10 Tough Questions You Should Ask Any Outsourced Marketing Automation & Content Marketing Agency

10 Tough Questions You Should Ask Any Outsourced
Marketing Automation & Content Marketing Agency

There’s no question that content marketing and marketing automation are some of the biggest buzzwords in sales and marketing right now so it’s no surprise that numerous agencies and third party providers have jumped on the good ship automation to offer outsourced solutions. Given the fact that many internal marketing automation projects fail (see our blog on that very subject here) then if marketing automation is something you are considering then it does make complete commercial sense to seriously consider using a professional and credible provider to outsource some or all of the solution for you. Whether that’s to help you adopt and fully manage an automation platform, whether it’s just to offer you professional advice and best practice on your implementation or whether it’s to simply top up your content output and extend your distribution channels then a quality outsourced partner can prove to be an astonishingly powerful asset.

Diametrically, if you’re not careful, you could end up choosing a provider who, instead of empowering you to fully align all your sales and marketing across every channel, ends up shackling you and consigning your brand to enduring a commoditized, painting-by-numbers approach to marketing automation and content marketing. Worse still, you could end up handing over control of something that should be central to your business to a junior account manager, fresh out of university, who is trying to juggle two dozen other accounts (many of whom may even be your competitors). Do you really want to pay a third party to just churn out fluffy and formulaic content in Microsoft Word?

When deployed correctly with a high quality agency - and we are certainly not the only agency who fit that bracket – and when deployed in an omni-channel, multi-directional way; marketing automation and content marketing have the potential to revolutionise your business in an extremely cost-effective way. Deployed incorrectly; it can not only be an expensive and flawed exercise in futility but can end up being incredibly damaging to your brand - and hinder your sales efforts. 

Outsourced Marketing
Automation - The Truth

Superfluity recommend that you do look at outsourcing some or all of the marketing automation implementation and management process to a professional agency as, in most cases, the agency will then afford you incredible agility, scalability and economies of scale (among many other things). Picking the right partner can give you access to all their hard fought-for best practice and allow you to enjoy price points that you would unlikely be able to replicate yourselves. 

Our competitors won’t thank us for this (but hey, we’re certainly not known for being scared to speak our mind and be brutally transparent) but it’s clearly an important decision and we want to help ensure that you do end up picking a partner that’s right. You should ask any potential provider questions based around the following 10 areas:

(1) When it comes to the various marketing automation platforms available - is your potential partner genuinely supplier neutral?

You may not know this but most outsourced providers are completely tethered to a single automation platform. While there’s nothing wrong with having a preferred platform (we certainly do - Act-On Software) nobody likes a Hobson’s choice. Your partners chosen platform may not prove to be right for you because different platforms have different benefits depending on a whole range of factors (not least industry, business size, budget, primary channels etc.).  While marketing automation should be bleeding edge and outside the box, most providers have built a box inside a box and are refusing to come out…

Is your partner "vendor agnostic"?
Really? Are you sure?

Ask yourself whether you should be coerced into committing to a particular automation platform just because that’s the one your chosen agency is embedded with (likely the one they get the most kickbacks from) and for which their staff have probably only ever had exposure to? Does your vendor claim to be vendor agnostic with one hand while banging the drum for a particular platform with the other? Is your provider busy running timeshare-style sales presentations and seminars with one automation software partner while recommending you then pay them to assess the different platforms on your behalf? Are they really likely to be objective? 

You must assess the alternatives and you must do so independently. Be exceptionally cautious in paying a provider to do your due-diligence and your platform selection for you because more often than not they will have vested interests. Our advice is that before you commit to any platform - either directly or via a partner - be sure to personally check out at least half a dozen of the alternatives yourself, even if you think you will never be using it directly. Feel free to ask us for a full list of the platforms you should look at (but if you want a good spread then we immediately recommend you look at Act-On, Hubspot, Oracle Eloqua, IBM Silverpop, SimplyCast and Salesforce Pardot).

If you find your partner is being intransigent on you using/purchasing their preferred marketing automation platform and if you find yourself being pressured and over-sold into going with that choice then it’s a simple option… just go find another partner who won’t straightjacket you!

(2) What’s the partners position on knowledge transfer?

It’s worth stressing that outsourcing your marketing automation and/or content marketing to a professional agency can allow you to mitigate many of the costs usually involved in its implementation – especially in terms of expensive training plus the overall speed to adoption.

One day though you may wish to pull things back in-house - either entirely or at least in phases. It’s vital that you clarify, very precisely, what your partners position is on knowledge transfer. Many agencies intentionally keep their clients at arm’s length and as far away as possible from the marketing automation platform the client is paying for. Why? Because not only can they maintain a level of mystique about what they do for you but because they are locking you in by making themselves completely indispensible. There’s nothing particularly sinister about that (and it’s a completely understandable yet short-sighted tactic from a commercial perspective) but marketing automation is a long-term and sustainable approach to sales and marketing so it is essential you take an over the horizon view on it. Ultimately you will need to be completely comfortable using your own platform, even if it’s just to benchmark the value you are (or aren’t) receiving from the provider.  Don’t ever let a provider raise barriers to you receiving long term value.

At Superfluity we look at it this way - if we keep doing a tremendous job for clients and if we keep delivering them incredible value then there is no reason why a client would ever wish to walk away. So why would we ever want to prevent our clients from really getting underneath their marketing automation platform? We take the time to expose them to every element of it and we train them - for free – not just on the platform but on our overall Mission Control approach to marketing automation, inbound marketing and content marketing. As a boutique agency we have found that providing a structured knowledge transfer programme to our clients means they end up becoming even more committed to our commercial relationship than they otherwise would have been. Why? Because they visibly appreciate the remarkable value of what we do an awful lot more and they are able to fully quantify our output across every area. To not do so is, in our humble opinion, incredibly avaricious and myopic. Over time we aim to help our clients become more strategic via knowledge transfer while we become more tactical. This leads to more collaborative relationships where we are not just a provider but a partner.

Never forget that whatever your agency creates and deploys for you and whatever the level of knowledge transfer; all of the output and IP is yours – the content assets, the data, the personas, the analytics etc. It’s your brand. Be sure to understand how easy it is for you to take control of that output if ever (and whenever) you wanted to. What's their roadmap should you ever wish to extricate yourself from the relationship.

(3) Who is actually creating/writing/designing/deploying your content?

Marketing automation is a voracious consumer of content and creating engaging content that works is far from an easy task (plus it can certainly be time-consuming – not least to create but also to correctly deploy). Having an experienced provider on hand who can completely take care of it for you (or at least supplement your own efforts) can really liberate you in this area and allow you to focus on the more important things. Retaining a quality agency is a smart and usually highly cost-effective move. Problem is that there’s a huge spread out there in terms of quality between the different agencies...

Do agencies with slides & ballponds create better content?

First there are the more classic creative agencies who are generally able to craft incredibly beautiful and innovative looking content. The key issue is this content can frequently be style over substance with the actual meat of the content being fluffy (maybe because it is often written by purely ‘artistic’ types with little or no real world commercial experience). If you need your content to ultimately drive sales – and you probably do – do you want vanity content or do you want something that actually drives revenue? The two are not (and should not be) mutually exclusive but, sadly, for some agencies they just are. And remember too that just because your ‘quirky’ agency has beanbags, ballponds and grass carpeting in their office; this will have absolutely no impact on the ROI of your outsourced marketing automation and content marketing campaigns!

  

Do you want inexperienced kids writing content for you?

Next there are what we not-so-politely label the mutton-dressed-as-lamb, sales lead generation/telemarketing agencies who are all about just accumulating clients and who have only recently jumped ship into low-level content marketing and marketing automation as a vehicle to dress-up and differentiate their pay-as-you-go leads. Vital as leads are; there’s a whole lot more to marketing automation and content marketing than leads alone and it should form part of an overall business strategy designed to supercharge your investments in everything sales and marketing orientated. These lead generation agencies tend to really only use marketing automation in a very linear and closeted way so as to pay lip-service to their clients and mask what is still just basic email and interruption marketing. In our experience, their content is usually designed by interns or kids fresh out of university so there tends to be a glaring lack of commercial acumen and/or creative sensibilities in their output. Content created by these providers can often be prescriptive, derivative and dull - at least after the first piece of ‘showcase’ content has been created. Worse - it may have been re-spun or plagiarized from other content they’ve either done themselves for another client or worse - just ripped from the web. Lead generation agencies have a nasty habit of reverting to type i.e. abandoning content marketing and marketing automation sensibilities to just go for the short-term, route one approach.

Finally there are the small handful of dedicated content marketing and automation agencies that are actually any good! We’re not afraid of saying that there are surprisingly few with good all-round capability (but ask us who and we'll tell you!). Offering proven and harmonised services across every channel and digital discipline is (and should be) important. You should look very carefully at your provider across a number of benchmarks. Look at their existing content in terms of its complexion, aesthetics, innovation, interactivity and commercial appeal. Look at what marketing automation platform they use (and how they use it). How harmonised are they across every channel and technique? What is their own social media prowess. You should also carefully examine the individual commercial experience of the team who will be directly working for you - easily done these days via LinkedIn. Does the collar match the cuffs in all the areas that matter to you? Will their team be able to write and design compelling content for you - no matter how complex or technical your product or service is?

(4) Does the agency re-spin content (and even data) between competitive clients?

Too shocking a question to even ask? Think it’s a rare scenario? 

It’s not as rare as you’d hope….

We know of more than one agency who not only churn out the same pieces of clichéd content in more-or-less the same format for half a dozen competitive clients but who are also happy to take the top responding data from one clients managed marketing automation instance to use with new clients they’re onboarding to give themselves a successful headstart - at the expense of their existing customer. They even serve the same hot leads from one client to several others so they can maximise their yield from pay-per-lead pricing elements. 

Is your partners team overworked & are they cross
contaminating with others in your industry?

This is, thankfully, an extreme case and it’s certainly unethical but it’s the kind of worst-case scenario that you will definitely wish to avoid. Interrogate your potential provider carefully on which clients they’re working with and how they ringfence not just your competitors but all of their accounts. If they claim dozens of automation clients then, unless they have a seriously large global team, how many staff do they actually have and how many of them actually create content? If they only have a few marketing automation and content marketing centric staff versus a large claimed client base then it’s of course inevitable that the person(s) managing your account will not only be overworked (and far from dedicated to your project) but they may well also be cross-contaminating with others in your industry either intentionally or not. It’s such a problem for some agencies that they often claim headcount that doesn’t even exist! 

As a business, we limit our team to working on no more than 3 non-competing clients each. When we onboard new clients we simply scale our resource and we never distribute ever-increasing workloads across the same headcount because that means every other client would get a poorer service. Does this approach cost us more? Yes. Do we believe that our own business growth should be a positive factor to clients, never a negative one? Yes.

(5) What’s their profile like on social media?

Social media is a crucial but at times under-utilised or overlooked area of marketing automation. We’re not just talking here about the ability to send Tweets or Facebook posts – anyone should be able to do that. We’re talking about using social media to truly engage with – and grow – your audience. Using it to dovetail and add value to everything else such as SEO. Using social media to proactively generate inbound leads. Using it to listen. Turning it into a high performing sales and CRM channel for your business.  

While there are some incredibly talented agencies out there across social media (and we’re not afraid of giving you a list of the various ones we admire – just ask) there are many who position themselves as automation and content marketing experts who really couldn’t tell the difference between a tweet and a loaf of bread! We were looking at an agency yesterday who we rate very highly in terms of their client list and also in the general quality of their content. They have good marketing automation experience and are entrenched with an automation platform which happens to be one of the best out there for social media. We were thus very surprised to learn that, for an agency who are self-proclaimed experts in content driven social media marketing, they only had a handful of Twitter followers and had posted the same one line tweet over 140 times this year alone (accounting for over 90% of their Twitter activity)! If we were a client then no matter how good their content was and no matter how great their MA platform; their lack of social media credibility would not give us any confidence in their ability to deploy anything socially let alone in their ability to fashion unique content. 

Social media should be a key channel alongside email, watering hole marketing and syndication so it has to be treated seriously by any prospective partner. Anyone providing any kind of managed marketing automation or content marketing service is B2B by design so check them out on Twitter and LinkedIn to see what their own profile is like. Are their tweets engaging, timely and contextual or are they just auto-tweeting statistics and generic flannel? Are they thought leaders with thousands and thousands of followers or are they just tweeting to the ether? If they’ve not got a credible presence - and if they are struggling to position themselves socially - then ask yourself how good a job do you think they will do for your brand?

(6) What do they create their content in?

What does your agency use
to create your content?

Sound like an obvious thing? We see (and enthuse) over seriously stunning examples of world class content every day from many of our peers. There are some exceptionally talented people out there. 

Just as frequently though we see shocking quality content that has clearly been quickly cobbled together with no attention to detail and then packaged into maybe a basic pdf using MS Word. 

Many clients new to content marketing just haven’t yet got the experience or enough of a critical eye to tell the difference between great content – content that can help their business - and basic marketing content that has been sugar coated as content marketing (and then often poorly deployed out of context). If your partner can’t be bothered (or isn’t able) to even create a pdf in something as simple as Adobe In-Design then you should really worry. If they have to resort to using off-the-shelf packages like Piktochart to build you an infographic then they clearly have little or no in-house design capabilities. If you see a document that doesn’t have the basics encapsulated in it – be it tweetable quotes or working hyperlinks – they have no attention to detail. 

Bad content can be as damaging to your brand as interruption marketing.

(7) What’s their pricing model? 

The cost of providing managed services for marketing automation and content marketing is largely driven by time plus the cost of the marketing automation license itself (in terms of the number of contacts you have under management). 

If you’re paying several thousand of pounds a month (or possibly more) to a provider then you’ll probably be a little aggrieved if you then discover they’re only really spending a day or two a month on your campaign. Are they merely creating and deploying one or two pieces of original content for you and perhaps sending the odd tweet? Do they seem like the type of partner who will charge you on a unit basis for everything e.g. per lead nurturing programme? Seriously? On top of the actual services they are providing you with (demand generation, lead nurturing, drip marketing, RPM, SMM etc.), are they charging you anywhere near the listed price for your marketing automation platform i.e the price for the number of ‘contacts under management’ that they are managing for you? If so you are likely being enormously mislead because they should be passing on the massive savings that they are no doubt making for being an agency partner. Your partner should only be asking you for a contribution towards their real cost. Feel free to ask us for an opinion on any element of a quote you have received and we’ll tell you the real truth behind the numbers.

What hidden extras and premiums are there? Account management? Training costs? Get out of town! We’ve even heard of people being charged a premium just because their staff are pseudo “certified” on the automation platform they were press-ganged into purchasing. Staggering as it is to hear, there are one or two marketing automation platforms out there (like Marketo) who physically charge their customers/users to become “accredited” users of the platform. In this case, this type of accreditation is to be frank a complete misnomer and is a redundant, non-independent, made-up, non-certification that has no real value or credibility. It’s certainly not a badge of honour - it’s like a taxi driver in a Ford Focus charging you an extra fee just because they have a piece of paper from Ford saying that they are a Ford Focus driver!  Duh!

What are their upfront contract terms? If it’s anything more restrictive than an initial proof of concept over two or three months then think very, very carefully. Do they demand you pay everything upfront? Why? Think carefully about how you are being locked in and how you can extricate yourself should you ever need to.

(8) What are their content distribution channels?

We’ve touched on some points relevant to this earlier so we’ll keep this one short. In addition to content driven email marketing then if you partner isn’t also absolutely all over every area of social media marketing, watering hole marketing, curation/syndication then ask why not. If they’re not also dovetailing and harmonising those channels with all the other important things like SEO, SEM and RPM then ask even more questions. If you’re buying into just emailing people and then either them or you following them up by phone then trust us – you’re actually not really doing content marketing and marketing automation. If that's what you want then that's fine - just don't be sold something as one thing that's actually another. 

(9) Do they provide a boutique or a commoditized service?

From a service perspective, how accessible is your partner? We know a couple who try and kettle their customers into only calling them after 5pm just to make their own lives easier!

How proactive are they with you (because they should constantly be giving you ideas and taking the initiative)? How flexible are they? Will they whip out your service level agreement every time you need something? How long does it take to just get things done? Since being pitched by one of their directors, have you been relegated to a junior thereafter? How easy are they to deal with on a day-to-day basis? Are they hassle-free?

From a product and solution perspective, how bespoke and specialised is it? Does it feel like an off-the-shelf, menu style, formulaic solution or do you genuinely get the impression they are working with you intimately and collaboratively to achieve common goals? Do they constantly push the envelope to craft innovative, outside the box content and campaigns across multiple mediums and channels or are they very prescriptive and rigid?

(10) Do their testimonials and case studies stack-up?

We guess the same goes for most products and services you may ever buy but you'd be amazed by some of the false claims we regularly hear from providers.

While we won't say anything potentially litigious; we would urge you to carefully check case studies and client testimonials against what the end client says to you in person. Outsourced marketing automation is pretty new so did they really provide the service they claimed to years ago or have they just reinvented the narrative to suit the here and now? Was the customer really happy or have quotes been taken out of context (or even blatantly fabicated)?

And on that bombshell...

As we said, we're not afraid to say it how it is. We may do so in a tongue in cheek way but it's a serious subject. Are we perfect ourselves? Probably not but all of these issues were front of mind when we built Superfluity so we intentionally looked to eliminate them all at source. That's one of the reasons we developed our Mission Control approach, it's why we provide a genuine boutique service and it's shaped everything from our technology to our HR policy. Others have done the same - but not all. Forewarned is as they say forearmed so, hopefully, you'll take some of these tough questions and put them to your partner. Feel free to email us or comment on this blog and do let us know how you get on - we're happy to hear the horror stories but even better; we love to hear about what other providers are doing right (because maybe we can learn something ourselves).