Too Many Cooks & No Dialogue

Written by: Karin Pinter
June 30th, 2010 at 5:14 pm, filed under Random

So, you have a marketing agency that focuses on your branding and copywriting, a web designer who controls your website, perhaps a programmer who does magic with your database to pool your leads into your CRM, an independent Pay Per Click agency administrating your sponsored listings on search engines, and finally an SEO consultant optimizing your carefully drafted content, adjusting your site code, and monitoring your traffic through Google Analytics, which is connected to your PPC.

Ideally, everybody involved with your website would have some sort of dialogue between them, so that each ‘cook’ is able to facilitate one another’s work while at the same time focusing on their requirements to provide you, the client, with the ultimate service and results. After all, that’s what you’re paying each person for, right?

Well, what happens when one or some of these elements stops communicating, or neglects to engage in conversation to begin with? Not one of those providers is more important than the other, if you look at the big picture. Regardless of their experience and expertise, they must all be professional enough to communicate their needs to one another for your overall benefit as their client. Whether or not they are comfortable with it, each one is somehow ‘married’ to the others for the duration of their contract with you. So I would encourage you to ensure that all your service providers, if they are not all within the same organization, genuinely facilitate one another’s tasks, knowing that somehow they all overlap at one point or another. Otherwise your marketing manager will always ask your web designer to revert the text your SEO consultant updated with new keywords, and your PPC manager may forget to inform your SEO consultant that they changed the code for them to run their reports to show performance. Meanwhile, your programmer may well sit back and watch over everything dumbfounded (since he’s the one managing your database with those precious leads that the SEO & PPC managers are avidly generating for you), shake his head and say, “Sort yourselves out and call me when you’re done.”

If any of your service providers shares their uneasiness with you over how the other members of your marketing team are treating them, do please remember that your responsibility as a client (meaning, to yourself ultimately) is to make sure that they are all in active agreement over one thing – getting their jobs done for you, while at the same time enabling everyone else’s tasks.

Otherwise your budget may well burn up faster than planned, thus undermining your business’s goals and expectations.