If you are interested in outsourcing your agency’s digital marketing, there are several important things to consider. You’ll need to choose the right partner, ensure that they can provide the services you need within your budget, and create a plan of action for getting things done. Just as importantly, you’ll need a solid plan for communicating with that partner. In fact, the number one tip for outsourcing your agency’s digital marketing is assigning a single point of contact. Here’s why.
Why Do Projects Fall Apart?
The number one reason why projects fall apart – or worse, fail completely – is miscommunication. Simple errors in communication can lead to weeks’ worth of wasted time, unhappy clients, and significant loss of revenue for your company, your marketing partner, and your client. Furthermore, if these miscommunications are severe enough, you can even be targeted by negative reviews that tarnish your reputation and leave you struggling for years to come.
Fortunately, it isn’t at all difficult to avoid miscommunication between your agency and your marketing partner. The best thing that you can do for yourself and for your clients is to establish a single point of contact between your company and your digital marketing partner. Simply put, it means assigning a single representative from your agency to handle all communications with the outsourced marketing team. This way all communication funnels through one person and is not spread out across multiple account managers with different styles of communication (with some even being noncommunicative – that’s a whole other story).
We’ve worked with many agencies and freelancers over the years as a digital marketing partner executing the agencies clients marketing needs. We have seen what works and what doesn’t and one single point of contact tends to work best. – Maciej (ma-chi) Owner of Brandignity
Why Multiple Points of Contact Cause Conflict
One of the biggest points of contention between agencies and their digital marketing partners is in the form of recordkeeping. As the agency, you serve as the “middleman,” so your goal is to fully understand your client’s wants and needs, then communicate them clearly to your marketing partner so that they can deliver exactly what your client expects of you. If you have three or four different people relaying information to your marketing partner, then your partner has to sort through four unique sets of communications to filter out the latest and most relevant information. Even then, there’s always a chance that they have missed something critical to satisfying your client’s needs.
It’s also important to have a single point of contact for organizational purposes. Imagine checking your email inbox in the morning expecting to hear back from a real estate agent about a house you want to buy, but instead, you see four different emails from four different agents containing four different sets of information about the same house. How do you know which one is the most relevant? What do you do if there’s conflicting information? Your only option is to reach out to the agency, but when you call, a completely different person answers the phone. It’s easy to see why multiple points of contact cause serious conflict when you imagine yourself in a similar situation.
Choosing a Point of Contact
Now that you can understand the importance of having a single point of contact that represents your agency to your marketing partner, how do you go about choosing that point of contact? Oftentimes, you might want to hand this job off to an assistant or intern, and in some situations, that might be an excellent choice – and a great opportunity for someone who is new to the field. However, in almost every case, it’s best to choose a point of contact who has experience in the marketing field.
This individual will likely be fielding questions from clients and questions from your marketing partner. Assigning someone who has very little experience in the field will make it incredibly difficult for them to answer difficult questions or correctly relay details that they don’t quite understand. Furthermore, the point of contact you assign should have a solid understanding of your agency’s overall operations so that they can answer almost every question they receive without having to field it with a higher-level individual within your agency.
How One Point of Contact Can Grow Your Agency
It isn’t just your marketing partner who benefits from having a single point of contact with your agency; your clients benefit, too – and that means your agency is positioned for growth. Being able to deliver the best possible service to your paying clients should always be your mission, and your marketing partner exists to help you do just that. A single point of contact improves communications significantly, makes it easier to get answers to important questions, and drastically reduces the risk that information will get lost in the shuffle between multiple people and overflowing email inboxes. Remember, your marketing partner is not the one managing your client or even sometimes the project. Your point of contact is responsible for keeping the flow of communication and needs (from both sides) moving forward.
To put it simply, a single point of contact makes it much easier for your marketing partner to do the job you hired them to do quickly, efficiently, and exactly as your client wants it to be done. When you can consistently deliver timely, high-quality results to your clients, that’s when your business will grow.