If you’re seeing your leads plateau, it’s probably time to get a new set of eyes on your marketing strategy.

This is one of the most common reasons companies come to us. They want more leads, better quality leads, or to reconsider the way they think about lead gen.

Agencies like ours provide a fresh perspective and can give you insights on how to increase sales that internal teams may have overlooked.

• “If I had more staff”
• “If there was another 12 hours in the day”
• “If only I could clone myself”

Have you ever thought like this?

When you help manage a growing business there’s never enough time to do everything.

You want to focus on all the different areas of your business but having to manage a productive marketing strategy on top just leaves you anxious.

You never have enough time.

As your company grows, it can be hard to find time in your day for nailing a marketing strategy.

Agencies take that responsibility off your shoulders so you can focus on other crucial parts of your company.

This is a tough thing to admit – sometimes it feels like you’ve tried everything and still seeing little result or change.

We speak to many clients who have done things like spending £1000s on an event, bought and blasted a database of teacher emails, and sent out multiple PR pieces.

And yet website traffic, leads, and sales remain flat.

Why? Because without a strong experienced team to manage the marketing you end up working tactically instead of strategically. You’re throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

And eventually you run out of things to throw.

A good marketing agency should be able to understand your business, analyse your current marketing strengths and weaknesses, and produce a clear strategy and campaign.

Then they will decide what tactics, channels, and media will deliver the strategy and help you overcome your challenges.

Which means you don’t need to worry anymore about having ideas – that’s what you pay the agency for.

Who’s the Jack or Jill of all marketing trades on your team (whether it’s their actual job or not)?

Expecting a single person to manage all the aspects of marketing in a growing company is asking too much.

For example, from a non-marketer’s perspective posting a Tweet seems like a quick and easy task, right?

But from a marketer’s perspective it likely involves the following skills and tasks:

1. Brain storming creative idea(s)
2. Copywriting and proof reading
3. Hashtag analysis
4. Image design in accordance with platform rules and post type
5. Video filming, editing, branding, and subtitling
6. Scheduling and posting
7. Responding to comments
8. Post-publishing data analysis

And that’s just a single X/Tweet, a tiny part of a wider marketing remit.

So your marketer does their best. But they have to think small. They know they’ll struggle to do everything that needs to be done to make any sort of substantial difference.

But with that said, it doesn’t mean you should hire more marketing staff.

A discussion with a marketing agency is the answer.

And don’t worry that your marketing person might feel threatened by the involvement of an agency. Decent agencies are well versed in working tightly and empathetically with marketing teams all day every day.

In fact, we often see the marketing person gain huge experience and leadership skills working in partnership with our agency. We love working with other marketers!

It’s a common story around Bee Digital HQ.

Every time we welcome a prospective client to a discovery call, to find out if we’re a good fit for their needs, we ask: “Have you worked with an agency before?”

And, for those that have, the replies are always some version of the following:

• “We tried a non-educational marketing agency and they just didn’t understand the nuances of selling to schools.”
• “We worked with a non-educational marketing agency agency who kept changing staff and I had to constantly explain the schools market to them over and over again.”
• “We worked with a non-educational marketing agency agency who treated us like a 3rd class account because we were an educational brand and not a flashy consumer brand.”

When they start to work with us, a specialist marketing to school agency, you can almost hear the relief in their voice over time.

We know all the acronyms. We know the language that gets action from a teacher. We know how to get emails opened by teachers.

We’ve marketed products into all the different roles in schools. We know where they hang out. We know what hashtags teachers follow. We have interviewed, surveyed, and analysed every type of teacher. We have internal research that outlines the needs and wants of almost every permutation of educator.

We understand the pain points your audience experiences.

We understand the routes to purchase, from budgets to evaluations to key decision makers.

We know it’s a hugely rewarding market to work in, but we’re not naive about the pressures and challenges.