The Importance Of The Right Marketing Partner

Marketing is important for any business.

You could have the best product or service in the world - but without a clear understanding of your audience and an effective marketing strategy, your business will struggle to achieve its potential.

With the right approach to marketing, and the right marketing partners in place, your business is more likely to achieve growth and success.

Yet many growing businesses are reluctant to even look at external marketing support, believing it will be too expensive. This simply isn’t true. There are a lot of consultants, freelancers and boutique agencies that are ideal for all budgets. 

Let’s take a look at some of the common areas where the expertise of an external marketing partner can help drive your business forward.

Do you have a clear brand strategy, and a defined target audience?

Your brand is more than your logo and your website.

It covers, amongst other things:

• Your business story – including why you started the business.
• Your business values and what you stand for.
• Your business expertise.
• Your point of difference against your competitors.
• The way you talk about your business.

A good brand strategy partner can help you work through and define all of these points, and can also help you define your ideal target audience.

Do you have upcoming news about your business that you want to share?

Running a business is exciting. 

As your business grows, there are going to be a lot of things for you to shout about - new product or service launches, new hires, new premises, new partnerships.

One of the best ways to make sure that this exciting news is shared with your target audience, is to engage with a Public Relations (PR) partner.

If you’re a national business, you might want to choose a PR partner that has expertise in national press release syndication, and has a list of journalist contacts in national publications. 

If your business is more locally targeted, you might be better opting for a locally focused PR partner - someone that has relationships with publishers, journalists and website owners from your local community.  

Can your site be found in the organic search listings?

When you type a search into Google, there are two types of results that appear – organic and paid.

Getting your business ranking well in the organic results can be really important for your success. Any traffic from organic searches is free!

But there is a lot of work that needs to be done behind the scenes to give you the best chance of ranking organically, such as:

• Your site structure.
• Your site speed.
• The quality and authority of your website content.
• The number of other websites that are linking to you.

A good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) partner will be able to support you in all of these areas. 

Are you appearing on relevant keywords with paid search?

One of the major benefits of paid search is that you can choose which keywords you want to appear for, and set bids to make your business eligible to appear for them.

The underlying principles of paid search are relatively simple – you bid on the terms that you’d like to appear for, and pay if a user clicks on your ad.

But there is a lot more to it than meets the eye.

A paid search partner is likely to support you on:

• Paid search strategy
• Paid search forecasting
• Ad creation (including additional ‘sitelinks’ to different pages of your site)
• Suggestions to improve relevancy of ads/landing pages to search queries.
• New innovations in Google (Performance Max etc)
• Tracking paid search activity, and optimising your budget across keywords based on results.

Are you confused about which social media channels are right for your business?

With the popularity of social media, it would be surprising if your business wasn’t planning on engaging with your audience on social channels.

But with so many social media channels available, it can be hard to know where to start.

You can’t be everywhere - it’s not advisable for your business to try to be active on every social media channel.

It’s a much better strategy to focus on a small number of channels where your target audience are most active, and you’re most able to deliver valuable content.

A marketing partner with social media expertise will be able to identify which channels are right for you, develop a strategy to listen and engage with your audience, and produce regular content to publish across your target channels.

Are you making the most of email marketing?

It can sometimes feel demoralising to look at a small email subscriber list in a new business, and decide that the ‘quicker wins’ lie in other marketing channels.

A lot of new businesses neglect email marketing for this very reason.

But email remains one of the most profitable marketing channels in the UK. Statista estimate that email marketing in 2020 had a Return on Investment of £35.41.

Engaging the support of an email specialist can help your business develop:

• Strategies for building your email list
• Selection of an email service provider (to send your emails)
• Audience segmentation
• Email design and builds
• Ways to analyse and optimise your email marketing activity.

Are you a B2B business that wants more leads and appointments?  

For B2B businesses, another area of marketing support that you might consider are lead generation and appointment setting partners.

These marketing partners can contact a list of prospects on your behalf, and either send you back a list of contacts that have shown an interest in your product or service – or go one step further and even set up an appointment for you.

How do I choose the right marketing partner?

Whatever the size of your business, having the right approach to marketing is critical for business growth.

If you’re a small business, hiring a small agency or marketing consultant can often be more cost effective than hiring in-house.

And even if you’re a larger business with an internal marketing team, there are still areas where you might benefit from the expertise of an external marketing partner.

But when you’re choosing a marketing agency or marketing consultant to help your business, it’s important that you choose someone you can trust, and that they align with your business goals.

All of the marketing partners listed on The Directors Choice have had experience helping businesses achieve growth, and have been vetted and approved by Directors just like you.

View our list of partners providing marketing services >>