Does your Online Partner Want You to Leave the Nest?
Could your online marketing company be dying to get rid of you and find a little space to breathe?
It’s so, don’t take it personally – that’s just the way some of the best digital agencies operate. We know because we regularly try to get our clients to leave the nest when we think it’s time. And, believe it or not, they usually thank us for it.
To understand why we need to look at the two most common approaches that online marketing firms use today. The first and more common traditional approach works in the way you might expect, where you come to the creative team with the list of wants or needs, for which they give you so many hours or pages before sending you a bill. A small but growing number of agencies, Kayak Marketing included, do things a bit differently. Instead of just doing what our clients ask for, we like to go one step further and teach them how to handle most of the tasks and projects themselves.
Given that we are the experts, and that we get paid for the work we provide, why would we take this step? Shouldn’t we be trying to get our clients to cling to us, rather than push them away?
Why We Like Clients To Do It Themselves
Although it would be nice to have the extra billable hours, the reality is that most everyday online marketing tasks (like publishing blog posts or handling social accounts) don’t really require expert input and attention. With just a little bit of training, you could take care of them on your own. Even better, doing so would make you a vested partner in your own online marketing success, rather than a spectator.
That might reduce the size of our invoices just a little bit, but it also reduces our workload by an even bigger factor. And, it frees us up to do the two things that we are best at, and that is most important – get online marketing campaigns on track, and devise new strategies and ideas for your inbound lead generation.
How is that not good business all the way around? Granted, it means taking the “revolutionary” step of treating our clients like partners or equals, rather than assuming they couldn’t possibly grasp the enormity of what we do. But by trading away that little bit of pride and dependence, we get more creative challenges to focus on, happier clients who are paying less, and better working relationships in return.
Find a Digital Agency That’s Willing To Give You A Push
The traditional agency model of creative work is certainly easy and convenient, but then again so was being spoonfed your dinner, and that’s something that most of us outgrew a long, long time ago. The challenge is in finding a team that can help you to grow your business but empowers you to keep going on your own at the same time.
The amazing thing about our collaborative and educational approach to online marketing isn’t that it works for our clients – we always knew that it would because they care about their success just as much as we do. The astonishing part is that it works out just as well for our company, too. Even though the business owners and executives we work with certainly could take their business elsewhere, or even manage their campaigns on their own, the overwhelming majority stick with us year after year.
That’s because we are transparent about what we are giving them and where the real value is… and they know we won’t be afraid to push them a little bit further the next time around.
Learn more about our approach by downloading and reading the EMA ebook here.
