You Don’t Have To Know Everything If You Know the Right People

When you’re a business owner that is also the only part of business development, there will be a lot of things thrown your way. And those ‘things’ require your expertise because of your client, who is essentially your boss, is whom you know best. Rock Candy Media was formed on the ‘bootstrap’ mentality because that is all I know. My digital marketing agency services clients the way I wish my first agency and first public relations firm served me.

I already know that anyone coming to an advertising agency or marketing firm is 1) a business owner, CEO or CMO and 2) needs our assistance to execute first and foremost.

Think about the two things money can’t buy besides fame and fortune. It’s time and health. So our collective baseline is the number of hours in a day. Yes, my marketing firm is known for being the ‘creative sales force’, and we like to drive strategy top-down, but at the end of the day, it’s our job to have your back and without execution, a good idea is just an idea.

Often, when we bring on new clients, they’re so in the weeds that they want to start without knowing what they really need or even want.

To which we say, “Relax. Breathe. It’s okay to not know what you’re doing. We will never know more about your industry than you and you will never know more about digital marketing than us (we hope.” It’s the collaboration that makes both our businesses grow together.

My advice is to embrace that you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why you hired Rock Candy Media. There’s a reason we’re one of Austin’s top advertising firms and it’s not because we’re really great at executing our clients’ commands. Quite the opposite. A foundational ethos at Rock Candy Media is “We are not task monkeys.” You bring us an amazing business that you built from the ground up and we sell it.

Ingrained in our company culture is that we put two things on the whiteboard and kill it 110% before moving on. We’re always striving to do things smarter and more effectively at Rock Candy Media. This extends beyond the things we do for clients like A/B testing, experimenting with social audiences, and search engine optimization, to our own internal practices. Nothing is ever static. Every ad – even the ones we put $10 behind – gives us data that may inform what we need to change on your website, or promote on your next e-blast to your ‘prospects only’ list.

Like you, Rock Candy Media is always fluid and changing with the same theme: transparency. A recent development on this front is we now establish strategic priorities with clients right off the bat with a scope of work in the kickoff meeting. The beauty of being a retainer-only shop is that our clients aren’t waiting two weeks for messaging, another four months for their website design and responsive development. Then once that done you start experimenting with audiences? I don’t know about you but most business owners I know need to know their audience(s) and need a revenue plan. And they can’t wait a year to start capturing the right leads. Anyone can get you bogus leads by setting ads up to run. We don’t do that. We do the opposite and optimize daily. In order to make things easier for our clients, we now let them know exactly what to expect in the first few months of their retainer, when to expect it and why we think it’s a strategic priority in the kickoff meeting in addition to client-loved weekly status reports.

The results thus far have been tremendous. New clients are happy with a visual roadmap and the legacy clients that we’ve applied these principles to has proven to help us all work smarter. And we will continue to evolve and change in my ‘bootstrap’ mentality. It’s the only way I know and I like to think since 2009, my team and I have definitely succeeded.

To see all the ways we aren’t your traditional agency, check out the differential.