One of the best methods of vetting a marketing partner is vetting the questions they ask you – to vet you! Here are 3 questions we always ask new clients.

Why do you want to increase your sales?

When we talk to you we want to know why you are interested in even having a conversation with us. Simply saying you want to increase your sales really isn’t going to cut it. That’s like going to a personal trainer and saying “I want to lose weight.” Well, that’s great, but why?

If you don’t have a good underlying reason then you won’t fully commit yourself to the routine. Perhaps you want to lose weight so you can be in better shape. Well, that is closer to a good answer. But again, why? Maybe you want to lose weight to get into better shape so you can play with your kids for longer. Now we are getting somewhere.

So why do you want to increase your sales? Why do you want to have a conversation with us about improving your marketing strategies? Why do you want a website, or brand, or videos?

What are your goals?

Let’s get in to some more specifics here. If your goal is to simply increase sales, you’re not going to be very effective at achieving your goals. So let’s get a little more specific here. How about increasing quarterly sales?

Well, that’s closer, but not quite where we need to be. So how about something like you want to increase quarterly sales revenues by 10%.

Now we are getting somewhere. Broad goals do not provide anything actionable to work off of. Specific goals, however, provide actionable milestones, which gives us the ability to market intentionally. With specific goals in mind we can now move on to the how.

How do we achieve your goals?

Now that we have some actionable goals, we can start to explore ways to achieve those goals. This provides the opportunity for us to explore what you have done in the past, how we can improve on that, and what we can do that is new.

It is important to start with what you have already tried – some things may have worked, some things may not, but we do not want to waste time repeating things that did not work for you. But just because something didn’t work for you, doesn’t mean we can’t improve upon that in the future.

Now that we have discovered what you’ve done in the past, let’s start working on what we can do moving forward. Whether that is reutilizing past campaigns or creating new campaigns, our efforts are now intentional. We have a set of specific goals and methods to achieve these goals.

We will start exploring different methods of communication and marketing – do you already have a website? If so, how can we improve on that or if you don’t how can we use a website to help achieve your goals. Do you have any digital media? Videos are a great method of engaging with your audience across the web and social media.

In Summary

Each agency is going to be a little different in their approach. They won’t ask these exact questions, but similar questions display a certain level of competency and interest in your future. The best kind of conversation is not a short, quick Q&A, but rather an hour long conversation that covers these subjects.

An interest in your business’ well being and future shows that you are working with a marketing group that is concerned with more than simply increasing their bottom line. Taking the time to have in-depth, guiding conversations with you is a display of the type of work they will deliver.

When you’re ready to have this conversation with us, contact us, no strings attached.