According to Statista, “In 2015 there were more than 13.3 thousand [marketing/advertising] establishments in the entire United States.” That’s a jaw-dropping number and can make choosing the right marketing agency difficult. However, when 1 Bold Step first started, out of the 13.3 thousand plus marketing agencies out there, we noticed that there was a gap in the industry when it came to marketing operations and marketing technology. To fill this gap, our agency executes on 4 different things that really make us stand out.
Take a look at the video below and keep reading as we'll dive into these 4 things that make 1 Bold Step unique from most marketing agencies.
1. A Lean Marketing Approach
At the heart of our company, we believe that everything can be more efficient – especially marketing. That’s why we approach marketing with a lean mentality. What that means is that every one of our projects or engagements repeats these three steps:
- Align: We make sure that your company’s marketing goals directly support your overall company goals. We make them clear, measurable, and provide accountability to each goal.
- Enable: We help you ensure that the right people (in-house or outsourced) are in the right roles doing the right things with the right systems to enable sales and generate revenue.
- Improve: Once we kick off your marketing, we measure to manage. That means we test a campaign or marketing material with your audience, review the results, tweak it, and then test again.
So how does this apply to your business?
- You’ll get results. Quickly. Through our agile marketing approach, we efficiently experiment and gather results as quickly as possible, giving you the information you need to make the right marketing decisions.
- We create plans and goals, and we learn from the results we get.
- We are continuously improving our process (But we don’t let perfection get in the way of progress).
- We collect data that matters and allows us to make good choices on future campaigns and goals.
- We stay focused on your customers (Because the customer experience is everything).
- And we provide the tools and resources needed to enable sales reps. If marketing isn’t driving revenue, it’s not working.
Overall, this process helps us keep up with the constantly changing marketing landscape in order to keep your marketing fresh and performing at its highest ability.
2. Data Over Design
At 1 Bold Step, transparency is one of our main values as a company. And if we’re being transparent, we often tell our clients that “We don’t do pretty.”
Wait! Before you leave, hear us out.
A lot of people are awed by the beautiful creativity and design that comes out of a lot of marketing agencies. And don’t get us wrong, we love to see that stuff too and we partner with some amazing, local creative design companies to ensure your campaign looks the way you want. But “Pretty” is not how we measure success.
At the end of the day, knowing how your campaigns are performing is what’s important to us. To do this, we ask high-value questions like…
- Did your campaign increase revenue?
- Did your marketing materials generate leads?
- Did your initiatives provide a return on marketing investment?
- Did your tactics gain impressions, clicks, whatever KPI you were using?
Overall, did your marketing materials make an impact on your target audience?
Ultimately, your campaign could be the prettiest design in the world, but if you can’t show the C-Suite the results from the campaign and how it worked, then it wasn’t worth the time. In the end, we focus on showing you the metrics of your campaign and offer strategic ways to continuously improve it in order to boost your return on marketing investment.
3. A Focus on Marketing Automation
Another focus of 1 Bold Step is building the “marketing machine” for companies via marketing automation. That may seem a little impersonal or scary, but trust us, it’s not once you realize the productivity and time-saving benefits of automation.
If you’re unfamiliar with marketing automation, let’s review a quick definition. Marketing Automation is typically performed through a software platform that allows you to automate certain tasks and activities rather than doing it all by hand. At 1 Bold Step, we use HubSpot as our marketing automation platform. Marketing automation can help your business:
- Track your visitors’ and prospects’ activity on your website
- Alert sales reps when a lead visits a certain page on your website
- Group marketing initiatives together (like social media posts, emails, and landing pages) to see the bigger picture behind how they are performing within one campaign
- See how your customers are interacting with your brand via a chatbox on your website
- Nurture your leads automatically through email drip campaigns
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! There’s so much more that a marketing automation platform can do for your business.
If certain tasks like the ones above aren’t being automated, your business could spend a lot of time manually doing them instead. But that’s no longer necessary with marketing automation platforms. Ensuring that your marketing is working for you (and not the other way around) is something that we focus on in order to provide you with the most efficiency.
4. Running a Fractional Marketing Department
These days, marketing and technology are colliding. With that comes so many roles that need to be filled in order to create a successful, holistic marketing department. A comprehensively-staffed marketing department consists of:
- Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs)
- Marketings Managers
- Marketing Technologists/Operations Coordinators
- Marketing Data Analysts
- Content Strategists/Creators
- SEO Strategists/Coordinators
- Social Media Strategists/Coordinators
And as you know, the list could go on. However, if you’re a small to medium-sized business (under $10MM), you might not need to hire all of those positions in-house.
That’s why we offer companies the option to hire our fractional marketing team. Hiring us as your fractional marketing team allows you to plug and play our experience at whatever percentage you need to build out your modern marketing department at a fraction of the cost.
Take a look at this 1-minute video to learn how you can benefit from hiring 1 Bold Step as your fractional marketing team.
Get Started With Something Different
At 1 Bold Step, we’re different from most marketing agencies. By taking a lean approach, putting data over design, focusing on marketing automation, and running a fractional marketing department, your company will take bold steps forward towards improving your marketing and showing a return on marketing investment.
To learn more about how we can take your marketing from overhead to value-add, reach out to us and we’d be happy to help.
