How to invest your marketing budget as a star-up?
As a full on marketeer, I get asked a lot of industry related questions. Some are challenging some simply make my blood boil. However, over the years I have interacted with clients asking a variety of questions such as: “How do I find the best PR agency in Dubai”, or “What’s the best marketing agency in UAE”, or “Do you know which is the best digital agency in Dubai?”, and I have always tried to give away a few examples, or at least a few indicatives of what they should look like when they’re choosing their agency.
Having said that, in the past few months I have always found it interesting how the same people ended up complaining about their agency months after they started working together, even though the client’s budget was “a healthy one” and on the other side, the agency they went for was a decent one. So what’s happening here? How do companies manage to identify “the best PR/Digital/Marketing agency in UAE?”
In order to find the answer to that we need to take 2 steps back and look at the much, much bigger picture here and ask some serious and perhaps uncomfortable questions. My favourite one and an eye opener: “Why do you need a PR/Marketing/Digital agency to start with?” Or better said “How do you know that’s the type of agency your business needs?”
Over the years the advertising/marketing/digital(call it however you want to) industry has grown and morphed into what we can now “channel specialist agencies”. What does that mean? That you will have a specialised agency for each media channel: Social Media agencies, PR agencies, Digital Agencies, Digital-Outdoor agencies and so on. The great thing about these specialised agencies is that they can give you full on insights on that specific channel which they dominate. Now the not so great thing about these agencies is that they leave a lot of people on the client side who aren’t advertising specialists in a bit of a dilemma. “Which agency do I need? PR? Marketing?both? Which one is the best?” Very often, this dilemma makes business owners spend their marketing budgets on a channel that doesn’t bring the best results for their business.
How to best address this? Hire a marketing consultant. It doesn’t have to be on a retainer basis, some of you are barely starting and cannot afford this luxury, but you can hire a marketing and growth consultant who will be able to dictate the overall strategy and direction your marketing should take each quarter. These consultants have experiences across all media and marketing channels, but moreover, they have a business and sales revenue knowledge as well. So they can look at your business from a holistic/360 approach and tell you EXACTLY where you need to invest your money for the stage your business is in, in order to make sure that you don’t overspend and all your investment has a return, compared to a specialised agency who will only tell you how to leverage that particular channel they specialise in.
It’s really that simple, if you’re a business owner and you’re new at the game, you should do things right from the very beginning as any marketing strategy that doesn’t have a clear and solid foundation will cost you double even triple down the line. We now give away free consultation calls, so feel free to reach out, even if it’s simply for advice.
