Marketing Isn’t Easy… Even for a Marketing Agency
Monday, February 1st, 2010Our agency just launched a new website in the fall. We launch new websites every week for our clients but launching a new one for ourselves was a Herculean task. First, we took a look at our branding and decided to update our logo a little as well as our color palette. We liked our Pomerantz purple but we were also using this “olivey” green that was feeling a bit drab and dated. We wanted our new palette to be happy because these days people can use all of the happy they can get. Getting all of the pieces of this initiative perfect took forever and a day because creative people, like myself, can be super picky. And, fitting this stuff in with all of the other daily goings-on was pretty much impossible. Can you relate?
But the logo exercise actually was easy compared to designing our new website. This required us to dig deep because we had just brought on a new Internet Marketing specialist to our team and needed our positioning to be more focused on this arena but we also didn’t want to lose the reputation we have built as an award-winning creative shop. Needless to say, we figured it out because, well, we always do. We have to.
Next, we needed to “act like a client” to Amanda, our new Internet Marketing specialist, so we could learn the ropes of what is involved in optimizing a site properly in order to sell the services and to do right by our website. Amanda had the patience of a saint (one of the reasons she’s a good match for us and our clients) and she took us through the process step by step. We reviewed our current analytics to understand them the best we could. We weren’t using Google Analytics at the time so they were kind of a mess. We poured over lists of keywords to identify the ones that best fit the strategic direction of our agency. We looked at our competitors’ keywords. We learned about site wide optimization, on page optimization, pay per click campaigns and how to use Google Analytics to guide our online and offline marketing efforts. We also learned about social media communications including Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and blogging and how they fit in the marketing mix. It was a total immersion in web marketing because we used our new site as the learning tool.
Now, several months later, we get leads off our website on a weekly basis – much more than ever before. It’s a very satisfying feeling. Amanda and I work together regularly to “feed the machine”. This is really what it takes in today’s business environment. Your website has the power to be an incredible business-driving machine for your business but putting all of the pieces together requires dedicated people with the right skill sets and insight into the systems and processes for keeping things running.
So, if a marketing person that is in the trenches doing this stuff everyday tells you it’s not easy, it’s really not. If I were you, I’d outsource it to someone like us. 
