3 Ways For Law Firms to Have a Great Relationship with Your Marketing Agency
You will only get the most from the investment in your law firm marketing efforts if you have a great relationship with your marketing agency. There are three steps you can take to optimize the relationship between you and the marketing firm that you hire.
While we would hope that great relationship will include us, these steps should improve your working relationship with any marketing agency.
Step Number One: Maintain Responsive Communications
Solid communication is at the core of any healthy relationship. When you reach out to someone and they don’t respond in a timely fashion, the critical line of communication breaks apart.
Now timely does not mean immediate. You wouldn’t expect most people to respond to messages sent at 3 a.m., and your marketing firm is no different. But if you call or send an email and don’t hear back for a week, that’s a problem.
Remember, though, that the communication obligations flow in both directions. When your marketing agency asks for your input on something and you don’t respond for two months, you are hampering their ability to do the work you pay them to do. You may be paying for absolutely nothing.
We sometimes send information to clients and when a week goes by with no response, we send a reminder. Then, at two weeks, if there’s been no word, we’ll send another reminder. Many times, they will promise to send feedback or a mailing list or other information we’ve requested, so we stop pestering them . . . for a while. Then we might check in to see if they want to go a different direction. And we still might get crickets in response. During all that time, we often do not have what we need to move forward with a project.
The bottom line is that your marketing firm cannot do their best work for you if you don’t keep the lines of communication open. (And if your marketing agency is not responding when you reach out to them, it may be time to shop for a new agency.)
Step Number Two: Establish Clear Expectations
You are paying a company to do work for you. You deserve to know what that work includes and when it will be completed.
If your marketing firm is building a new website, you should know when it will be finished. If they write regular blogs for you, you should know when those blogs will be available for review and when–after you’ve approved them–they will be posted. If they create a newsletter for your firm, you should know when it will go out.
If you want your messages to maintain a certain tone or avoid the use of certain terms, let your agency know. If you are hosting or sponsoring a special event, chances are that your marketing firm can help with publicity—but only if you ask for help. In many cases, they may not know what you need until you tell them.
Step Number Three: Give Constructive Feedback
If your marketing agency is doing a great job and producing the results you want, the highest compliment you can pay them is to give them a public five-star review on Google. But even when a firm is doing well for you, there may still be a few things you would like to do differently. Or you may have questions about why tasks are done a certain way and you can suggest ideas for improvement. Maybe you want them to use a different picture in a newsletter or you don’t like the way something is explained on your website. Or maybe you’d like to receive information on metrics in the middle of the month instead of at the end.
Let them know. Provide constructive feedback. If you are seriously unhappy about the performance of your marketing agency, it is particularly crucial to let them know why. They are not likely to improve until they know what’s wrong.
Work with a Firm That Values Your Relationship
At LaGrande Marketing, we know that we only exist to serve our clients.
You may have worked with a few—or many—marketing agencies that promised you the world and delivered substantially less. If you want a different experience–where you know what you’re getting every week and you regularly see the results of your marketing campaigns—give us a call.