What 15 Years Of Marketing Agency Ownership Have Taught Me (infographic)

Marketing channels change. Marketing tactics change. Marketing content changes.

But some things about marketing are no different now than they were when I founded JONES more than 15 years ago. Or when I got my first job in marketing and PR a few years before that.

Over the last year, I’ve shared 15 of the lessons I’ve learned since starting this agency, and I believe they are things every marketer, CMO, agency principle, communications director and even entrepreneur should keep in mind.

This infographic gives you the short and sweet version of each lesson. You’ll find the details of how and why in the 15 “lessons” blog posts linked below.

1. Be curious, make it interesting and make it relevant. Even if it is about as exciting as printer ink.

2. When you build strong relationships, clients stick with you and contacts take you with them to new jobs.

3. Enterprise software requires a focus on telling specific success stories that are relevant to analysts and potential customers.

4. Ask the right questions, set measurable goals and deliver to expectations.

5. Big ticket B2C marketing requires a focus on engaging consumers with useful information to draw them through a longer sales cycle.

6. Hire experienced, self-motivated, reliable staff and be willing to drop toxic employees (or clients) quickly before they can cause more damage.

7. Use quality content, thought leadership and strong analyst relationships to build confidence and trust when marketing B2B FinTech solutions.

8. Life sciences marketing requires expertise, media analysis and quality content to build credibility in a highly sophisticated industry.

9. Marketing for healthcare IT solutions begins with understanding your customer personas and key industry trends, and then builds a comprehensive integrated PR and marketing strategy based on solid data, executed across all communications channels.

10. Taking time to do the data work — establishing benchmarks and goals, tracking metrics, auditing existing programs, and reporting results — is essential to improving marketing performance and proving marketing’s value to the executive suite.

11. Integrating public relations and marketing is essential in order to maximize the impact of cohesive branding and messaging along with the efficiencies of shared content, all with the goal of achieving corporate lead, sales and revenue objectives.

12. Marketing in the telecom industry requires constant focus to keep up with trends, as well as understanding how those trends impact multiple target audiences, from consumers and enterprise customers to manufacturing buyers and industry analysts.

13. High quality content is essential for successful integrated marketing and public relations.

14. Marketing surveys are one of the best sources for original data and stories that fuel great content.

15. Starting a marketing or PR agency may seem easy, but keeping one going requires perseverance in order to adapt to changes and challenges through continual learning and the drive to be accountable to yourself, your team and your clients.

What are the top marketing lessons you have learned through your years of experience?

While these lessons focus on the big picture, and I will continue to share lessons like this in the future, you’ll find even more advice for successful integrated marketing and public relations strategies, including getting down to nitty-gritty details of writing survey questions, scheduling social media posts, auditing past results or choosing an agency partner throughout the articles here on the Inbound Accelerator. Click here to subscribe to weekly email summaries so you won’t miss the topics you want to learn more about.