Facing a Client WCM/Marketing Automation Challenge? A Partner Might Help.

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1 Facing a Client WCM/Marketing Automation Challenge? A Partner Might Help. Wednesday April 23, 2014 by Lisa Waters, Verndale Agency Services A client is concerned their website isn't helping them sell their services or build their brand. Another wants to better understand their customers so they can personalize content. A third worries about not generating enough leads because visitors are abandoning searches that don t deliver the information they need. Sound familiar? These are real world problems your clients are bringing you every day. And they want you to solve them. You know the answer eventually comes down to technology -- but which one? There s plenty out there to choose from - just look at the dizzying Marketing Technology Landscape infographic by Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) published this year. It s enough to cause a brain freeze. Your clients count on you to always have the bleeding edge ideas. They expect you to have the technology expertise in all things digital to help make these ideas come to life. You likely already have deep expertise in technologies to support social media, adserving, video, campaign

2 management, content production and the other never-ending demands and tide changes of your business. It s just not realistic to be an expert in all areas of the technology landscape. Well you don t have to be. Clients just want their pain to go away and aren't really concerned about how you make that happen. That s why more and more agencies are partnering with specialists to help solve their clients issues. Those opening scenarios are good problems to solve. They show that clients are quickly realizing that social media, personalization and market targeting are useless without an effective website and marketing platform that delivers good content and analytics. To get there, you need specific expertise in Web Content Management (WCM) and Marketing Automation two small but significant and complex pieces of Scott Brinker s daunting technology puzzle. So what do you do now? Here are three questions to ask before you decide how you re going to solve your clients WCM/Marketing Automation challenge. 1. What s best for the client? You need to develop the best possible solution to accomplish your clients goals. Quickly. You certainly have a level of knowledge with some of these technology solutions. But is diving into the deep end of WCM/Marketing Automation technologies going to deliver the best result? It might, but teaming up with a partner focused on that technology guarantees you a team of resources with a full range of expertise. Their staff consists of specialists including project managers, system architects, quality assurance professionals, production and account managers. They ve built repeatable processes to get these projects done on-time, and on budget. Ask yourself if it s practical, financially prudent or best for your client for you to develop a

3 similar team? An experienced partner can shorten the discovery process by helping you define the best technology solution to accomplish your client s goal. To successfully implement a complex, scalable WCM/Marketing solution, a provider has to be constantly engaged doing it, with continuous industry education/certifications, and refining implementation and development methodologies. 2. Where should you focus? Do you build a WCM/Marketing Automation practice, continue to try to maintain the one you have, or do you partner with a technology shop that s done all that heavy lifting for you? Do you have enough projects to maintain a technical team with those specialized skills? How do you provide support and manage a long-term roadmap for your clients? How do you educate your sales and account management teams around the benefits of these solutions? If you do have some successful implementations out there, then you know the level of effort required to learn about and implement these products successfully. If you aren t making continual investments in education, processes, people and sales around this specific practice, you ll fall behind. Working with a technology partner shop that focuses 80% (or more) of their business in these solutions, makes continuous investments and has a steady flow of projects allows you to leverage up-to-date expertise without making that big investment. If you have a WCM/Marketing Automation technology practice as part of your firm, look at it using the 80/20 rule. Does your WCM practice account for 80% of your revenue or even 50% for that matter? If not, should you be devoting resources to it?

4 So you ve already invested in building a WCM practice A partner can act as an external resource to help fill gaps in your team and provide supports services while you focus on your next big strategy. Partnering with a WCM/Marketing Automation expert allows you to stay focused on the dizzying array of technologies that are in your sweet spot that make you money. The right partner can take the amazing creative content you produce and use their expertise to architect the best solutions to support your clients strategy. In the final analysis, how many technology solutions can you afford to become an expert at? Are you prepared to divert your expensive resources when they might be better invested in other areas more core to your business? 3. What is most cost effective? Which brings us to the final question you should be asking. What is the least cost solution for you and your client? Traditionally it s been tough for creative agencies to make money on WCM technology work. Not because they don t know what they re doing, but because rates for this kind of work and estimating these projects is an art and a science. In most cases, the analysis will tell you that it will cost you less to buy the service from a good and reputable shop (more on this subject in my next post) than to develop it in house - especially for large projects. While your team has a solid working knowledge of these solutions, there s a big leap from that to having the ability to properly architect and build a solution that will scale for the future. I might be handy with small jobs around the house, but if I plan on constructing a new home, I m going to bring in an expert with the right expertise and experience to design and build it.

5 Partnering with a reputable shop on a WCM/Marketing Automation project gives you an instant team of experts with the right background and experience. You get a scope of work that is well defined with an estimate of specific deliverables and a project team that has successfully executed on these projects time and time again. The net-result is that you have some peace of mind, a happier client and better profit margins. One thing is for sure, change is coming rapidly. Keeping up with it can be intimidating, but it doesn t have to be. Having a partner by your side can help pull you through and allow you to keep on surfing the waves you know you can catch. Stay tuned for my next post where I ll talk about how to qualify a good partner."