5 Things I Wish I Knew as an Agency Marketer

Howdy Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is John Doherty. I currently lead Marketing at HotPads.com. Thank you Moz for having me back here on Whiteboard Friday. It’s been a while since I’ve been here. I’m super-excited to be back in Seattle, able to get here on the camera and talk to you guys about a few things that are near and dear to my heart.

I’ve been at HotPads for about four months now. I joined them in San Francisco a few months ago, moving out from New York City to lead Marketing for HotPads, working with some of the other rentals businesses as well under the Zillow Inc. umbrella, both on the consumer side and the business-
to-business, B2B side.

But I worked for an agency for a couple of years. I worked for Distilled, based in New York City, and obviously I worked with a lot of clients, small clients, large clients, took a lot of pride in building relationships with my clients and getting things done. Distilled is phenomenal at that, and I felt like I learned a ton. I learned a ton about clients. But over the previous couple of months, I’ve really been reflecting and trying to figure out: What is really the difference between agency and in-house marketing?

I wrote a post about it on my own personal website, JohnFDoherty.com, which I don’t write on there often enough. But I published a post on there recently about that difference. But today I want to take a little bit more focused approach to that, and I want to talk to you from the in-house perspective about five things that I wish I had known when I worked as an agency marketer working for clients.

So I have five points for you. Let’s run through them real quick. First one is your client is the industry expert. What I mean by that is your client knows their industry, their vertical better than you know their vertical. You may be able to look at it from a domain authority perspective, who’s ranking, who’s creating content, who has social media going, who has a full-
fledged marketing team built out, who’s just playing around, and who’s spamming, who’s building link networks. But you don’t know their vertical, and you don’t know their business. You don’t know their monetization model nearly as well as they do.

So while you know the tactics, and one of the great things about agencies and one of the super valuable things about agencies is that you know the tactics and you can see across verticals. You know what’s working in travel and what’s working in real estate and what’s working in video. You know what’s going on across the broader spectrum. So that’s where you can really add value to your client. You can tell them tactics, and you can tell them tactics that work across different verticals that they may not have thought about. But at the end of the day, they’re the ones that know their business, and they know their vertical, from a business perspective, better than you do.

The second one is learn the whole marketing team. This is one that I struggled with early on in my career at Distilled. I was very focused on SEO, especially technical SEO, focused on site architecture and content and things like that. So I made sure to get to know the SEO. I made sure to get to know the SEO team, who does what, what’s everyone’s skills, all of that. For a long time, though, I failed to get to know their bosses. I failed to get to know who runs the marketing team. I failed to get to know the different sides of the marketing team and who does what. For example, in a big company, the marketing team may have five people in PR and three people in SEO and two people in email.

So talking tactics, such as email marketing strategies, with the SEO team when the SEO team has no ability to change the email marketing tactics isn’t going to get you a long ways. However, this can be super valuable when you’re talking with the SEO team about how they are going to be able to get buy-in with other teams to work together collaboratively with them to get more done on the SEO side. It’s the old you scratch my back, I’m going to scratch yours sort of mentality.

The third is never forget that, as the agency, you are the outsource solution. Whether you like it or not, no matter how closely you get to your client, no matter how well you get to know them, no matter how often you go down to visit them, you are still the outsourced solution. You are not working there in-house with them all the time, part of the politics, seeing what’s going on, knowing what the roadblocks are, knowing why certain things aren’t getting done, or why certain things do get done. At the end of the day, you are still an outsourced solution that you were brought in for a reason. That’s not necessarily a negative thing. Actually, from the in-house perspective now, I don’t believe that’s a negative thing at all, because you were brought in because you’re the expert. You’re the expert in SEO or technical SEO or link building or content marketing or social media marketing. You were brought in because that is what you own, and that’s what you are known for, and so that is exactly the reason why you are there, not to be part of their marketing team.

However, what I learned in my time at Distilled is the closer you can get to the team, to the in-house team, the better you can get to know them, the more successful you are going to be.

This brings me to my fourth point. As an agency marketer, you’re actually less responsible for results than you may think that you are. What I mean by this is ultimately the in-house team is the one that is responsible for the results. Myself, at HotPads, I am responsible for driving traffic, which drives leads which drives the business. If I hire an agency, you are not going to be responsible for driving traffic. You’re going to be responsible for giving me deliverables that I can then use to go and turn into actionable things for my development team to do or for my marketing team to execute on.

To be successful as an agency marketer, what you need to do is you need to make sure that you are communicating with your client. That is the first and foremost, that you are communicating with your client, telling them when things are going to be in their inbox, what you’re going to be delivering, why you are delivering it, what you’re going to deliver next based off of the deliverable that you are currently working on, or spending a lot of time reporting. Honestly, I was really bad at this when I was at Distilled, reporting to my clients and telling them, “This is what we’ve done over the previous month, and this is what we’re going to do over the next month.”

That alone is invaluable to an in-house marketer, because then, as in-house marketer, if I’m given that from my agency that I’m working with, I can then go and set expectations with my bosses and tell them, “This is coming down from this agency. I expect it on this date. These are the things that they’ve done, and this is what we’re doing with them.”

Finally, this brings me to my fifth point, which is deadlines actually matter less than you think. Deadlines for deliverables actually matter a lot less than you might think. The reason for this is in-house marketers are very, very, very busy. Leading marketing at HotPads, I’m doing SEO. I’m helping out with the content strategy, helping my content manager with the content strategy, helping her meet the right people and get buy-in from the right people and figure out when to publish things and where do we publish things, and how do we push it on social media. I’m helping me email marketer get to know our developers and talk with people up here in our Seattle office, the email marketing team up here to find out what they’re doing. We’re strategizing about emails. I’m helping my link builder find new places to get links. We’re strategizing about link building and measuring that and measuring the ROI on that.

So I’m very, very busy. Everyone on my team is very, very busy. All in-house marketers are very, very busy. We’re all over the place. We’re touching all sorts of different parts of marketing at some point and working very, very collaboratively, and I would suggest that any very successful in-house marketing team is all working collaboratively and not siloed away from other teams.

So all of this is to say that I really don’t care about deadlines, and most in-house people aren’t really going to care about deadlines. What’s important for you as an agency marketer is going to be communicating with your client when something is going to be delivered. If you’re going to be late, communicate that with them as soon as you’re able to. If it’s going to be a week late, let them know why. Things come up. Everyone understands that things come up. Maybe another client had an emergency. Maybe there was an algorithm change that they were hurt by, that their CEO is about to fire the whole marketing team if you don’t jump in. Clients understand this. So what you need to do is you really need to communicate with them as soon as possible, as often as possible.

As an in-house marketer, speaking to the in-house guys for a second, you need to tell the agency exactly what you’re dealing with, exactly what your responsibilities are. What keeps you busy day-to-day? There’s nothing more frustrating as an agency marketer than being like, “Why can’t I get a hold of my client? I know they’re around. I know they’re in there. Aren’t they just like sitting there building links?” The answer is no. They’re not just sitting there building links. They have a lot going on. So to be successful as an agency marketer, you need to find out from your clients exactly what keeps them busy day in, day out. So then you are able to not be a pain to them, but rather to help them do their job even better.

So these are five things that I wish I knew as an agency marketer now that I am in-house. Once again, my name is John Doherty. You can find me on Twitter, DohertyJF, and I’m happy to be back here. Please leave any comments you have below in the comments section. Thanks a lot. Have a great weekend.