I know every marketing agency says they are different. I don’t really think One Little Seed is an agency in its truest form. But this could also be my perception. To me, an agency is where you go for a campaign, a fixed body of work tied to deliverables within a time frame. This is where I think we are different. We’re in it for the long haul. I say to prospective clients, we sit on your org chart like an employee would.
With the advent of fractional CMOs this brings about a different conversation. We’re not one of those either. A Fractional CMO usually is brought in for a particular period of time, with their success tied to short term objectives such as building a Go-to-market (GTM) model or defining a particular strategy. They work with you at a specific time and place. Generally, they don’t do any execution.
When I started One Little Seed five years ago, I adopted the term Marketing Manager as a Service very early on. This is still the truest representation of who we are.
So, how do you get the best out of your relationship with One Little Seed? I’m going to be honest here (and it won’t win me any new business). You need to be prepared to be in it for the long haul. Yes, we’ll be able to knock over some quick wins most of the time. However, if there was a magic tap to turn on quality leads, I wouldn’t be writing this blog piece or doing 2024 marketing plans for clients.
We’ve built them a sustainable model that delivers continuously.
We have customers who started with essentially nothing, and by nothing I mean either no website, or a website that hasn’t had any fresh content since it was built two years ago. After 12months of investment and commitment, they are now humming along nicely with new business continually rolling in. We’ve revamped their website, built out their brand identity, devised a content strategy, talked to vendors and accessed MDF, sponsored events and helped build a business development strategy. We’ve built them a sustainable model that delivers continuously.
With all this work, there’s always the things that you don’t see. The planning. The meeting with vendor marketing managers to build the relationship at the partner levels and educating them on your GTM so we can access that funding. And honestly, as inappropriate as it sounds, the time we spend thinking about your business when we are in the shower, or out on the walks, or in some extreme cases, when we’re lying in bed at 2am. Put simply – the people I hire, myself included, give a shit about your business.
However, like any employee you would hire, we can’t be successful without the right stakeholders willing to give us their time.
Be clear on your expectations because every month is not the same in this model. Generally, we only ask for a couple of hours commitment for a WIP meeting once a fortnight, it’s important that you prioritise these two hours each month. It enables everyone to be on the same page, and ensures that things don’t get lost in email swaps.
Use the tools available to ensure you’re aware of the details. Across the board we use Teams, Trello, Asana, Jira and Monday to fit in with our clients. This gives you a single state view of everything that’s in flight and what the priorities are.
Involve us like an employee, yes there’s a balance of hours vs deliverables here, but if you’d have told an employee about an upcoming change, you need to tell us. Ask yourself, if this was my employee, what would my expectations be?
Be realistic, this is also a hard balance. Generally in our model you’ll get on average 6 hours a week. That’s the equivalent of one day. We know we’re more efficient than most people, but as a benchmark, a good quality blog piece takes 4-6hours (length dependant) from ideation, through to research, actually writing it and then proofreading.
Lean into trust. If collectively we’ve put everything above into place, you should know that we’re about delivering the best outcomes for your business. You’ve hired us for our expertise and specialisation in this industry we love so much. We know that we’ll continually work hard to deliver for you and your business. Because quite simply if we don’t, we won’t keep the contract. We’re just as invested as any employee to make this a success.
This model has the potential to disrupt the market, and it’s hard to define where we sit. I don’t want One Little Seed to be known as a traditional marketing agency, I want us to be recognised as a technology vendor. We’re providing a specialised service to the technology industry. You provide a specialised service, whether that’s cyber security as a service, managed services, backup as a service. We simply provide marketing manager as a service. We’re your part-time one stop shop marketing employee, who creates strategy but then goes and makes it happen.
