The 4Ps of marketing transition.

Emotional conflicts can impact the implementation of new marketing strategies.

Odds are, that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve either hired, or are thinking of hiring a marketing firm to help promote and build your brand, engage new customers, and create campaigns that highlight the advantages of your company over your competition.

It’s a fantastic decision–and it’s a choice that can really help elevate your business.

It’s incredibly hard to market yourself without the benefit of outside help. Heck, I’m a marketing professional with 30 years of experience, and I loathe every step of marketing my company … and I absolutely LOVE marketing.

When you handled your own marketing, you kept your own counsel, advertised when you felt you could afford it, and developed your own materials. All those factors change now that you’ve engaged with an agency. Expect a shift in your engagement that sometimes trips up marketing efforts at the very beginning. We want to avoid stumbling out of the gate because trust is so important to the overall process. Damage it early on, and it makes regaining momentum all that more challenging.

If you’ve ever taken a marketing course, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with the Marketing Mix, otherwise known as the 4Ps of marketing. Price, Product, Place, and Promotion. What’s not addressed are the 4Ps of Marketing Transition©—the shift in mindset that’s required of clients at the very start of the marketing process. The 4Ps of Transition address the more emotional components of moving from marketing yourself to trusting someone else to do it for you.

What are the 4Ps of Transition?

• Price

  Marketing is expensive, but it doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive if you plan for it. By planning, I mean setting aside enough money to allow the marketing firm to do its thing and put you in the best position to succeed. But how much is reasonable?

  The number is 10 percent.

  Set aside ten percent of your gross (yes, I meant gross, not net) revenue for investment back into your marketing company. Some companies can get away with eight percent, some crank the dial up to 12 percent, but ten is a good solid average to work with.

  When you give an agency a reasonable budget, they can identify which levers to pull to provide the best strategy and tactics to meet your marketing goals and objectives. You can’t “pot shot” your way around marketing; not if you want to do it effectively. You can increase spending at key times of the year, but the goal is to create a base level of spending that supports the marketing strategy.

  One of my specialties is getting the most out of limited budgets. Most of my clients are small businesses who pay close attention to every dime spent. I will tell you for certain that, even when budgets are small, the company that consistently devotes resources to promoting itself is the one who stands a better chance of growth and taking market share from its competitors.

  In short, get comfortable spending.

• Perspective

Perspective is an area that is difficult for some business leaders to change. As the head of your company, you are used to being the one in total control of every situation. The buck, as President Truman said, stops with you.

And it still does … but you need to make that transition, anyway.

The change in perspective means to allow an objective third party to have a substantial stake in the conversation about how to best build your brand and promote your company. Many of the things you are going to hear may upset you because they will challenge your way of thinking or present shifts in tone that aren’t immediately comfortable.

Listen, when you run your own company and do your own marketing, you live in a vacuum chamber where your voice and perhaps those in your employ are the only voices you hear. It’s a limited circle of ideas, it stifles creativity, and doesn’t always lead to open communication because employees don’t want to lose their jobs or get on your bad side if they voice objections to your ideas and direction.

Marketing companies care about results. They care about reaching and pleasing your customers—and not necessarily about pleasing you. The mandate is to grow your business, and through that effort you’ll find happiness. So, expect that they may push back with data, statistics, and their collective experience as a trump card to challenge any entrenched ideas about messaging, audience, branding, and strategy.

In my years, I’ve found this to be a hard transition for many company owners and those in leadership positions to make. “This is the way we’ve always done it,” is a phrase uttered countless times in conference rooms. Your company is your baby. Your idea. You’ve grown it, nurtured it, and taken it to a level of success. But you’ve hit a wall in either knowledge, strategy, or time and you need to bring someone else in to elevate your brand and take it to the next level.

Don’t worry, your marketing agency still listens to you. We want your wisdom, your insights into customers and competitors. We need your data. If you’ve chosen the right marketing partner, you’ll never feel marginalized. Instead of being in charge, you’re relaxing the history of how things were done and instead approving strategies and creative designed for the future.

• Patience

Patience is more than just an excellent Guns ‘n Roses track. It’s an essential component in the marketing process. Results seldom happen instantly. Oh, you may see a bump in traffic when you unveil a fresh look for your brand or a splash new website, but the purpose of marketing isn’t just to get that cash register to ring once, it’s keeping it ringing day after day.

Patience is as much about consistency as it is about giving strategies time to work, resonate with customers, and carve out a space in the market.

Here’s the hard truth: You are going to tire of seeing your logo, your tagline, your design aesthetic long before any of your customers feel worn out by your message.

The adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” comes to mind. While I prefer a slightly different take of “if it ain’t broke, evolve it,” the idea in patience remains valid. A healthy brand grows over time to meet new challenges and ideas. It doesn’t hit reset.

Just because you are tired of a look doesn’t mean it’s time to shake things up.

In fact, the opposite is often true. Building brand identity and market presence requires consistency and doing the same thing (or similar things) the same way over an extended period. You only look at changing things up after the marketing and data shows a decline in your market share for a sustained period. You want people to associate your look, a color scheme, a layout, a tagline with you. You want your brand identity to be second nature to your audience. You want them to recoginze your aesthetic immediately. You want them to feel comfortable with you and assign values of trust, quality, and performance.

I’ve had companies want to redo their logo every year. Similarly, I often see marketing agencies recommend a complete rebrand as the very first thing to create. Personally, I do not recommend either approach for the simple reason is that every time you change your brand, you lose all the brand value you’ve accumulated since the last time you rolled out a new look. There must be a strategic reason to change a brand, like poor reputation, scandal, new ownership, or a new customer base to change a brand or message and hit reset on its market position.

Give marketing time to work. Let your marketing team look at big picture numbers and trends in data. This means waiting months, sometimes years to fine tune and evolve your brand from A to B. Slow and steady growth is good. It’s healthier for your business than change for change sake.

• Presence

The last item in this blog is perhaps the most important one. As the owner of your business, you must resist the urge to take marketing off your ‘to do’ list and move on to other things that you find more exciting. In all my time in this industry, I can say for certain that nothing kills the potential of a marketing strategy like an absentee owner.

While you are entrusting your marketing to someone else, a marketing agency needs your input and insights to inform every step of the strategic and creative process. Without the owner or other stakeholders taking an active role, it’s not uncommon for apathy about the effort to gain a foothold. Instead of active conversations about what’s working and what could work better, both sides seem to settle into a status quo of pushing forward with the last approved direction.

It’s not a healthy way to market anything.

So please, be engaged. Ask questions. Share information. Explore those ‘what ifs.’ Get excited about the next campaign, the next promotion, the next series of blogs. Marketing can be fun and exciting if you are present, approachable, and keep up your end of the deal. Being an active participant in your marketing can bring you many benefits, both for your business and your advertising agency. It can help you create a marketing strategy that is aligned with your vision and goals, which is more effective, relevant, and engaging for your target audience, which is more tailored, personalized, and customized for your business.

In closing, welcome to the wonderful world of marketing. It’s a blast! Practice the 4Ps of Transition as best you can. Enter into the next phase of your company’s marketing with a mindset of cooperation, empathy, and humility. An open mind creates a world of opportunity and soon enough, you’ll be wondering why you ‘always did it THAT way.’