Sometimes it seems impossible to get marketing spend transparency for optometrists. But it shouldn’t be! One of the most important pieces in any marketing campaign is transparency. Therefore, you must spell out your expectations upfront and find a way to hold your marketing agency accountable. This is the only way you will know exactly what’s happening with your campaigns and marketing spend at all times. But this is unfortunately not always the case when you’ve chosen to work with an agency to handle your marketing for you.
So let’s talk about exactly how to gain marketing spend transparency and what tools you can use. We’ll show you why our software is built differently, so you no longer have to rely on an agency to determine where and what you do in marketing. But first, we’ll clarify why marketing transparency is so important. Then you will see how critical transparency really is.
Why Marketing Transparency Is Important
If you use a marketing agency, it’s extremely important to maintain full control and demand complete marketing spend transparency of your campaigns.
If you don’t have transparency, it creates a frustrating experience and diminishes the full potential of your marketing investment. Additionally, full transparency is essential to ensure your agency is following all digital marketing best practices, performing your requests promptly, and that they don’t share your proprietary information or marketing strategy with their other clients, or anyone else for that matter.
Another problem with not having transparency is that you might not realize there is a problem until the damage has already been done. You might see that your practice’s SEO rankings have dropped, marketing costs have increased, and suddenly you don’t have any new leads coming in and by then it’s too late.
That’s why it’s vital you use a platform and tools that you and your marketing agency can both access and utilize. This will enable full transparency, allow you to ask the right questions, and help you hold your agency accountable.
And lastly, marketing transparency can help you effectively spend your budget versus spending blindly, drive more new patients with up-to-the-minute campaign strategies, and reduce your costs due to more effective messaging and marketing campaigns. It will also ensure you and your team are spending your time efficiently while growing your practice profitably.
The Most Common Marketing Agency Transparency Issues
Here are some of the most common marketing agency transparency issues.
Not Keeping You Informed
It’s imperative your agency keep you informed at all times. That means giving you a detailed explanation of every aspect of your campaign. They need to tell you what they are doing, why they are doing it, and provide you with reports or some other type of documented proof of work and trackable results based on that work. Unfortunately, many agencies don’t.
Limiting Your Access
The agency you hired should provide you with full access to each account they are managing for you. Some agencies will try to tell you they can’t move an account or that it’s their systems and protocols so you don’t need ownership. Never let an agency restrict access to your campaigns. If they do, find someone else.
Additionally, all your marketing campaigns should be set up on your own accounts, never under the agency’s account. You provide the accounts and then grant the agency access to those accounts. Always maintain full control of everything!
Agency Wants to Provide Everything from the Ground Up
Many agencies will tell you that the best way to provide you with SEO services is for them to create, host, build, and manage a brand-new website for you. This could be a concern because this allows that agency to hold your website and associated digital assets hostage if you ever decide to cancel. If you cancel, they can delete your website or do anything they want with it since they own it. Whether or not you opt to build a new website, you should still own it.
No Robust Reporting or Clear Proof of Results
You might have a good marketing agency, but how would you know if they are not providing you with consistent, detailed, real-time reports or any clear proof of results? Every agency should have tracking, analytics, and industry and competitor benchmarks set up so you can review those stats at any time.
Not Responsive to Your Requests
Another common marketing agency problem is responsiveness. Many agencies don’t respond to your requests quickly enough for you to make an informed decision on any potential issues or marketing challenges. That hinders you from measuring the effectiveness of any given marketing strategy or campaign. It also leaves you unable to determine if that agency is providing you with a good return on your investment.
Where Do You Go from Here?
What’s the solution to all these marketing agency transparency issues? Using reputable, high-quality online tools and resources that are conducive to a healthy, profitable, relationship between you and any given marketing agency.
One of the most popular online tools that provide just that is called the Surefire Local Marketing Platform.
Let’s take a closer look at what Surefire Local can do for you.
Three Ways Surefire Local’s Software Gives You Marketing Transparency
Surefire Local routinely helps small businesses get higher Google rankings, more online reviews, and faster results. The Surefire Local platform can also help business owners with nine of the most important online marketing activities. And that includes paving the way to make things easier for business owners and marketing agencies to work together seamlessly and transparently.
Here are the Surefire Local platform features that will help you take full control of your marketing tasks. It will also enable you to see in real-time what your marketing agency is doing and hold them accountable. This is the absolute best way to get marketing spend transparency for optometrists.
1. Insights & Analytics
Knowing what you’re spending on marketing and what results you’re generating is paramount. If you don’t have analytics set up and you aren’t tracking your campaign results, you are wasting money. So even if you think you are getting good results without these things, just think about how much better your campaigns could have been if you knew which channels and tactics were providing you with the best results.
You need to understand where your patients are coming from, and you need analytics software to track that data. That’s where Surefire Local comes in. Our platform can help you with the following digital marketing tasks.
- Lead Management
- Local SEO
- Reputation Management
- Paid Advertising
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
If all this data is carefully tracked, you will have the insight needed to quickly identify new marketing opportunities for your brand. It will also help you see the digital marketing tactics that are getting you the most results and which ones need to be better optimized if you want to reach your highest possible ROI.
2. Competitive Benchmarking
Some agencies will provide you with vanity metrics such as the number of “likes” or something similar to competitor research—it’s not! These types of metrics are not an indicator of how good or how bad any given marketing strategy is working compared to your competitors. Nor does it tell you how well you are doing based on industry benchmarks.
You have to measure your online visibility against your competitors. And to do that, you have to know how your competitors are ranking in your local market. This process should entail watching what your competitors are doing and using metrics like search rankings and online patient ratings to gauge what’s working.
Competitive benchmarking will show you exactly where you stand from the perspective of your potential patients who are searching for the products and services you offer.
The Surefire Local platform provides you with its Intelligent Search Tool to gather competitive benchmarking data. This will instantly give the metrics about how your campaigns are performing compared to the other optometry businesses in your local area. It will show you your organic search rankings, how many leads were generated, the reviews you earned, your average star ratings, and more.
3. Marketing To-Do Lists
It’s common for a marketing agency to pressure you into signing a long-term contract and request upfront payment. The problem is, once you sign, they have little incentive to create better campaigns or to act quickly and change those campaigns as needed. You can always provide them with lists of what you want to be done; however, it’s hard, if not impossible, to know if they’ve followed through in a timely manner, if at all. There’s really no way to hold them accountable and they know that. They also know that as long as they stick to the terms of the contract, they will get paid regardless of how poor the results of their actions are.
The good news is that when using the Surefire Local platform, you can check your campaigns and see the results yourself. The Surefire Local Marketing Platform’s built-in To-Do Manager uses AI to analyze your recent activities and recommends things that can help you achieve greater visibility, results, and ROI.
Here is an example of a list you might choose to create.
- Add pictures to directory listings.
- Reply to reviews.
- Send patient review requests.
- Update our featured message.
- Publish a Google Business Profile post.
- Review all new leads.
- Publish new posts on social media.
- Publish a new blog post on the website.
- Add new pictures to the website gallery.
Or anything else you want them to do!
Are you curious? How would you like to try the Surefire Local platform and associated tools before you commit to a purchase?
Request a Demo of Our Business Intelligence Marketing Software
Request a Surefire Local Demo today. Why not take control of your digital assets and online presence? Wouldn’t you love to roll out hyper-local focused campaigns that provide you with real-time visibility into which marketing channels are producing for you and which ones aren’t?
Go ahead…request your complimentary marketing analysis today and learn about how to receive a demo of the Surefire Local platform. It’s time to get back that marketing spend transparency for optometrists before it’s too late.