8 Things To Do Before Starting Marketing Services

At Zinc, we encounter brands and businesses at all stages. From pre-launch to long-established, marketing services are useful to understand at every point. When a new client comes to Zinc, we’ll ask a lot of questions to ensure we understand where they are in their journey, and how we can help them best. However, if a client is looking to really hit the ground running, there are some things that can help get marketing services off to a great start.

If you’re thinking about beginning marketing services, here’s what will set you up to have the best results.

Do the housekeeping!

Especially when a business has been around a long time, with accounts passed from pillar to post, one of the biggest delays that our clients experience is account access. When we first speak, we’ll ask for access to a lot of things; Google Analytics, Content Management Systems, Social Media Platforms. Without access to these tools, the work we are able to do is limited. Before your kick-off meeting with us, make sure you look into who in the company has access to these places, and ensure you’re able to share it with us. If you’re locked out of any accounts, we can try to help and recover them before we get things started.

Establish and define the brand

Branding is more than just a logo! Every communication you send out and image you use affects the way that you’re perceived in the online marketplace. We want to make sure that when we represent your brand, we’re doing it right. If you have brand guidelines and a tone of voice document, bring them with you! If you don’t, we can help you develop some so that every ad, landing page and image feels like it fits. This enables us to be confident that everything we write,

Know your audience

At Zinc, we like to consider our marketing services as a collaborative approach. We’ll bring our knowledge of marketing, strategy, and data-based decision making, but we know that we’ll get no better expert on your business, industry and target market than you. When we first meet for your kickoff meeting, we’ll be interested to know about the history of your business – who are your best customers, what do they have in common, and why do they choose you. We like to know if this has changed, so we can understand why. If you’re a brand new business, then we’ll ask all about who you think will be your best customers, and who might surprise us.

Have a website that converts

It’s a harsh truth, but today’s audience has high expectations of a website. We can drive the best quality traffic to your website, but if the site they land on isn’t up to scratch, the likelihood of a conversion is low. This could be anything – an outdated design, difficult navigation, slow load speeds. In this day and age, a slick site is a trust marker. That’s why we’d always recommend speaking to us about web design before you speak to us about marketing.

Have a realistic budget

Especially in the world of PPC and social media advertising, understanding budgets is key to understanding the results you’re likely to see. Costs vary widely from industry to industry and niche to niche, so we’ll always work with you to advise what we can do with the budget you have. Nevertheless, if you’re in a competitive market, we’d advise you to be open to a range of budgets, so we’re able to suggest a range of strategies.

Know your USPs

Most businesses don’t operate in a vacuum – you’ll have direct competitors, similar businesses, and others in your sphere that will be alongside you whilst potential customers are making their decisions. We’ll always do competitor analysis to see what we think sets you apart, but it’s always great to hear directly from our clients how your business is different. This helps us get to know you, understand why customers choose you, and find the best way to market your business.

Have tracking set up

At the end of every first meeting with a client, we’ll ask for access to analytics. Google Analytics forms a foundation of everything we do at Zinc, because it lets us see into the past, find trends you didn’t know were there, and work out what’s been before us. If you don’t have it set up, don’t worry! We’ll make it the first thing on our list, and collect data from the time we start to work with you.

Know your competitors

At Zinc, we like to get a picture of the whole industry. Just as we’d like to understand your USPs, we’ll also like to do competitor research so that we know what we’re working with. It’s always interesting to compare the list of competitors that we’ve collected with the competitors that our clients suggest, because often the lists don’t match. Whilst we’re looking from a keyword competition or Ad impressions perspective, you’re looking at it from the inside.