Who owns your work? Your access points, your website, your data, or even access to your analytics?
When it comes to digital marketing, there are a lot of moving parts and elements at play. Platforms, tools, your internal team, and sometimes even agencies and partners change on a dime – making access and keeping track of information a challenge for business owners and marketers.
Nothing is worse than that locked-out feeling and your marketing operations coming to a screeching halt. We’ve seen it happen for clients when someone is out of the office, when a client migrates from one tool to another, or in the onboarding process when clients transition to us as their digital marketing partner.
This is why ensuring access and ownership over crucial aspects of your digital assets are paramount to your success – and where your ‘digital binder’ becomes important.
As a law firm digital marketing agency and agency partner for other small and mid-sized businesses, we understand the importance of seamless operations and flow of marketing and believe to our core that transparency and collaboration are key to building a successful partnership. (Seriously, it’s one of our Guiding Principles!)
So stop what you’re doing and ask yourself – do you have a digital binder? Are you clear on who and how to access what so that no matter the industry dynamics, your marketing operations are functional?
We’ll take you through what should be in your digital binder. And by this do we mean a physical 3-ring binder that’s labeled (or maybe has your favorite vacation spot or band on the cover)? No, not really. It’s really a checklist of your tools, platforms, data, how to access it, and who within your company can access it.
Let’s get started:
Ensuring More Than One Person Has Access
Even if you’re the one who bears the responsibility or holds the key, it’s important that not only one individual, but three stakeholders can locate and have access to the key elements associated with your marketing efforts. It will not only help your digital marketing run efficiently, but it ensures a smooth transition getting set up and going when working with a new digital marketing agency.
Owning Your Analytics
Analytics is one of the most important components of digital marketing because it provides businesses with insights into customer behavior, website performance, and marketing campaign effectiveness. Without data insights, you won’t be able to make data-driven decisions.
To truly harness the full power of analytics, you should have complete ownership over your data and access to important platforms, such as Google Analytics. Ownership of your analytics and data ensures continuity in your data history. If you lose access to your analytics, you lose the ability to track and analyze long-term trends, leaving you unable to identify patterns and make data-driven decisions based on historical data.
Being able to analyze and interpret data will allow you to make informed decisions and adjust strategies for the success of your law firm.
Testing Platforms
Testing platforms, such as VWO, and Optimizely, allow businesses to optimize their website’s conversion performance and user experience. These platforms give you and your agency partner the ability to create and run tests, view results, and make changes as needed. They also provide you with a better understanding of your audience and provide a seamless user experience that drives conversions.
Being able to log directly into your testing platforms, gives you and your agency team the ability to conduct A/B testing, implement data-driven changes, pinpoint areas for improvement, and address any bottlenecks that might hinder your firm’s success. Without access to these, your team is left unable to fine-tune your marketing efforts for better results.
Google Tag Manager
A key component of digital marketing success is managing various digital marketing tags, such as conversion tracking, analytics, and remarketing pixels. Google Tag Manager (GTM) offers a centralized platform to simplify tag management.
GTM is an essential tool for digital marketing because it allows you to add tracking codes and other tags to your website without requiring manual code changes. This gives you the ability to create and manage tags, set up triggers, and track conversions while reducing the risk of page load delays and potential disruptions to user experience. Without having access to GTM you lose the ability to track user behavior and make informed decisions about your marketing strategies.
This piece of the puzzle is a little more technical, that’s why it’s important to have a dedicated analytics team handle this for you.
Call Tracking
There are numerous reasons your business needs call tracking, especially for those that rely on phone calls for leads and sales. And having ownership of your call tracking platforms, like Call Tracking Metrics, will help you better understand customer behavior, enhance lead attribution, improve client engagement, and optimize your marketing campaigns accordingly. Without access to your call tracking you lose the power you can harness with inbound calls. It is a vital component because it helps firms understand clients’ journey from online interactions to offline conversions.
Social Media Accounts
Engaging with customers and building brand awareness comes with the power of social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok give you the ability to manage and post content, track performance, and engage with followers.
Owning access to your business’s social media accounts ensures that regardless of changes within your company or agency team, you have access to the insights you need that allow you to be strategic with how you connect with your audience and build stronger relationships. If you use a social media management publishing platform such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and any Linktree or Bitly accounts, it’s important you have access to these as well. Without this access, you and your agency team are missing out on curating content tailored to your firm, responding timely to clients, and tracking performance, historical data, and any paid campaigns you might run through these social channels.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising and Paid Media
PPC for law firms and other Paid Media are powerful channels that drive traffic to your website and generate leads. Having full ownership of all your paid media accounts, especially your Google Ads account, gives you and your agency team better control over your advertising spend and optimize their campaigns for maximum ROI.
Without having access to your paid media accounts your paid media team loses control of performance data, budgets, fine-tuning targeting, and missing out on analyzing the performance of the campaigns.
If this is outside of your wheelhouse, work with our expert team at Hennessey Digital to research, strategize and execute a paid media plan to get fast ROI.
Development
You should have ownership over your website’s development. This includes access to the website’s source code, the ability to make changes and updates as needed, the website hosting account, and the domain name. Having access to and ownership of your website’s development, you can better control your online presence and make informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy.
We’ve heard SEO horror stories where clients didn’t own their domain or access to their Google Business Profile listing, and when they left they had to start over from scratch or gridlocked spending time acquiring access when needed.
All set?
If you cover the bases above, you should, and can, have peace of mind that no matter who is leading your digital marketing strategy, you’re set up well on the back end with the access you need to be successful, and your marketing always up and running.
We cannot overstate it enough: the key to success, especially when working with an agency partner, lies in the power of ownership. Safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining access over critical elements is essential for success and security. No one should leave all passwords to one individual in your firm or to an agency who could leave you with no control over your digital assets.
But if you want help with the technical aspect of digital marketing and are looking to switch to a digital marketing partner who educates and empowers your team and company, let’s chat. We are committed to transparency, collaboration, and empowering our clients to take ownership of their digital marketing assets. Our team of award-winning SEOs, paid media strategists, website developers, data analysts – and all-around awesome people – are ready to begin the conversation and help drive your marketing performance and website to new heights.