We talked about:
- How to effectively collaborate with your C-suite or leadership team to ensure outsourced marketing efforts align with business objectives
- Why providing solid input to outsourced partners is essential for integration and consistency across the organization
- Why investing in pinpointing your ideal prospect is crucial — and how it can influence various aspects of your business strategy
Featured Resources
- The Role of Marketing and the CMO in Today’s Financial Services Industries with Nick Richtsmeier
- Business Growth Tips for Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Financial Services Business Owners
- Tips for Effective Branding and Website Strategies for Financial Services
- Financial Services Branding: When and How Should You Redesign Your Company Logo?
Audio Transcript
00:00 - 00:36:10
Lauren Hong
We're talking about outsourced marketing. Sometimes what happens is we start an engagement and we have a client who says okay, we're ready to outsource, ready to go online and dial up our marketing. But what are we going to keep in-house versus what makes sense to be able to outsource? What are you guys going to run with and what are some swim lanes or domains that we would put up, such as it makes sense for us to keep XYZ in-house because this makes sense for us to really lean on our team for that?
00:36:13 -00:41:25
Lauren Hong
Okay. Let's share some examples. So I think it'd be really helpful to just share what we've seen.
00:41:27 - 00:52:05
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah, I think the biggest differentiator for data points is whether they actually have someone in-house for marketing.
00:52:07 - 00:53:16
Lauren Hong
Totally. Yeah.
00:53:18 - 01:22:13
Tiffany Silverberg
If it's someone's extra job that they also do marketing. So if they have someone in-house doing marketing oftentimes then scheduling of things, calendaring of things falls to them. And then we can come in and fill in blanks where they need support, often for design or doing technical stuff like SEO research, things like that, that they're just not ready to do day-to-day.
01:22:15 - 01:31:15
Tiffany Silverberg
But if it's someone's extra job on the side, we can come in with that more stretched strategic operation, taking stuff off their plate so they can keep moving forward.
01:31:17 - 01:52:14
Lauren Hong
Totally. I can also see, okay, so you have a situation where copy, written words, is really, really close to people's hearts. And sometimes there's firms and clients we work with, their voice is what makes them different. It's their selling point, the human part.
01:52:17 - 02:09:02
Lauren Hong
So I feel if you're in a seat where you're leading the copy team and you do such a great job of helping. I feel like clients also feel like I don't have to totally give that up. My voice can still be a part of what's written without me having to literally type every single word.
02:09:10 - 02:20:13
Lauren Hong
That's another place where it's kind of like a hybrid between you kind of keep it in-house but you can also outsource some of it. I don’t know if you want to talk to the specifics of that.
02:20:16 - 02:42:15
Tiffany Silverberg
Oh yeah, I mean, it can really look different for every client. So for some clients, it really is like whoever and I’ll make up a name like Sarah here at our agency loves to write and is really good at it. She's basically become our voice. So they can write things and we can clean it up or support them.
02:42:18 - 03:02:02
Tiffany Silverberg
Templating things like this is what we need written and then we run with it because they just know it's going to feel like them. Or we're at a place where, thinking about other clients, where they have a specific voice, they can feel it. We can feel it. But they trust us to be able to deliver that.
03:02:02 - 03:24:01
Tiffany Silverberg
And so maybe they send bullet points or maybe they send recordings of their voice and things like that. And we can kind of step in and create that voice. So, like you said, it really looks different for everyone. I don't know what's really valuable to them. I mean, it's always valuable but like you said, it just feels really like this is our thing.
03:24:01 - 03:24:14
Tiffany Silverberg
This is our baby.
03:24:14 - 03:47:25
Lauren Hong
I’ll give you another example of a company we're currently working with, and they have a whole in-house graphics team that does a lot of work. But there are certain things where it's like, hey, if there's additional support that's needed, more arms and legs, we can totally help with that. I can you give another example of a firm we've worked with that's rather large.
03:47:25 - 04:05:19
Lauren Hong
They've got a whole marketing department but they just need support because their team just can't take on the project. So why couldn’t their team keep it in-house? It's a bandwidth thing too. I feel like that's another kind of great example of when we could keep it in-house but this is going to be a backburner project.
04:05:20 - 04:13:00
Lauren Hong
If it's really a priority, we've got to be able to figure out how we're going to get some fuel in the engine.
04:13:02 - 04:45:23
Tiffany Silverberg
Well, and sometimes I'm thinking of a couple other clients too, where they're a department within a bigger company. They need to get their — well, let's talk about trains — they have to get their wheels rolling on that little project. And so we can come in and use all the data, use what this marketing department has worked really hard on, to create style guides and all that, to get this off the ground because they're busy with their day-to-day, what’s happening in the next month or whatever.
04:45:29 - 04:47:21
Lauren Hong
You need a trusted agent.
04:47:22 - 04:54:12
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah. And like you said, the volume I think that's a big part of it too, is just how much volume support is needed.
04:54:14 - 05:30:28
Lauren Hong
Okay. Another question talking about outsourced marketing. So we've seen situations sometimes where there is a CMO, an internal leader, and oftentimes we're in that role too, right? We're more in that strategy role. And you're trying to balance both the business needs but then also just the super shiny object of marketing, massive data points, different levels of understanding of what you can do with marketing, if it's digital or not or what, how marketing is connected to sales, all these kinds of things.
05:31:00 - 05:46:04
Lauren Hong
It would be kind of fun to have a conversation about how you navigate the C-suite just to make sure we're constantly connecting it back to the business strategy. And you do such a great job of that, Tiffany, being able to really hear the clients and connect the dots.
05:46:04 - 06:05:11
Lauren Hong
So I’d love to hear about some of those lessons learned along the way, not just for how we navigate conversations but also for folks who are in more strategy roles. How do they make sure they don't lose the strategic direction of the decision-makers as we're proceeding forward?
06:05:13 - 06:32:09
Tiffany Silverberg
It feels like that's the case with so many clients. So some clients are the founder and CEO and that's our main point of contact. So that's a little different conversation. But oftentimes our day-to- day point person is someone in the business or that marketing person, and they really do have that tough task because at the end of the day, everyone wants leads, which equals sales, right?
06:32:09 - 06:56:25
Tiffany Silverberg
Everybody just wants more clients. And so trying to figure out how to connect those dots. I think we've spent a lot of time in conversations just turning down the noise but calling our focus down because there's just so many data points. And I think this marketing world is just so like data, data, data.
06:56:25 - 07:20:13
Tiffany Silverberg
And there's so much data available. And I feel that's been kind of the buzzword of late that every data point is promising something. But I think just again, just focusing it down to okay, if we know this is going to be presented — I'm thinking of a few clients that tell us every year at this time, I have to give a marketing presentation.
07:20:15 - 07:28:22
Tiffany Silverberg
How am I going to help connect those dots? So it's again, it's helping them say, okay, you need five leads or whatever it is.
07:28:24 - 07:29:18
Lauren Hong
Right?
07:29:20 - 07:47:20
Tiffany Silverberg
So your lists have grown or this many people are coming to your site, not even your site but this particular landing page we've built for this project. I think zeroing in a little bit is the answer because it's just so easy to kind of go all over the place..
07:47:22 - 08:04:11
Lauren Hong
I feel like there's like 1,000,001 dials you can turn, which is very easy to do in marketing. Because we get all the noise, right? So I totally resonate with what you're saying: okay, let's not turn up the volume on everything; let's just turn it up on the right piece.
08:04:11 - 08:13:25
Lauren Hong
That connects back to the business strategy. And that's where we really need to turn up the focus and the noise. And then we can turn it down there or we keep it in whatever kind of state it is and then turn it up elsewhere.
08:13:25 - 08:40:03
Tiffany Silverberg
And again, thinking of a couple specific clients, here's the buzzword but it's also the target market or the niche. It helps if they can say in those marketing meetings, presentations, if they can say, well, here's the — I don't want to say growth — but here's the activity we've seen in this particular area.
08:40:05 - 08:58:16
Tiffany Silverberg
And this particular thing we all know as a company is so important that we're hitting this client right now or this cross arena. I think that kind of helps too, so that it's not just so broad — everyone's like we need to reach these 500 million people and we're all going to Zoom.
08:58:16 - 09:29
Tiffany Silverberg
It's just that.
09:01:01 - 09:21:06
Lauren Hong
And also just to underscore all this, I think we can't take away from the fact that obviously you've got to be light on your feet, right? And they're in a meeting. But the prep that's required, I'm thrilled to do that and turn over all those stones and really be able to make sure we're helping the team navigate that so we're not saying you need to flex and bend, right?
09:21:06 - 09:31:22
Lauren Hong
As an organization, you're always evolving but you're not deviating so much that you lose sight of the bigger picture between those reporting kind of meetings or conversations.
09:31:24 - 09:56:01
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah. And really again, when you're zeroing in on the data points, making sure they are really strong data points. I think marketing can also get a bad rap for making up the numbers along the way. And so I think that's where it can get tricky. For those who are in that CMO sort of role, they don't want to feel like they're just bringing in numbers for the sake of it, you know?
09:56:01 - 10:04:28
Tiffany Silverberg
So I think, again, zeroing in and really having hefty, meaningful data points. Yep. There's a lot to that.
10:05:01 - 10:11:10
Lauren Hong
All right. Ready for another question.
10:11:12 - 10:15:02
Lauren Hong
I can throw it out, okay. You ask me..
10:15:08 - 10:33:29
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah. Actually, I have a good question for you. So, talking about outsourcing, we were just talking about sometimes they keep copy in-house or sometimes they only keep this or that in-house. So there's probably different levels of outsourcing people can go to. Can you talk a little bit about that and how do they know what they need?
10:34:02 - 10:52:25
Lauren Hong
Oh my gosh okay. So I can think of a company, they were about, I don't know, maybe 150 employees at the time. And they had a situation where their Salesforce, which was their CRM, needed to be customized so they could tweak and turn the dials. This isn't really related to marketing but it's an example of “we need something done quickly.”
10:52:25 - 11:12:25
Lauren Hong
So they went on, I think they ended up finding someone through Fiverr, somebody to stop the bleeding, just help us turn these little tweaks and dials so we can make the output stronger. And they're a big company, right? But they just needed to find a trusted agent to be able to slowly kind of adjust the styles as they proceeded forward.
11:12:27 - 11:34:16
Lauren Hong
I can think of another example if you go up the food chain, going from a one-off quick piece to now we want to get really specialized. There is another client I can think of where they realized strategically they really wanted to work on SEO but they wanted to be in the thick of it.
11:34:18 - 11:53:12
Lauren Hong
Like they wanted to see the backend of all the data and the numbers, and they wanted to help with the manipulation of it and really unpacking all of it. And so they worked with an outsourced SEO team that could literally take them in the kitchen and show them around; this is how we make everything.
11:53:12 - 12:15:04
Lauren Hong
And these are our processes and that kind of thing. So there's kind of that one-off, I need a quick provider. It could be a freelancer engagement. It could also be like a very specialized kind of partner. And then a lot of our clients are like, okay, we need a whole marketing department but we're not ready for that yet.
12:15:10 - 12:33:16
Lauren Hong
But we need strategy and all the other parts and pieces of marketing. And so that's a good fit for an agency. Or you might have a marketing team of maybe two or three people, and you need additional support both on strategy and implementation, or you have a whole marketing department but you just need a little bit more, like an agent,
12:33:21 - 12:53:00
Lauren Hong
a trusted agent that can help you with a project. So it kind of depends, honestly, where you're at and you can outgrow your provider. Or you could sometimes work with multiple providers at one time but it really depends. There's a lot of things you can outsource and a lot of different ways you can outsource.
12:53:00 - 12:54:24
Lauren Hong
So feel free to jump in.
12:54:26 - 13:16:01
Tiffany Silverberg
Maybe we can chat about the difference between that specialty provider and an agency. So like you were talking about the SEO provider. So how does someone know when it's like, I just want to focus on this thing, like I said, I want to know the nitty-gritty versus I need everything.
13:16:01 - 13:36:18
Lauren Hong
Okay, so this is kind of like a catch-22 because you could go with an SEO provider, let's say I'm just going to specifically work with an SEO provider. But if you're leading that engagement, you're also helping with the input to make sure it connects not only with the business goals but then the umbrella of all the other marketing.
13:36:24 - 14:03:14
Lauren Hong
So you just want to make sure if you're leading that initiative, either you or the individual who’s leading it is seeing how those efforts kind of sweep across the company at large, and likely that provider and your resources are really going to be like a deep dive on that particular specialty. We're on the agency side; we act as that umbrella to see how everything is integrated across the board.
14:03:17 - 14:25:03
Lauren Hong
But then we would have those deep dive conversations with an SEO specialist or developer, someone who just does video, all these other kinds of facets — graphic design, website development — those facets of it. So we kind of work as I'll call it that strategist, to be able to connect the dots, manage the projects, and then implement them and bring in the providers as necessary.
14:25:06 - 14:39:18
Lauren Hong
So this is a different kind of engagement. And if you're going to do just a specialist — I shouldn't say just; it's a left right. If you're going to engage with specialists, you just want to make sure that the input is solid so the output can be solid as well.
14:39:21 - 14:49:14
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah. And what about, I don't know if we talked about a business consultant or a CMO sort of role. How would that differentiate?
14:49:17 - 15:24:15
Lauren Hong
That's a good question too. Okay. So feel free to jump in here. We have seen situations where a business strategically may need to have an offsite to really unpack everything, pull back layers of the onion and put it back together. And an offsite would be a great opportunity for a business consultant to be able to come in to support with that and might be behind a particular initiative, like a target market: where are we going to go after and what does that look like, and how are we going to put our efforts behind it?
15:24:18 - 15:48:07
Lauren Hong
It could be conversations around strategic goals and mission, vision, value statements, maybe unpacking that a little bit more. And it could be a reshaping of understanding — how does the business strategy specifically connect with the marketing strategy and help identify needed campaigns or what have you, before you even bring in a team?
15:48:09 - 16:25:19
Lauren Hong
And those conversations are usually had in a little bit bigger organizations. And they oftentimes kind of unpack things related to fee structure or your service offerings. It could be, gosh, it could go a number of ways. Your target market, your culture. So those offsites more are the business consultant, marketing consultant sometimes while you zero in on hopefully a key project you might want to focus on, which is then going to help all your other efforts when you actually get to the implementation side of it, be that much more successful.
16:25:19 - 16:34:14
Lauren Hong
So feel free to jump in. I feel like that was a long-winded answer to basically say it's more of like leaning on the business strategy.
16:34:16 - 17:05:01
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah. And I think like the question earlier of how do you know when you need each thing. But I think that's the kind of stuff that if those are the pieces that are missing, it has to sort of happen before you bring in a marketing team because you don't want to be operationalizing, putting calendars together or things like that, but still not really knowing who is our target market or like you said, even more, like what sort of offerings are we even providing, what makes us different?
17:05:01 - 17:24:11
Tiffany Silverberg
Those sorts of things. I think when you don't have that clarity and we see this time and again when you're sort of trying to figure out clarity in the midst of strategizing it gets tricky. And I guess I go back to the earlier question too, about keeping everyone focused when everybody knows what the goal is.
17:24:14 - 17:31:21
Tiffany Silverberg
And we're not still trying to do development midway. It's so much easier to get everyone to that same page.
17:31:23 - 17:37:15
Lauren Hong
Yeah. I totally like what the goal is and why that goal.
17:37:18 - 17:46:18
Lauren Hong
Not just we want to grow. Because as I was saying earlier, why do we want to grow? How is that going to impact the company? How is that going to impact the team? And what's the heart and soul behind that?
17:46:18 - 18:12:03
Tiffany Silverberg
So yeah, absolutely. Okay. One more one more question. Or maybe there's more. But so this kind of ties into something you said earlier but now it ties into this question too. So marketing, marketing and sales always sit together. We talk about that. But marketing also is involved cross- departmentally and it impacts other things, especially when done really well.
18:12:03 - 18:17:19
Tiffany Silverberg
So I don't know if you want to sort of touch on that.
18:17:22 - 18:40:28
Lauren Hong
Oh my gosh. Yes. So you really feel this when the company gets bigger. So you start to feel it if the employee count is around a dozen. Because what happens is marketing is your face to the world, right? It's a reflection of, ideally, your mission, vision, values, your business strategy, where you want to go.
18:40:28 - 19:04:09
Lauren Hong
It's kind of that first interaction someone's going to have with the brand. But if you're at that dozen employee-ish place, you probably have a CRM in place, or you might have onboarding materials or ways you hire people, like job descriptions, things like this, right? And all of these are going to require considering how does the company sound, like in a job description?
19:04:09 - 19:29:18
Lauren Hong
What's the voice and tone of the company? We're going to have our logo out across our CRM. And what does our training look like? And does that feel like the brand, the voice and everything kind of exuberate through all these other parts of your business. And so that's when you start to see marketing really plug into other parts of the business.
19:29:18 - 19:52:08
Lauren Hong
And then as you grow. So now let's say you’re at 75 employees, 150 employees. Marketing is connected across departments because what happens is you're going to have one department, any department, it might be HR. And so they're going to have all kinds of communications that are going to go on just within their department.
19:52:13 - 20:12:29
Lauren Hong
There might be another department that's working on webinars that are externally facing. There could be another department that has regular communications that are really timely that need to go out. And so marketing acts like the glue for all of that but it's making sure the brand doesn't lose its essence as it grows, because that's so critical, frankly, to the value of the company.
20:12:29 - 20:25:01
Lauren Hong
If you're going to value the company. And then as you're hiring, you want to make sure people really exuberate in the brand personality. So who the brand is and how they show up. But you can totally talk more to this.
20:25:02 - 20:44:07
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah. And I was thinking of one particular client who, I don't know their employee count but I think it was around a dozen and they were struggling to hire. They weren't attracting the right people. And it was having those conversations with us, the marketing team, where all of a sudden it was like, this is what makes you really special.
20:44:07 - 21:06:22
Tiffany Silverberg
You need to go positive with those things that are making you really special. And then everything trickled down, the visuals became really obvious for social media posts around that hire, the job description, everything just became really clear because everybody knew this is what your brand is about. So yeah, it definitely matters cross-department.
21:06:25 - 21:11:28
Lauren Hong
Totally. Okay. Any other things with outsourcing we should chat about?
21:12:00 - 21:13:02
Tiffany Silverberg
All the things.
21:13:04 - 21:15:09
Lauren Hong
I feel like we could do this for a long time.
21:15:12 - 21:16:19
Tiffany Silverberg
Yes.
21:16:21 - 21:18:29
Lauren Hong
Okay. Plus rapid-fire questions.
21:19:02 - 21:19:29
Tiffany Silverberg
Yes, okay.
21:20:01 - 21:26:15
Lauren Hong
We're talking big picture. What's the best way to identify your ideal prospects?
21:26:17 - 21:28:13
Tiffany Silverberg
So that's a rapid-fire question?
21:28:16 - 21:45:02
Lauren Hong
Yeah, sorry, I know that's not a very good rapid-fire question. I should be asking you something really simple that you can respond to. Like where is your favorite place to vacation? Okay. So let's just unpack that a little bit.
21:45:05 - 22:10:09
Tiffany Silverberg
Now that's a really good one. Because we were saying earlier, if you're going to work with a business consultant, a big part of it is kind of figuring that all out. But even in the marketing level, the best answer to the rapid fire question, the best way to identify your ideal prospects, I don't know, who do you love to work with and who's bringing in good money?
22:10:11 - 22:26:20
Tiffany Silverberg
Which is not always the same. So we'll start with the first one. Who do you love to work with? You want more of those. There's all kinds of tips out there about putting them all on a spreadsheet and how much money they bring in and which are the ones you want to call more.
22:26:23 - 22:47:06
Tiffany Silverberg
But that's really the answer. Who you really, really are good at serving. There's data points you can look at too. You have a starting point of who your ideal clients are — maybe we'll use the obvious one.
22:47:06 - 23:09:26
Tiffany Silverberg
Retirees. You can start to look at your data and see popular blogs the people are reading. Which newsletters are my clients actually opening? Those sorts of content data points can help kind of go, okay, we tend to track that. I think that's happened with a few clients too, where they're like, we've been writing a lot about this particular thing.
23:09:26 - 23:28:27
Tiffany Silverberg
We have one client in particular who had one person in there — I'll be vague about this; I don't call them out — but one person in their firm had a previous job where there was an obvious connection there of the kinds of people they could serve. It just became obvious, so we put stuff out.
23:28:27 - 23:39:09
Tiffany Silverberg
Everybody loves it. Well, we should just put more of that out and make that a target because people eat it up every time we post it. So I think that can make it obvious.
23:39:15 - 23:57:16
Lauren Hong
There's so many ways I'm like that. I'll just say I'd encourage folks, if you're going to narrow a target market, spend the time on it because it's one of those forks in the road with your business, where then you get behind it and there's a lot of effort, so you don't want to just kind of do this stuff like willy-nilly.
23:57:16 - 24:21:27
Lauren Hong
You really want to take the time to invest in it as a team. And if you're smaller, then you're in more of a decision-making hat and you can have those tough conversations but then act accordingly. But it's worth the time and energy to put it behind either hiring a consultant or doing an offsite or working with an agency, whatever kind of makeup that looks like.
24:22:01 - 24:28:28
Lauren Hong
But to really kind of unpack that because then you start aligning everything behind that strategic decision.
24:28:28 - 24:46:19
Tiffany Silverberg
So, yeah, like you said, if the whole team can be behind it, that's the best because I just gotta say we've seen it get a little tricky when some people are super excited, some people are not. The flip side is I'm thinking of one particular client, they have a new target market and everyone's excited.
24:46:24 - 24:54:13
Tiffany Silverberg
The website's going to be about it. Social is going to be about it. So the opportunities are immense because they're ready to go all out.
24:54:15 - 25:12:11
Lauren Hong
What I was going to say too is like, sometimes it's really scary to get behind a target. Especially if you come from a second generation of owning a company. You don't want to ruffle feathers. If you have a lot of different stakes in the game, like a lot of different players.
25:12:11 - 25:32:11
Lauren Hong
But part of that leadership we see that's so successful is when you do have a team or an individual who gets behind that and invests in it, and that's really where you start to see that traction. It's a hard call to make but it's one that when you make it, it's kind of where it all starts to funnel into.
25:32:13 - 25:52:17
Tiffany Silverberg
So yeah. And one more thing: it doesn't always have to be like a demographic, right? So you’re like we have to go after dentists or whatever. And then especially bigger firms, they're like, well we're not all going after the dentists. So they start to know our clients are just into this kind of investment or they like this kind of philosophy.
25:52:17 - 25:57:17
Tiffany Silverberg
How we serve them is different. And I think that can absolutely be a target market for them.
25:57:18 - 26:14:28
Lauren Hong
Yeah, even to the bigger firms, like sometimes how the targeting starts to happen is by geography and locale. So it just depends where you are and kind of the bend of the strategy. So okay, we could talk about this for a whole other thing but super fun.
26:15:00 - 26:20:29
Tiffany Silverberg
Yeah. Thanks.
