Discover expert marketing insights with our agency experts as they uncover industry missteps, AI’s transformative potential, and the essential balance between strategy and operations. A must-listen for marketers striving for success.
Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.
- Find your niche in marketing
- Leverage AI without losing the human touch
- The power of SOPs in streamlined processes
- Building a referral network for agencies
- Essential questions before buying a service
Resources:
Connect with Diane Moura:
Connect with our hosts:
Quotables:
- 28:29 – And something like that, I think can be a real game changer for a lot of businesses, whether, you know, if they’re SMB, whether they’re a startup, if they’re SMBs and they’re 10 years in, there’s still I think a lot of value there and some of the key tenets are around first of all like, let’s make sure that we not only understand the vision of the company, but how are, you know, how are all of the KPIs attached to that vision. You know, if you are, whatever your level is in a company, you should have clarity as to what you’re doing and how that impacts the overall company. And so if the executives have KPIs that they’re trying to hit and you know, maybe they’re bonus eligible, you still need everyone else in the company who is going to have a piece of those KPIs so that it can all be effective. And then there’s another, I think, really important tenant that is called right person, right seat
- 14:45 – Let’s make sure that, you know, we start with an MVP, you know, we make sure we test it, we test the market, you’re always going to be kind of adding different features. You know, you might do some pivots to some extent, but you have to at least get something out there and get it working first. And the other thing, and this is coming from a marketer, is don’t pull the trigger on marketing too soon. So if you don’t have a product yet, you can burn through all your cash if you get really excited and you start pushing out all of the marketing that it’s going to need. And especially I think with, with SaaS companies, because it’s a, it’s typically a pretty heavy lift the marketing that’s required for SaaS. And if you start to do that too soon, then you know, like things are never gonna be delivered in the time that you think they will. There’s always gonna be issues and you know, I worked with a client where they had the front end and the back end development were happening in different parts of the world. And when they finally brought them together, they actually didn’t talk. So that was, that was kind of an issue. Had they been a little bit more conservative at the beginning in terms of their spend, they probably would’ve ended up in a better spot.
- 46:08 – We’re not the, you know, give, give me a certain amount of money per month and it’s all a black box and trust me, I’m gonna get your marketing done. We’re very transparent in the services. So we basically say, okay, here’s all the things that need to be done. Now let’s have a conversation about what you have the capabilities to do in house versus where it makes sense to outsource and let’s look to prioritize. ’cause a lot of SMBs, you know, if you ask them their budget, they really don’t know. Some of them are attempting marketing for the first time. So we do need to have that discussion with them and say, look, if you have the people in in house who can, you know, do your own video shoots, great. If you don’t, you know, we can handle the shoots for you. You know, if you have your own people who can do social media, you know, do social media, but then maybe engage us just to provide them with some coaching or maybe they’re creating content but they’re not actually out there doing engagement and you know, maybe they’re able to do it for the main brand, but they’re not able to do it for your personal brand. ’cause that’s like a kind of a, you know, as the founder, you should be top of funnel for your business and so maybe that’s not their capabilities. And so then we just, we have a very open conversation with them and we prioritize into phases and then usually that will lead to the engagement.
- 39:26 – And if you’re not using that, you’re falling behind. And I’m glad that you mentioned, you know, you’ll have these unicorns with a few people. ’cause I’ve always had the thought that AI, if used properly, which you kind of went into pretty deep, which which was great, is essentially a company in a box or a marketing team in a box or like, and there still needs to be that oversight, but you know, it allows you for, and I’ll tell you how I use it. Like, I have all these philosophical thoughts and that’s why I love getting into Philosophy on this podcast. But I’m not the greatest writer. And what allows me to do is it is not gonna come up with a new philosophical theory, but if I pump in my theory notes, it makes me a good writer and then it makes it a lot easier for someone to read. So, so I, I just think everyone, you know, it is just this tool that makes people more efficient for bad writers. It makes us good writers.
- 44:47 – Alex: It’s really interesting. And the way that you described that, it sounds like you provide a lot of value. Where does that initial kind of discovery before you get to the engagement and where does the engagement start? Is that, that’s something we’ve been talking with a lot of agents is about, you know, there’s the initial building, the relationship and discovery. So what does that look like for you?
Diane: Yeah, so typically, we’ll have an initial exploratory call with a potential client because as much as, you know, if you give me an attorney and you tell me their, you know, personal injury attorney, you know, I’ve, I’ve probably got 85% of their marketing plan in my head, right? Because we worked with so many of them, but I don’t have that extra 15%. So that has to be personalized. So we, we have conversations about, you know, their business and what has, what has worked well, what hasn’t worked well, what resources do they have internally. So we’re try, you know, our initial meeting is we’re basically capturing that information and we’re sharing some things as well, but we really wanna make sure that we focus and target and then we go away and we do our analysis and we come back and we share that presentation that I described to you.