An unfortunate marketing decision can cost a business significant sales for a quarter – or even longer. That’s never been truer than in these volatile times, where even planned, strategic decisions can have unforeseen brand effects.

When a business has a sudden marketing slump, one solution is to hire an outside marketing agency to help correct what went wrong. An agency has the experience and perspective to diagnose weak points in marketing and help the brand create new solutions for current challenges. Here’s what that can look like – and what a marketing agency can’t always help with.

Crafting Updates and Responses

Some marketing mishaps are sudden – a disastrous PR event, for example, or a campaign that immediately flopped. In these cases, a marketing agency can help perform quick triage and create a response to mitigate damage immediately. Sometimes this means helping the business craft an apology, or become much more active on social media, or fix a content issue that prevented leads from becoming sales. The agency can work on these quick fixes while the brand continues to focus on core activities.

Creating New Sales Solutions

Market changes and marketing mistakes can sometimes lead to falling sales. A marketing agency can help businesses create new lead management strategies and help them find the most effective channels for reaching out to potential customers – along with the content that’s designed to work for their chosen target audiences. Not sure about any of that? An agency like Blue Atlas Marketing is happy to help find the best channels and target audiences for a brand to focus on in current conditions.

Improving Value Offerings

Sometimes a business can struggle to show the value of a product or service to customers. A marketing agency can help companies craft clear value offerings, product bundles, and targeted discounts that help increase sales. Instead of just throwing deals at the wall, this comprehensive approach will help win over potential buyers as they make decisions, while also improving customer retention with specific outreach.

 Adjusting Communication Efforts

Many marketing failures are failures in communication…and if those issues aren’t addressed, a brand can quickly spiral into a growing lack of results and alienated customers. One of the primary services that marketing agencies like Blue Atlas offer is sitting down with a business and creating a complete communication strategy for buyers.

This usually involves a multifaceted approach: Marketing automation for social media messages is a popular tactic, as is creating space for dedicated, frequent social responses (especially to things like bad online reviews or ratings). Email marketing remains a key, effective element, with lots of room for adjusting email content and frequency to get results. Agencies can also help make plans for when leads should be handed off to sales for direct communication, what responsibilities sales and marketing should share, and other gritty details.

Through it all, an agency can show a business how to create a top-down guide for brand tone, voice, and expression that everyone can follow when communicating with customers, achieving a recognizable company style.

Reallocating Marketing Budgets

When marketing efforts don’t pan out, that often means shifting budget priorities. But how should businesses reallocate funds? This is where a marketing agency can provide invaluable insights thanks to their experience and the ongoing data they track. Working closely with a business, an agency can see what marketing efforts are most effective in their industry, and where current funding isn’t doing much good – along with other data on appropriate levels of spending for specific efforts. This provides a helpful roadmap for how a company should shift its budget to meet new challenges.

Preparing a Competitor Strategy

In other situations, businesses may find that competitors have shifted strategies and services more quickly and drawn away a significant amount of customers. We saw this throughout 2020, especially in the hospitality industry as certain restaurants were slower to adopt delivery or online services and quickly fell behind as a result. Marketing agencies can help pinpoint what competitors are doing differently and how a business needs to respond.

Marketing Agency Limitations and Partnerships

While a competent agency can do a lot, they can’t do everything for a business, especially if the agency is brought in to solve a particular problem. Here are a few key limitations businesses should keep in mind:

• Magic Turnarounds: Hiring an agency can help address an emergency, but it’s not an instant fix. As with most things in marketing, change takes time, careful measurement, and ongoing effort.
• Alignment – Inside and Out: If sales and marketing are poorly aligned in the company, there’s not much a marketing agency can do except point out that it needs to be fixed.
• Blame Games: It can be tempting to point fingers when in a tailspin, but a marketing agency cannot work properly in that kind of environment.
• Building Customer Relationships: Ultimately, most direct customer communication still falls on the business itself and how representatives treat people.
• Long-Term Adaptation: While an agency can certainly check in with a brand and help them analyze the results of a campaign, it can’t make long-term strategic choices for a company.

Conclusion

If recent times have been rough for your marketing efforts, contact a specialist to help ASAP! We’ll be happy to go over your current strategy and find out what needs to be improved, especially when it comes to specific goals. Let us know how we can help.