If you’re like most business owners: your plate is full, your stress is high, your future is uncertain, and your spirit is full of ambition and optimism. Entrapenous have so much to lose in every choice that they cannot afford to throw away the future of the business by blindly following the claims of most marketing companies.
The importance of every decisions makes research in this field of paramount importance. As such we aim to offer the following litmus test for any marketing company. Yes, you may be asking yourself “why should I trust a marketing company to tell me how to chose a marketing company?” And that’s an important question to ask in anything! We have nothing to hide, we’re offering this information because we sincerely believe we’ll offer you the best possible value and we wish to have every marketing company held to the highest possible standards, including ourselves.
Without further ado we offer you our take on the 5 most important tests to subject any marketing company to.
Test 1: Is it too good to be true?
Summary: If you’re only paying a few hundred dollars a month for someone to manage your ads, unless it’s a freelance marketer (which we’ll address how to assess later) very little of your money is going to them, therefore your account will get minimal attention.
Full Analysis: This one can be tricky because you first have to figure out what would be considered good value and what is too good of value? We all know a brand new BMW for $2,000 seems too good to be true, but what about a marketing company offering you a dedicated marketing executive or account manger for $400? How about a comprehensive re-marketing campaign for $500, including creative?
The easiest way to test this is simply to break down the costs to the marketing company as best you can and see if the pay is appropriate to the level of expertise you hope for in someone managing your company’s future.
Let’s start by breaking down appropriate hourly pay for different levels of marketing experience (and keep in mind these numbers are rough estimates and by no means are universal)
Account Manager Pay Levels:
1 – Apprentice/Inexperienced marketer: 60k/yr or ~$29/hr
2 – Experienced Marketer: 90k/yr or ~$43/hr
3 – Expert Marketer: 200k/yr or ~$96/hr
With these rough approximations, if you’re promised the services of an expert marketer, or even an experienced one, let’s look at what it should cost:
Many marketing companies try to opporate with a profit margin for the company of around 40% and often times offer a starting price around $400 to manage ads. If we assume the overhead for the company (including the building, their own marketing, designers, CEO pay, etc.) is an additional 50% then the account manager is going to make somewhere in the range of 10%.
Once we break that down that means your account manager is going to make around $40/month off of your $400 and therefore will spend around 30 minutes to an hour a month on your account, and don’t forget that includes answering your calls or responding to your emails. The bottom line is if you’re shopping for marketing based off price, just know what you’re getting. Many marketing companies make up for these margins by pocketing a huge portion of ad spend and we’ll go over that later on, but you always get what you pay for, and what might seem expensive to you, might translate to minimal income for the person that you’re trusting to help build your business’s future for you.
Note: Just as with any company Equilibrium Marketing aims to make a profit for both your company and ourselves. As such we charge a flat rate based on marketing needs to cover the appropriate time to work towards making your business as successful as possible, and we’ll always use your own ad accounts whenever possible to provide maximum transparency and accountability.