Valuable Advice: It’s Not You, It’s Me… Secrets of a Great Long Term Marketing Relationship

As of this writing, half of Dog Star Media's clients have been with us for more than fifteen years.We have two clients who are going on almost twenty years with us. Our Boutique Service approach is designed to nurture good relationships into great ones, but that is a two-way street. Do you seek the security of a long-term relationship with a marketing company you can really trust?

The Valuable Advice: If you hire for tasks or assignments, you will create a revolving door of marketing companies.If you hire for wisdom, insight, expertise and experience, you've taken the first step toward a long-term relationship with your marketing company. Because, the fact is, not everything will work perfectly, and things will go wrong. In long-term relationships, we value how things are handled when things go wrong.

Trust is earned, but it is also given.The first step in working toward a long-term relationship with your marketing company is leaving your baggage at the door. In the early days, evaluate the company by how they communicate with you, stay on schedule and respond if there are difficulties or problems. In the first six months, enough will happen to know if the communication is something you can begin to trust.

Next, hire for wisdom, not for hands.There is whole good advice blog about this here. Over time, the wisdom, expertise and know-how will get you a lot further than the savings you can get short-term by hiring someone to simply do legwork.

Consistency is king in this business. Tools and tactics change, but marketing and salesmanship principles do not. At Dog Star Media, we practice the same basic communications regardless of the medium, the format and strategy just change based on how the user interacts with the media.In a good long-term relationship, you seeing the consistent application of sales and marketing principles deepens the trust. When a marketing company lacks this quality, they are selling the latest and greatest, not adhering to the principles that always work. That is a red flag about underlying motivations.

And a word on partnership. Only you can encourage a sense of partnership with your marketing company. Here is a good way to do it: Be evenhanded when something breaks or goes wrong.In this business, particularly with web sites, problems come up. Evaluate your marketing company by how they manage and eliminate the problem. Knowing you will not shoot the messenger every time there is a problem sends the signal you both see the other as a valued partner.

If you have questions about how we maintain and engender long-term relationships with our clients, please contact us here.