Sorry, AdAge, Digital Marketing is a Creative ‘Service’

Trevor Hubbard says “agencies need to sell products, not services.” I disagree, though not with his premise. The Butchershop CEO starts his July 5, 2022, AdAge column by setting the stage: “As markets tumble and profit margins shrink, clients are tightening budgets and asking more of partners that are already stretched,” he says. Instinctually, many will “cut prices, either by lowering rates or acquiescing to more output for the price.” This, he rightfully concludes, “will devalue creativity and dissolve trust at a critical time for our business.” I’m with him so far: lowering rates or prices can signal trouble, no matter who you are; likewise, doing more for the same amount (and/or in the same amount of time) almost always means a decline in quality — and, as a result, a decline in trust. But, the answer isn’t to abandon your entire business strategy by converting customizable, service-oriented solutions into what may be confused as one-size-fits-all products (even if they’re not). Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with your digital marketing program, especially if you don’t use third-party vendors. The answer is “everything,” no matter what.

From Digital Marketing Services to Digital Marketing Products

As a senior leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure your digital marketing (and CX) team: 

1. Embraces your organization’s core values, value proposition, and business priorities and goals
2. Listens to the needs of your customers
3. Creates customized solutions to targeted problems and pain points
4. Delivers on time and on budget
5. Eagerly returns to the white board to iterate and optimize based on ongoing performance analysis

If you were to inform your digital marketers they could no longer present their strategies and tactics as services toward an established goal — and had to henceforth define strict timelines for and monetize each and every step in the process as a unique, standalone product — how do you think they’d respond? In this model, are there separate line items and fees for campaign analysis, reporting, responsive strategy, iteration and optimization?

Either way, at the very least, your announcement would cause confusion, as well as pull your digital marketers away from their current duties to focus on the unexpected assignment of establishing an entirely new product-based paradigm. Assuming Hubbard’s right and times are tough, is this the right moment to shift focus and start over? Are annoying last-minute change requests enough to supersede a cross-generational strategic mindset?

From Hubbard’s perspective:

People treat products differently. When we enter a store (physical or virtual), we pick products with fixed prices and pay at checkout. We don’t load up the cart, leave and say we’ll pay for everything in three months if we decide we like it. A product has a brand we buy into, features we like, a clear picture of value, and a sharp answer to a specific need whether that’s vanity or utility.

Why Digital Marketing Has Always Been and Should Always Be About Providing Services — and Not Selling Products

The problem for digital marketing teams and agencies, Hubbard says, is that the services they provide are so “loosely defined” that, inevitably, “assumptions define the process” — and dissatisfied clients or internal stakeholders can just walk away or abandon the project. “Service-based scopes are assumption bombs set to explode.” 

And yet the service model has defined how we, digital marketers, have operated in and outside of the agency setting ever since the first print ads appeared in US papers in the 1700s.

Hubbard’s “solution is to replace services with products,” but products are difficult to change, expand or personalize; services, on the other hand, are designed for customization — and can also be broken down into sub-services with their own attached costs. 

In addition, as we at CEI understand, and as you’ve almost certainly experienced building a brand, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t appeal to anyone in our very online post-millennial society; we all expect personalization, as well as intimacy, empathy and consistency. 

We “can productize services by breaking down the components of value and what it costs to produce them, then charging for each component,” says Hubbard. For example, instead of listing the strategy component “as one giant line item with a bunch of ‘stuff’ crammed into it — which can invite a tug-of-war over pricing,” he recommends “identify[ing] the output and price for each component of your strategy delivery.” 

OK, but how? Why?

Until you conduct the necessary research into your industry, customers, and unique gaps and opportunities, you can’t determine your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) or create a strategy to: 

• Authentically position your organization based on your core values and value proposition
• Finetune your messaging and design to present yourself with authority and empathy
• Outperform your benchmarks and competitors
• Best serve your audience(s), based on the user personas your team established from past on-site events (like purchases or form submits), customer surveys, focus groups and other CX-oriented approaches; check out Freshdesk, HubSpot Service Hub, Intercom, Salesforce Service Cloud or ZenDesk

Hubbard says, for instance, that “market assessments, brand platforms, audience segmentation and many more elements can become individual products, each with their own process, value, timeline, output and price.”

But we don’t always know how long each step will take, nor can we always apply a quantitative value to each piece of the puzzle. A market assessment, for one, is virtually useless on its own. Sure, you could sell it to a competitor (and give them an advantage), but the real value isn’t derived or determined until you see results; this doesn’t happen right away, nor can it typically be predicted based on past performance.

Here are the 10 steps you’d need to take to actually convert on a market assessment:

1. Conduct the market assessment
2. Present, iterate, finalize and submit the market assessment
3. Establish key competitors, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, ranking keywords (try Moz or Semrush), content, and promotional strategies
4. Identify your core audiences and define your user personas
5. Determine your unique gaps and opportunities, based on your competitors and user personas
6. Develop a digital marketing campaign — based on the market assessment and consistent with a larger 360-degree digital marketing strategy — to target your user personas at each and every stage of the customer lifecycle
7. Continually monitor all aspects of your digital marketing campaign, including clicks, conversions and engagement
8. Continually analyze, report on, split test and iterate all aspects of your campaign based on performance, on-page UX insights (go with Element Human or Cool Tool, as well as Usersnap or Wootric) and management feedback
9. Measure campaign results — prioritizing digital marketing and CX KPIs, including new leads generated, click-through rate (CTR), goal completion rate, lead conversion rate, lead-to-sale conversion rate, cost per lead and cost per acquisition, as well as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score, customer effort score, customer service satisfaction score and churn rate — against expectations (not promises!) and past campaigns
10. Iterate, present and, when approved, re-run the (ideally, improved) campaign

Does this process look like something we should pretend we can predict? Does it look like a process that won’t be interrupted by sudden and unexpected pivots? No. 

Unconvincing? Disorganized? Here’s How to Present the Optimal Digital Marketing Project Pitch

Even if we think we can ‘promise’ our stakeholders a project timeline — based on campaign length and/or how long we’ve historically needed to complete a similar project — what does anyone, ever, gain from pre-announcing? Seriously, no one has ever benefited from overpromising and underdelivering, so why should we put ourselves in that position when we know anything can happen to cause a delay? 

In short: we shouldn’t; instead of turning a market assessment into a standalone, individually priced product, your digital marketing team (or agency) should keep it where it belongs: as part of the so-called stuff “crammed into” an early stage of the process.

Hubbard believes productizing digital marketing tactics can: 

• “Provide predictability” — but no amount of scheduling or promising can overcome the inherent unpredictability of a project with multiple components and contributors
• “Identify unseen value” — but this merely suggests agencies and marketing teams have historically failed to demonstrate the value in what they do
• “Reduce client churn” — but the only thing that keeps clients happy is meeting their needs, no matter how often or inconveniently those needs change 
• “Streamline new business” — but like automation, ‘streamlining’ is not always the answer, and those responsible for landing new clients, projects or resources understand the time, energy and flexibility necessary to win an RFP or an approval from upper management
• “Preserve talent” — but all digital marketers are creatives and strategists, first and foremost, and therefore prioritize freedom and innovation (along with recognition, upward mobility and health and wellness benefits) over strict rules and requirements; we’ve got techniques for sidestepping burnout

So, instead of starting over, tell your digital marketing team to refine their presentations!

There is probably (or at least should be) a good reason each time you or your CMO, CXO or CCO rejects a strategy, campaign, project, promotional tactic or piece of content; or, there’s at least the perception of a good reason. In other words, even if your marketing team (or third-party vendor) submits a proposal featuring the most inventive ways to leverage tried-and-true approaches, you may not be willing to invest if it’s presented: 

• Without enough — or with too much ​​— detail
• Without enough — or with too much — pricing information
• Without a clear, compelling and comprehensive but concise case for why the campaign or project is necessary, based on a previously accepted SWOT analysis and reviews of your competitors’ and your existing content and historical performance 
• Without a clear, comprehensive but concise goal, established early and persuasively
• Without benchmarks and estimated results
• Without a draft timeline
• Without roles and responsibilities or precise project management (for agile, Jira’s the only answer; otherwise, I’d pick Basecamp, Asana or Notion) and approval processes
• Without the tools and other resources needed

That’s why I recommend assigning these nine mission-critical tasks to your digital marketing leader: 

1. Actively and equitably recruit, hire and empower a diversity of top talent with the full range of specialities, including strategy, project management, UX and web design/development, SEO, content creation, social media and influencer marketing (which you can organize and optimize using Sprout Social and either Klear or Aspire), email and SMS marketing (use Sendinblue or GetResponse), SEM and digital advertising, analytics and reporting, partnerships and sponsorships and, if possible, customer experience (who can act as liaison to your CX team) and sales (who can act as liaison to your sales team)
2. Clearly define roles and responsibilities
3. Include everybody in team strategy meetings
4. Create and oversee working groups to tackle individual campaign projects and tasks
5. Leverage project management software to engender teamwork and mutual accountability
6. Enroll the team in a public speaking program (ideally adherent to the adaptive learning model) to optimize the AV presentation of the pitch; Udemy, LinkedIn Learning and Coursera all offer public speaking courses
7. Focus the team’s energy on finetuning its campaign/project proposal processes and deliverables, leveraging interviews with stakeholders like yourself to identify priorities and all the ‘must-haves’ and ‘can’t-haves;’ irrespective of work environment, if the new idea is presented with appropriate detail and limited pricing information, as well as all the other aforementioned, oft-forgotten components, there’s a far better chance it'll be greenlit (while you obviously want to know what the campaign will cost, you also want to see the people you’ve hired demonstrate their qualitative value)
8. Require use of my content brief template to guide the team in outlining and organizing each proposed project
9. Require use of my project pitch template, including the content brief as an addendum to the document, which should also include title page, overview, goals, strategy, positioning statement, target audiences/user personas, SEO keywords, KPIs, desired actions/CTAs, tactics and mediums/platforms (e.g., video or Wistia, or digital advertising or Taboola), branding and styles, key dates (or tentative timeline) and key milestones; download the project pitch template here

Your Exclusive Free Project Pitch Template (Google Docs)

If your marketing team or agency is disorganized or failing to persuade with its project pitches, you might be able to help! Right-click this link to our free project pitch template, and left-click to copy the URL and paste it in an email to your marketing lead; or, click to open the template in Google Docs so you can review and download it as a Word document or PDF. 

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Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/54VAb3f1z6w
2. Photo by Álvaro Bernal on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/QPRd_UC3nE4
3. Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/3WA9tJOCvOo
4. Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/3y1zF4hIPCg
5. Photo by NASA on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/Yj1M5riCKk4
6. Photo by Drop the Label Movement on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/QiscXSaksJ4