So, another week has gone by and we’ve just had our weekly team meeting. I know every business has them, (if you don’t then why not?) but, do you ardently stick to them? Now, I guarantee that at some point each and everyone one of your staff think “Oh no, not another team meeting”, however ask yourself this… why do you do it? The right answer is Communication.
The Reasons Why
The reason we do it is to try and understand what is going on in our business, bring up any issues we may be facing and celebrate any successes we have during the week. The purpose being to then put these into action, resolve any issues and boost morale within the teams themselves.
The importance of this is completely underestimated in most businesses. But think about it, if we are having a tough time, it will only get worse if we don’t know the reasons why it’s happening. If you don’t have this communication with your staff, things can quickly spiral out of control.
Now, back to this week’s meeting. Whilst discussing things with the sales team, we like to talk through what are the key points that come to the fore with new potential clients. This week, it was brought up that the level of communication clients have with their agencies isn’t nearly as much as it should be.
This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I know the importance of understanding the client to get best results, without this understanding were shooting in the dark. I am proud to say we have a very intelligent and quick-thinking team here, but if they didn’t speak to their clients regularly even they would fail to get great results.
Making Changes for Communication
The reason I started Click Convert 7 years ago was because I too was a client to these agencies at one point. My costs just seemed to be rising and rising but the performance/ROI was actually reducing. I decided to take things into my own hands (I’m a bit of a technical bookworm) and spent days, weeks and months researching techniques and diving head-first into the world of AdWords Marketing.
As I started to delve deeper into my account, I soon came across negative keywords and took a look at my search terms to see what was being typed in to view my adverts. To my surprise (or not), I found a shed load of search terms that had absolutely no relevance to my business whatsoever.
Why was this happening? Well, clearly the agency had very limited knowledge of my business and products and they had never spoken to me about it, apart from the initial sales call! I soon realised that because we had no communication, they were wasting my time and money. I didn’t know what they had done (if anything) and I wasn’t going to carry on paying them for nothing… so, they lost me as a client and gained me as a competitor.
The point is this: Your agency should become an extension of your business, like another member of staff but without the HR headache.
You should be in regular contact with your agency, maybe not every week but at least twice a month. This is in principle is for the same reasons we have our in-house meetings, “try and understand what is going on in our business, bring up any issues we may be facing and celebrate any successes we have during the week”. If we don’t understand your business, we are doomed to fail. If you don’t understand the work we are doing for you, then we are also doomed to losing you as a successful client.
So, ask yourself…
When was the last time you spoke to your agency? Did they tell you what was working, what wasn’t and what were they doing about it? If the answer to this is “I haven’t” or “They didn’t”… then maybe it’s time to give us call.
