Why I Started Profitworks - A Marketing Agency That Tracks And Shares ROI
Last week I was at a seminar about content marketing, blogging and social media. One of the key messages was that each company should write a story about why their company exists and put it on their blog. Therefore I am sharing that story on our blog.
The Reason Profitworks Was Started
To provide small businesses with an marketing company option that would actually track and report back with the ROI (return on investment) metrics on the small businesses marketing spending.
My Story
Before starting Profitworks I worked in a marketing position at a consumer packaged goods company that sold products around the world. In this role I was in charge of creating marketing plans and allocating those dollars to different marketing initiatives that I thought were the best way to advertise and grow the sales of the brands I was in charge of. The only stipulation was that for each type of marketing I wanted to do I was forced to use the companies marketing agency of record whether I wanted to use them or not.
At first I thought this was okay as the marketing agency had a team of very talented designers, website programmers and partnering specialists that could create attractive promotional materials, flashy websites and bring in big name companies for co-sponsorship. What I unfortunately slowly learned after a few years of doing this is that it was all a front for a lack of true marketing knowledge. These companies really did not understand how to marketing a product to grow sales. They knew how to make things look good and professional but not how to get the desired results. Each year the programs we would put together with the marketing agency would cost $200,000, $500,000, $300,000, whatever the number might be. And each year at the end of the program what would I have? I could not tell and there was no way for me to track it. The worst part was that I was forced to use these companies whether I wanted to or not. Each year I never really knew what the program did to grow sales for the brands I was responsible for. Usually I would get a report of some kind at the end of the program with fancy statistics like website impressions, the number of people that sampled my product, magazine ad impressions or TV reach and frequency numbers. None of these numbers directly told me though how many purchases people made because of the advertising or how many new customers I got because of the advertising. The data would not even be tied back to if there was a sales increase or not. There was no correlation made to the programs impact on sales or profit from the spending. And there was definitely never any report on what kind of ROI I got. Some years I was not even lucky enough to get a final report on the program at the end of it! I had just spent $300,000 and I did not even get a report at all of what it did to drive sales for the business....how is that good business?
Basically what I learned was that spending money with a marketing agency is more like gambling than investing. You never know what you are really buying and they seemed to never be able to tell me what kind of sales increase it would drive for my business. The scary thing is that the agencies I dealt with (which was probably 5 or 6 different ones) never even talked about ROI. Never! Upon further research I found that this was generally common practice among marketing companies.
It was at this point that I knew there was an opportunity for a sales & marketing company that actually talked about ROI. And not just talked about it but shared expected ROI, tracked ROI and report ROI back to its clients. This is where I got the idea for Profitworks.
Therefore as part of all of Profitworks services we tell clients up front what we expect the ROI to be, we analyze the results of the activities, share what has been learned and report back on the ROI. In addition we did not want our services to be a net negative investment so we put a ROI and satisfaction guarantee on our services. This was not only to protect our customers but it also forces us to stay true to our goal, what we believe, and what we are trying to accomplish. We want to make sure our services results in a positive return on investment for our clients.
Our goals is to provide complete transparency to marketing spending ROI and provide this to our clients but also to all small businesses. We want to help small business understand what marketing vehicles have the best return on investment.
We strive to be the marketing ROI authority.
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