitely allow you to be able to, I think, effectively analyze. If you're talking to two or three marketing partners, it really gives you, I think, a true baseline of understanding how they think and how they operate that is going to benefit your business, assuming that they come through with that.

11:01So, all right, let's raise the bar. Let's stop settling for task doers and start choosing marketing leadership. I'm John J.S. with Duct Tape Marketing. I'd love to hear from you if any of these questions resonate. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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