Thank you for joining another episode of the Missing Half podcast, where we’re discovering what’s missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today we’re going to talk about three numbers that are really important to us and that we feel are critical KPIs that marketing managers can relate to as they’re trying to build their internal teams. 

So we look at client retention as a very very important metric in the marketing agency space. And it speaks to what we’re trying to do for our clients. The fact that they’re happy for us, we’re producing, they’re seeing results. And it also speaks to our ability to perform not only for our clients, but for our employees, because we really believe that it’s directly tied to our employee retention rate, and those two kind of go hand in hand in a successful organization. 

So a couple things we started to look at this year in 2023 as we reflected and tried to plot a plan for 2024 to make sure we were benchmarking, looking at our past, and then looking to the future and that horizon and how we could impact it and do better and improve our performance. 

We experienced over a 97% client retention rate from 2023 to 2024, which is above industry average, and we’re very pleased with that. We wanted to ask the question, why is that happening? And we started to study it and here’s the thing we found. 

The first area we really honed in on was the longevity of our team. Our team has been together for a long time. We have many members of our team that have been with us for over 10 years and have really been here through our evolution and have been part of our amazing growth and the amazing results we’ve been able to deliver for our clients. So longevity of our team was one key factor. 

One of the next areas we found that was really important was not only the longevity but then the strength of our team and the strength of new team members. So we’ve really doubled down on training and making sure that we have a knowledge leveling across the organization for specific seats to make sure everyone understands what their role is, what they’re supposed to be doing, but also that they understand how they fit in the bigger picture of what we’re tyring to accomplish for our clients every day. 

In addition, we also work really really hard on our new hires and making sure that we hired for culture and fit with our mission, vision, and values first and then technical skillset second. We really believe that attitude will overcome any lack of knowledge or technical ability. And if we hire teammates who have the right attitude, who buy in to who we are and what we do everyday, and how we want to deliver value to our clients, we can really overcome anything, and thats a very important factor in ongoing client retention. 

The third area we really looked at as to why we were able to generate success and to have a really good client retention was in providing support for our team through existing and newly developed playbooks, roadmaps, and systems that allowed them to be their best and to do their best work. We’ve invested significantly in our project management system and developing workflows, reports, and other tools to help each person be their level best and to stay as organized as posible to keep the trains running on time to make sure that our clients’ projects are on time, on budget, and that are achieving the best results they can. 

Marketing in general, specifically digital marketing, can be fraught with minutiae. There are so many nuances to each platform, each type of campaign, each strategic objective we’re trying to pursue, and our systems that we’ve developed, our playbooks, and our roadmaps had to be designed to ensure our team wasn’t being bogged down in the minutiae, in the day to day grind and that they could focus on the big picture. They could focus on high value work and doing their best work to impact the outcomes we were pursuing for each client. 

One of the other areas that has been really important for us is developing a real firm grasp of our niche. And understanding a very unique and individual niche that is a sub-niche of the manufacturing and B2B marketing space. Our team works really really well with late adopters and those who are really trying to take their marketing and digital marketing from the traditional into the digital space. It requires a more entrepreneurial focus, a more entrepreneurial approach, adn we’ve been agble to develop playbooks that take you from 0 to 60 on a scale of 100. We can really help you get started and take you up to that high performance area. Our team does not focus on like the Fortune 500 or clients that have marketing teams that have 20 to 30 people. We’re really at home with those owners and founders and C-suite personnel, as well as marketing managers that may only have 1 to 3 people on their team, so they need to look outside of their organization and outsource a lot of the technical delivery, strategy, and implementation. 

So when we think about these three numbers, and this kind of venn diagram that we have around employees, client retention, and systems, what we see is we’ve been able to develop a finely oiled machine that produces results for our clients by balancing team size, expectations, scope of work, and providing the right training and systems we’ve been able to provide a platform by which our team can execute and deliver so that we retain our clients year after year because we’re driving results for them. 

So what have we discovered that was maybe missing before or that we arrived at that really started to work and that we recognize that you could use as a marketing manager for your company as you develop your internal team or a combination of a hybrid internal plus external team to deliver marketing results and initiatives for your organization? Number one, hire based on culture, based on your mission, vision, and values, and find people with the right attitude to be part of your team. The technical delivery portion can be secondary, it needs to be there, but it is secondary to finding someone who fits your culture. Second, double down on building the right processes and playbooks and making sure that you find the right systems to allow those people with great attitudes to actually do their best work and be as efficient as possible. And then third, get to work. Right? We all have to work really really hard even when we have the best teams, the best culture, the best systems, the best playbooks, the best project management, it all comes down to working really really hard to deliver that best value for the client and drive those outcomes that are helping them to achieve their goals 

Thank you for joining us today on the Missing Half podcast. We hope you’ve discovered something new or that might have been missing in your approach to your marketing program and please tune in, give us a like, and give us a like, and subscribe, and we’ll see you next time.