Lessons - How to Hire the Best Marketing Agency | Darragh Grove-White, CEO of This One Marketing

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today you're going to hear from Derek Grove White, CEO of this one marketing. Now Derek owns this one marketing and marketing agency and he practices what he preaches. He is a master of all things, process, scale, systems and tech and applying that to your marketing strategy. So he's learned to develop and apply marketing tech and proprietary systems to automate himself and his clients out of a job, virtual assistants, marketing software and marketing AI app radices that have enabled scale, low overhead, greater output for his clients resulting in more leads, busier sales teams and higher closing rates. He enables clients to engage decision makers, inform stakeholders, mobilize grassroots support with proprietary engagement tools and bleeding edge digital strategies, building out communities and evangelists around their products and then enabling scale through tech. Today he's going to talk about what to look for when engaging with a marketing agency. One of the most difficult things to do yet you are trusting this agency with the revenue and the reach of your business. So ultimately, as you're starting out and as you grow and as you scale, how do you find an agency that's going to care about your customer as much as you do and how do you find an agency that will actually be effective? A lot of people, unfortunately, have taken and working. It seems to be one of those things that there's a lot of shortletons out there. There's a lot of people that say they know how to do things and it's disappointing because I've seen people that overpay for marketing all the time because they just don't know. They're getting mystified by jargon rather than having things explained in really simple terms. So marketing is unfortunately, it has the potential to be abused. I think even traffic, if you look at the total amount of traffic on the internet, there's some ridiculous stats out there that 50% to 60% of the total traffic on the internet is all bots and all fake and not real traffic and how do you combat that? Okay, so that's a great question. How would a company know what to look for when they're hiring somebody a firm or an individual within the organization so that it can be more effective and they can measure the results? What should they look for when it's their best practices or could there be tools that they could use that's the pathway that I'm going down a little bit because you're speaking about how opaque marketing is, how do they make it more transparent? Okay, so what would be a good litmus test? Yes, yeah, exactly. On when interviewing marketing professionals? That sounds like a good way to phrase my question. A good litmus test, it would be how quickly and how soon they ask about the customer versus what they think is good marketing. So how customer obsessed they are or how marketing segment obsessed they are, right? Because there's no shortage. There's a big difference between tacticians and strategists, right? Strategists are the big picture, tacticians are the like technicians, they're good at specific skills versus understanding how does this all work together, right? When it comes to good marketers, it's how good are their questions about your target market? Like how obsessed are they about understanding them versus selling you on their services? So when you work with a company and you're going in fresh, what are the benchmarks that you try and take off in terms of if you're trying to identify their buyer persona or their target market or like what are what is like the baseline strategy that you would implement or is it all customized depending on who your client is? It has to be like, I think it has to be really, I mean, although you can systematize and should just for efficiency, it really, it needs to be about who you're trying to market to and the detail, the level of research you've done to do that, right? Because you're actually going to get some of your best call to actions, you're going to get some of your best landing page copy, you're going to get some of the best verbiage that your potential customer is going to respond well to by doing the research, by doing surveys, by doing interviews.