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Medullar: A Safer Way for Professional Services Firms to Collaborate with AI

Guest Blog Post By Heath Anderson, Medullar

Professional services firms run on knowledge: every client engagement, advisory project, investigation, tax matter, or consulting assignment depends on the team’s ability to find the right information, apply judgment, and move quickly.

But for many mid-market firms, that work is harder than it should be. Important context is scattered across email, cloud drives, chat tools, research notes, meeting transcripts, prior deliverables, and personal folders. Teams often spend too much time searching for information they know already exists. Work gets repeated. Collaboration slows down. And when sensitive client data is involved, the pressure to adopt AI safely becomes even more complicated.

Many small-to-mid-sized firms want the productivity benefits of AI and move quickly to adopt AI tools without investigating if and how their proprietary data/intellectual property will be kept private. But, they cannot afford to treat confidentiality as an afterthought.  The crux of this problem is one that Medullar aims to solve.

This image shows a black woman, Caucasian and an Asian woman looking at and working on documents together as they sit on a comfortable-looking brown leather sofa.

Medullar is a privacy-first, secure AI collaboration platform built for professional services firms that work with sensitive information. It gives teams a safer way to bring project knowledge together, collaborate across people and tools, and use AI in workflows where privacy, permissions, and trust matters.

At the core of Medullar are secure, encrypted Spaces. A Space acts like a private project room for a client engagement, matter, deal, investigation, proposal, or internal initiative. Teams can gather relevant documents, emails, notes, research, transcripts, and other materials into one controlled environment. Access is permission-based, so only the right people can see and use the information inside.

This matters because professional services work is rarely done by one person in one tool. A consulting team may have client emails in Outlook, research in browser tabs, deliverables in Google Drive or SharePoint, notes in a meeting transcript, and key context sitting in someone’s inbox. Without a shared, secure environment, valuable knowledge stays fragmented.

Medullar helps firms reduce that fragmentation without forcing a major data migration. Its universal search tool can search across connected apps and sources, helping teams find relevant information where it already lives. That means a team can locate prior work, surface client context, and reuse institutional knowledge faster, while still respecting permissions and access controls.

Just as important, Medullar is designed for private AI interactions. Instead of exposing confidential information to general purpose, publicly trained AI models (such as large language models (LLMs)/answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity), teams can work with AI inside a governed environment. AI can help summarize, compare, draft, validate, and search across approved project context, while keeping the work scoped to the right Space and the right users.

Consider a consulting team preparing for a client engagement. Before the project begins, the team creates a secure Space for the client work. They gather relevant emails, prior deliverables, client notes, web research, meeting transcripts, and internal reference materials. Instead of hunting across multiple systems, team members can search across everything from one place. They collaborate with each other alongside their frontier AI model of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc.) to help summarize the current state, identify gaps, compare findings, and draft sections of a client-ready output, all without exposing sensitive client information.

The same pattern applies to advisory, accounting, tax, investigations, and legal-adjacent services firms. A team working on a due diligence review, an RFP response, a case triage, a board briefing, or a client deliverable can use Medullar to organize the work, search across fragmented knowledge, and collaborate more efficiently.

This is especially useful for firms that are large enough to feel the pain of scattered knowledge, but not so large that they can tolerate slow, complex systems. Mid-market firms need tools that improve daily work without adding unnecessary overhead.

A secure AI collaboration platform should do more than answer questions. It should help teams work together around sensitive information, preserve client trust, and turn existing knowledge into better outcomes.

This is the image of Medullar's logo which says "Medulla"r in primarily dark purple letters and has a magnifying glass at the bottom of the m in the word Medullar.

That is where Medullar fits: helping professional services firms use AI safely, find and reuse information faster, and deliver higher-quality work with less friction. Interested in learning more? Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about our secure AI collaboration and productivity tool for your own small-to-mid-sized business and/or for one of your clients; or, ask our friends at Results Communications & Research to make an e-introduction on your behalf.

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Should My Organization Cut Back On Marketing During Uncertain Economic Times?

We agree with the wisdom of many marketing experts when it comes to whether or not businesses and organizations should spend less money and time on marketing during uncertain economic times — times when their customers want or need to spend less. And, that wisdom is that, in most cases, spending less money and time on marketing is only going to worsen your organization’s product sales/engagements for services when times get hard financially.

We mentioned “in most cases,” because in the situation where your organization offers a very high-ticket item that would be considered a huge luxury to MOST potential buyers, it would seem wise to cut back your spending on marketing because of the unlikelihood of clients making a purchase until the economy feels less uncertain. Still, you definitely will want to maintain some kind of marketing presence, even if it’s just continuing to post to social media, so people don’t forget about your brand and your products and services, and keep them on their “for-when-the-economy-improves” wish list.

But, getting back to the “wisdom” outlined in the first paragraph of this post, let’s first set the stage before we do. A period of economic decline could mean your consumer clients have been laid off, or if they are business owners who purchase business (B2B) services and products from you, their business may be taking a financial hit. Or, it could simply mean your customers are afraid of what the economic future holds, and believe it’s important that they are careful about spending. All of the aforementioned means that target audiences are likely spending money most on services and products they really need vs. something that might feel like a luxury, feel unnecessary, and/or feel like it could wait.

So, How Should I Spend Money On Marketing When The Economy Is Bad?

Whether yours is the type of product or service that people find or on which they get educated thru push and/or pull marketing, it’s really important you continue to maintain a presence so potential clients can find you or learn about you.

In fact, instead of cutting back on marketing efforts, you may actually want and need to spend more than you had been spending to be found by and/or to educate the right people that your product or service exists. In fact, today (5/12/25), Our Principal shared the above information on LinkedIn “Not liking what I’m seeing on the #GoogleAds/ #SEM / #paidsearch front for some of my clients right now (last 6 weeks), but much of it is what it is. It appears these two factors are currently at play for many Google Ads advertisers: 1) fewer people searching on relevant terms (relevant product and service terms in relevant geographies) — likely due to all our #economicuncertainty and #economicvolatility and people’s fears about spending money now (whether they be consumer or businesses) and
2) new advertisers creating and running #searchcampaigns because their own business volume is off and they are testing/trying Google Ads as a way to circumvent the drop in business/leads/inquiries, etc.”

Regardless of whether your organization plans to continue to spend the same amount of money and time on marketing, or decides to spend more money or less money, you still want to spend your time, energy and money wisely. Regardless of the direction in which you plan to take your organizations marketing, we recommend you go thru the following data analysis exercise to ensure you’re making the right move/to inform your next move.

This is a gray square image with black and turquoise text that reads, "2 sets of data your organization should be looking at to inform your marketing strategy during uncertain economic times." Under the aforementioned text it reads: 1) which marketing activities have driven the most traffic to your website in the last six months? 2) which marketing activities have most caused website visitors to take a desired action on your website, i.e., convert during the last  months?

Step 1: Employ Google Analytics To See Which Marketing Activities Have Driven The Most Traffic to Your Website In The Last 6 Months

As we showed how to do in this previous blog post about using your Google Analytics account to figure out how much search-engine traffic your website is getting, you can look at the “acquisition report (see image in aforementioned linked post)” within Google Analytics to determine which marketing activities have driven the most traffic to your website in the last 6 months. Looking at past results data is the best way to inform next marketing steps.

If you spent a lot of time on sending out e-newsletters/e-mail to grow your business and/or on a social media expert to post to social media on your organization’s behalf, and Google Analytics is not showing a lot of traffic coming to the website via those defined Google Analytics channels, then, when marketing money is tight, that’s a place to cut back and consider investing in other marketing activities that HAVE driven a lot of traffic. You get the picture.

Step 2: Employ Google Analytics Data Or Other Available Analytics Tools To See What Marketing Activities Are Converting

In addition to reviewing website traffic acquisition data, even more importantly, you’ll want to look at which marketing activities are “converting,” the best, i.e., causing site visitors to take a desired action on your website such as completing an inquiry form or using a phone # or e-mail address on your site to inquire or purchase something. Check out our previous blog post about conversion generation, plus, follow the steps below to assess whether or not various marketing activities are converting.

Use Events Information In Google Analytics To See What Marketing Channels Are Generating The Events That Are Most Valuable To You

Access the “Events” report in Google Analytics, then, add a dimension such as “first user Google Ads ad group name (if you want to get really granular and look at a specific marketing vehicle and drill down on it),” or more general ones like “first user campaign,” or “first user source/medium” to allow you to see all the broader categories of marketing vehicles that are generating conversions vs. getting as specific about certain ones, and the type of conversions those vehicles are generating.

See print screens below which show where and how to access such data in Google Analytics. In the case where you want to look at “first user source/medium” or “first user campaign” to get a big-picture vs. granular information about a specific form of marketing or advertising, like Google Ads, after selecting “Traffic Source,” select “Cross Channel” and, then, you can choose “first user source/medium” or “first user campaign” from Google Analytics’ list. (Important Note: keep in mind that you may be able to get such conversion data from another marketing analytics tool or platform, including advertising ones, such as CallRail or social media platforms.)

This image is a print screen taken of the events report in Google Analytics.
This is another image of the events report in Google Analytics -- a print screen that shows how to really drill down to see which specific marketing activities are working.

Once you’ve generated your list of events at the marketing vehicle level you want to look at, if you have a large number of events or conversions a website visitor can complete on your site, you may want to use the search tool, as shown below, to search on the conversions that are most important to you, such as phone calls. This will streamline your analysis and make it easier for you to assess conversion results.

This is a print screen of a Google Analytics report showing how you can use Google Analytics to see which marketing vehicles are causing key conversions/events on your website.

In keeping with step 1 above where we suggested focusing your marketing time and energy, during difficult economic times, on those activities that are driving traffic to your website, related to step 2 and analyzing conversion results, you’ll want to focus your marketing efforts on activities that are generating your most important conversions like inquiries and actual sales.

It’s important that you complete both the above step 1 and step 2 analyses because, while a certain marketing activity may drive a lot of traffic to your website, if it’s not “converting,” you’ll likely want to spend more time and energy on the activities that are “converting.” Each organization and business is different, and particularly if your product or service has a long sales cycle, and therefore, people do a lot of research and thinking before they purchase it, creating awareness thru website traffic can still be beneficial. So, you really need to consider your organization’s particular situation when drawing a conclusion about your marketing dollars and time. But, ultimately, at a minimum, your marketing activities during uncertain economic should drive website traffic, and ideally, conversions as well.

Don’t Rule Out New Marketing Vehicles During Uncertain Economic Times

We’d be remiss if we didn’t share that, if the above analyses don’t indicate you’re seeing desirable website traffic and conversion results from your existing marketing activities to inform a marketing strategy for our current economic times, maybe it’s time you consider a pilot or test of one or several new marketing vehicles. There could be a vehicle out there that would be just what you need to drive website traffic or conversions during a challenging financial time. We’re more than happy to help you figure that piece out!

Want & need more detail? Get more insights from a fellow marketing expert about how and why to market your organization during uncertain economic times!

Let’s Talk Marketing Strategy: How Should Your Particularly Organization Fine-Tune It During Difficult Economic Time?

We’re huge data slicers ‘n dicers, so if you need someone to help you look at the above-mentioned data on your organization’s behalf to help you develop an effective marketing strategy for these uncertain financial times, please reach out to our SEO Company/digital marketing agency, or use our calendar app to schedule a complimentary discussion of your marketing challenges and opportunities.

Not ready to schedule a no-obligation, complimentary appointment? Want & need more detail? Get more insights from a fellow marketing expert about how and why to market your organization during uncertain economic times!

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Celebrating Our Digital Marketing Agency’s 10-Year Anniversary: A Then and Now Story

Because one of the services my agency offers is PR — and we’ve had some decent success obtaining meaningful media coverage for some of our for-profit and non-profit clients (as documented in our Public Relations Portfolio) — of course, we reached out to The Patriot Ledger to see if they wanted to do a “then and now” story about our South Shore organization since they covered our story nine years back. We’re still awaiting news, literally and figuratively on that one, but we figured why not go ahead and share a similar version of that story on our blog using the highlights we shared with them? So, here goes…

Our Then Story

Here’s the telling of our story by a local reporter about a year after we launched our digital marketing agency, which eventually developed a specialty in search engine optimization (SEO) — which is why we often refer to our business as a Boston SEO company too!

I prefer to refer to my business as a digital marketing agency vs. a marketing consultancy because we do as much as hands-on work as we do developing & recommending marketing strategies.

Our story actually began with me launching my own WordPress website without the help of anyone else, and my officially hanging my digital marketing agency’s shingle via that site. And, if I knew as much as I know about WordPress and website development now as I knew then, I would have originally launched my site with WordPress.org (the platform that it’s on now) vs. WordPress.org, so I could use the many great WordPress plug-ins from the get-go! Or, I might also have considered Joomla instead, but owning a business and getting it right is all about the journey. And, you can’t learn what you need to learn without making a few mistakes and getting your hands dirty, right?

What’s been particularly challenging as an organization who helps others with their own marketing is, sometimes, as I’ve been known to share, “the cobbler’s kids have no shoes.” That means often we are so busy helping our clients with their marketing, we don’t have time for our own. The aforementioned said, we make every effort to have our firm’s own marketing activities (such as our website and social media profiles) serve as a shining example of how to maintain a strong online presence, and it’s great that we’ve been able to use our own business to test and try out various marketing activities — therefore, serve as a bit of a guinea pig — before we test or try something brand new with clients.

We’re proud that, over the last 10 years, we’ve literally written and posted over 140 marketing, SEO, and health-related (yes, health-related — keep reading to learn more) blog posts, and we’ve had a few guest or co-bloggers along the way too!

This image is a light gray square one with the words "Celebrating 10 Years Of Using Our Digital Marketing Agency/SEO Company As A Platform For Doing Good." The image contains some colorful confetti in the middle and the logo of our Boston Marketing Agency, Results Communications and Research at the bottom.

Our Now Story

I believe and hope my story can motivate and inspire others considering opening their own business. Before, or right after I launched my business, I was told by one individual who works with entrepreneurs that 80% of female marketing consultants fail. I refused to be a statistic, and regularly told myself that during the first 5 years, which were the hardest. It takes a good five years to get the word out there and have business come to you organically/naturally thru referrals, leads, and recommendations from others — made by former co-workers and clients, existing clients, other marketing consultants and agencies, and other organizations who serve the same vertical/target audiences whom you serve.

My philosophy and dreams when I started my business have remained pretty constant and I’m pleased to report I’ve followed them. I’m particularly proud that I’ve been able to continue to offer what I believe, based on research, are very reasonable rates to small for-profit and non-profit organizations. Due to my years of experience and expertise, clients have access to the same level of knowledge and skills that they’d have access to via a larger marketing agency, but at much lower rates than what a larger agency might offer. And, because we have significant experience in both traditional marketing AND digital marketing, we can offer the majority of services a larger, full-service agency can.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned that I’d love to share with others starting a business is this: don’t think of others in your space as competitors. Think of them as collaborators – people who serve the same target audiences who may need your services.

Our Impact: Local (South Shore of Boston), National, and International

  • I’ve helped a number of young adults who grew up on the South Shore, or elsewhere in MA, get hands-on experience that they were able to parlay into a post-graduation job elsewhere.
  • Related to the above, I’ve had the great fun and pleasure of working with my nephews, my brother, my brother-in-law, and my late sister-in-law on various client projects.
  • I’ve also met with a number of college or graduate school students looking to pick my brain about careers in marketing and learn from me – including one in my neighborhood who found me thru a Google search! Yes, because early on I recognized I needed to create a Google My Business Profile for my own business to be found by local, relevant searchers and this is something I regularly help my clients with now!
  • I’ve given a large number of pro bono hours to nonprofits as part of a totally free consulting/volunteer situation or discussion, or as part of their paid arrangement with me. I’ve had a number of very interesting local nonprofit clients, including ones in the faith-based space, arts and music space, ones serving vulnerable populations, ones serving individuals with special needs, and one providing financially challenged teens the opportunity to serve vulnerable teens abroad, and more! Some have an international impact.
  • One of my specialties is helping nonprofits apply for a Google Nonprofit Ad Grant. I, then, often stay on and manage the Grant for them – $120,000 in free Google Search advertising annually. I can explain more.
  • I also have a number of for-profit clients on the South Shore, but my client base is national and I have had clients in New Orleans, CA, Texas, and more!
  • I’ve served over 120 for-profit and non-profit organizations in the 10 years I’ve been running my digital marketing agency/SEO company.
  • I had no idea when I launched my business that I would become an expert in something that I only had very little knowledge of at the time when I launched my business – search engine optimization (SEO). Many of my referrals for or sub-contracted work come from other agencies, marketing consultants, and website designers who need to pull someone into their client work/project who knows how to get websites and Google My Business Profiles ranking well in Google via organic and paid search (Google Ads) SEO activities. I’ve become a self-taught SEO expert and very proud of it. I just read and watched everything I could get my hands on, took Google Ads certification classes, and attended free webinars. I still do that daily as Google’s Search Engine will be switching to an AI one, and I’m already helping my clients be proactive about that and prep for it (Google SGE).
  • As indicated above, while I do sub-contracted or referred work for other agencies, marketing consultants, and website designers, many of my clients are my own clients, and I usually have a plate of about 12 – 15 clients for whom I’m doing ongoing, digital marketing work for on a monthly basis, plus also juggling several one-off/one-time clients at the same time. At any given point in time, I’m normally doing work for about 17 – 25 clients with the help of some fabulous interns and associates, as they were/are available.
  • My clients are diverse – large, small, business-to-business, business-to-consumer, product businesses, service businesses. I’ve done a bunch of marketing work in the food space, legal space, education space, and more! 
  • I’ve given a number of free workshops for SCORE and other organizations serving entrepreneurs, and I’m a SCORE volunteer and have provided tons of free advice to entrepreneurs by meeting with them on a complimentary basis. And, related to all of this, I’ve had a blast partnering with fellow marketing experts to give presentations that address multiple marketing areas of expertise! Thank you! You know who you are!
  • I’m a data geek and SEO geek and proud of it. I’m a huge data slicer and dicer and that’s what separates me from a lot of others in my space. I always say I won’t encourage clients to start or continue with marketing activities that don’t make sense for them based on what data is showing. I consider myself to be my clients’ accountability partner, and I’m not afraid to give tough love when I need to. I’m not afraid to voice a different opinion than other marketers. If I think something isn’t going to work, or isn’t working, I speak up.
  • I’m also proud that my marketing agency survived our recent COVID-19 pandemic and was extremely proactive about providing helpful insights from the very start of the pandemic for marketers to appropriately respond to the pandemic/pivot, such as these blog posts about using paid ads during the pandemic and how to make sure your social media presence wasn’t offensive and was relevant.
  • I give back significantly to the community. I was involved with the Braintree Relay For Life Committee for a while, and now, I do a number of charity walks in addition to all the other beneficial work I mentioned above.

Our Focus On Health & Wellness

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ll know that I’ll throw in a good blog post about walking once in a while. You can use the categories search tool/drop-down menu to search on “walking” to see the various walking topics about which I’ve written.

Since my corporate marketing days, I’ve always loved to share health & wellness tips — whether they be with fellow employees as part of an internal communications role, or with members of a health plan I worked for, and from the get-go with Results Communications & Research, I’ve aimed to inspire those with health (and other challenges) to never give up, and keep fighting via my “Keep Up The Fight” website page. And, I recently put up a new blog post about an invisible disease with which many health warriors who have battled or are battling other forms of illness have to contend.

Our Thank You

My digital marketing agency/SEO company and I would have never made it this far without all the help of great collaborators, cheerleaders (friends, family, my husband Jay, and other fellow small business owners), and most importantly, our clients who looked to us for expert marketing guidance and assistance. We have many clients with whom we’ve served as an outsourced marketing department for years, and we thank you for your faith in us! We’ve so enjoyed being a part of your business family! We also thank those who we haven’t had the opportunity to work with for as long as some of our long-term clients, but have enjoyed or are enjoying being a part of your organization’s success story.

What’s Next

I don’t know what the future holds for Results Communications & Research, but I’m excited about what’s to come! And, I know I will continue to try to give back as much as possible with the platform that this fun, educational, and interesting business provides!

Want To Benefit From The Marketing Services Of A Digital Marketing Agency/SEO With A Long Tenure And Who Gives Back?

Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about how we can help your organization create awareness and/or drive inquiries and sales via our outsourced marketing and/or strategic marketing planning services.

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Is Social Media Worth It?

On average, 110 individuals a month enter the question posed in our blog post title into Google. That’s over 1,300 individuals a year wondering whether they should be investing their time, energy, and money in social media.

Obviously, our Boston digital marketing agency and SEO company doesn’t know the intent behind the posing of this question. Are the searchers posing this question related to their personal use of social media or use of social media for their business? We’re guessing it’s a combination of both. That said, the purpose of this blog post is not to answer the question of how much time you should spend on social media related to your personal life, but rather, with a new year about to get underway, whether you should continue to invest time, energy, and money related to posting on social media and how much.

How Much Time & Energy Should My Organization Spend On Social Media?

The answer to the above is it all depends on the nature of your organization and the products and services you offer, plus the social media results you’ve seen to-date. I remember when organizations first started using social media to promote their businesses — I recall that happening in the early 2010’s. Both for-profit and non-profit organizations felt that if they didn’t jump on the social media bandwagon, they’d be left behind, have a huge competitive disadvantage, and maybe suffer great financial consequences. At the time I was in a marketing role at a health care organization, and quite honestly, I did champion the use of social media to create awareness of my organization’s services, but I don’t think I ever believed that social media was going to have an immediate, large impact on sales results. In many cases, as discussed below, social media has a less immediate impact and is more about creating awareness.

As a marketer, while I’ve often felt hesitant to voice the above and related thoughts about social media to other marketers, I’ve always been nervous and apprehensive about organizations moving too much of their marketing team’s or agency’s time and/or budget away from other traditional and digital marketing activities, and into organic social media activities vs. paid social media ones and/or investing too heavily in organic social media. Why? Because I just wasn’t seeing organic social media vs. social media ads moving the “conversion” needle, i.e., causing desired actions by target audiences, particularly when they visited an organization’s website.

Website Data Doesn’t Lie

For years now, I’ve been able to use various forms of Google Analytics to track either my employer’s or my clients’ website visitors — how they arrived on the site and what actions they took there. In many cases, very regular social media posting was driving very little traffic to their websites, and the traffic that was visiting their sites (due to clicking on a link to their website shared via a social media post or profile) wasn’t taking a desired action like completing a lead or inquiry form, or buying a product or service.

2024 Recommended Social Media Use By Businesses

So, what does that mean for organizations and their use of social media in the new year?

  • Consider how much time and money you have to spend on all forms of marketing, not just organic social media posting. Whether it be internal staff or an outside marketing consultant or agency that does the work, how many hours and what marketing $ budget will you have to spend in the new year for all forms of marketing?
  • Based on 2023’s time and $$ spend on social media (fees to agencies and/or consultants for their organic social media post work vs. social media advertising work and/or advertising buy), how much of your 2024 marketing budget and time would be spent on organic social media posting vs. social media advertising, and does it warrant that percentage of your overall marketing budget and time being spent on it? So, how will you know if it’s warranted? Ask yourself the following:
    • Do any sales or leads tracking systems, including Google Analytics (GA4) indicate that you are getting a sufficient number of inquiries or sales to justify the time and $$ associated with organic social media posting?
    • Do you often learn anecdotally from new and prospective clients that they learned about you on social media due to your posts or profile?
    • Does the product or service that you offer have a long lead time, i.e., do target audiences often take a long time and do a lot of research about your products and services before they make a decision, and therefore, is awareness creation among target audiences an important first step in the sales process?
    • Is your product or service one that target audiences tend to investigate on social media such as a consumer goods or consumer service one, like jewelry, clothing, a hairdresser, or a restaurant?

If you can answer “yes” to any of the questions above, then it’s likely you still want to have a fairly robust presence on social media in 2024 and, therefore, do want to continue to put out a steady stream of social media posts on the various platforms in which you participate. Keep in mind that daily posting is likely unnecessary and may actually be considered by target audiences as annoying. 3-5 posts a week is likely the ideal cadence for most organizations posting on social media.

Do I Need To Have A Social Media Profile On All Social Media Platforms?

The answer to the above is “no,” and if you do, it’s likely because you haven’t taken the time to really understand your particular target audiences and their social media preferences. Which profiles are they most likely to hang out on based on their age and interests — and are they personal platforms vs. professional ones like LinkedIn? Are there particular platforms like “X,” (formerly Twitter) or TikTok that your target audiences won’t/don’t visit and on which your organization wouldn’t want to have a profile simply because of all the negative press and sentiment associated with those platforms?

Add “first user source/medium” as a second dimension to your Google Analytics traffic acquisition report to determine which forms of social media are driving the most traffic to your website and/or your Google Analytics conversions/events reports (and add same “first user source/medium” dimension) to see which site visitors coming from social media are taking desired actions on your site. That will help you determine which platforms you should continue to post to most regularly, if at all (although don’t completely vacate a platform without encouraging visitors to follow you on another social media platform).

The Social Media Platform You Should Always Be Posting To

Being the SEO geeks and SEO experts that we are, we always say to our existing and prospective clients, “always think of your Google My Business Profile as another form of social media.” As we explain in our blog post about ranking locally, when Google decides to serve up your website in search engine results for relevant terms, depending on whether or not a geographic (city, town) or “near me” term was included in the search phrase, Google might serve up your website or it might serve up your Google My Business Profile.

To keep your Google My Business Profile ranking as well as possible in search results, be sure to keep it fresh/current, as Google rewards such profiles the way it does websites.

Need Help Related to 2024 Strategic Marketing Planning?

Need help figuring out where and how to spend your 2024 marketing $$ and time? Reach out for a complimentary discussion of your marketing challenges and opportunities.

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Why Your Marketing Agency Should Be Both A Strategic Partner and Accountability Partner

A former manager of mine used to say I was a great “bird dogger.” Believe me, it took some painful lessons to realize that just because I assumed co-workers were moving time-sensitive/critical-path work forward, it didn’t mean they were. Sometimes, particularly when you are just starting out in the corporate work world, you need to get “bitten” a few times, to acquire and employ new skills.

Getting back to the bird dogging. At our Boston-area digital marketing agency and SEO company, we believe that any and all marketing agencies and marketing consultants should serve as both strategic partners and accountability partners. Read on to learn why it’s so critical to sales, marketing, and SEO success, and to assess whether or not your marketing agency or consultant serves as both types of partners.

Why Your Marketing Agency Must Be A Strategic Partner

Whether you’re a small business owner with no marketing staff and you’ve outsourced your marketing strategy and/or your hands-on marketing work to a marketing agency or consultant, or you’re a mid-sized business that has a small in-house marketing team, it’s likely you and your team are far too busy to stay on top of cutting-edge marketing tactics and tools. Particularly as pertains to digital marketing, available opportunities/tactics change constantly, and there are such a large number of broad digital marketing categories (as indicated on our digital marketing services website page), that it would be impossible for you and your team to be experts in all available digital marketing topics, like SEO, social media advertising, Google Ads, etc.

I’ve mentioned this numerous times in blog posts and on Results C & R’s website pages, but when I launched my digital marketing agency and SEO company in 2014, I launched it with this tagline and philosophy: “Maximizing Results Through Research-Supported Marketing.” I always say I will never encourage an existing or prospective client to begin or continue with a marketing tactic that doesn’t make sense for them, based on secondary or primary data. That’s why I regularly ask prospective clients to let me look at their Google Analytics data before they engage me for work, and that’s why, for many of my clients, I track their digital marketing KPIs on a monthly basis and review results with them. Then, we talk about implications and what tactics we’ll put in place/what steps we’ll take to try to move the sales, inquiries, engagement, etc. (conversions) needle by the next time we meet. Often, it’s tiny steps, but steps we think make sense even if they only lead to slow progress as far as conversions go. Progress is progress, right?

Ask Yourself The Following To Determine If Your Marketing Agency Is A Strategic Partner:

  • Does my marketing agency regularly look at data available in various marketing tools and analytics tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to determine which current marketing tactics are most effective and what the “health” of your website looks like?
  • Does your marketing agency document the above results/analysis and meet with you and your team regularly to review implications?
  • Does your marketing agency try to learn on your dime — therefore, are they charging you for the time they spend on educating themselves on a new marketing tactic, tool, or opportunity? They shouldn’t.
  • Does your marketing agency let you know if there is something you aren’t doing right and/or could be handling better on the marketing front, regardless of whether they are doing work for you related to it?
  • Does your marketing agency let you know when they don’t think a particular marketing tactic/opportunity is the right fit for your organization?
  • Does your marketing agency only recommend services they themselves offer, or will they recommend services/opportunities from which you’d benefit, even if it means they need to collaborate with/pull in another expert or strategic partner or refer you to somebody else?
  • Does your marketing agency have a number of collaborative and strategic relationships with other partners/subject matter experts (SMEs)?
  • Is your marketing agency regularly recommending new possible marketing opportunities to you?
  • Related to the above bullet, do you get the sense that your marketing agency wants to use you as a “guinea pig” to try out the latest-fad marketing activity or tool, even if it might not be the right fit for your organization? If so, that’s certainly not a win-win situation!

Why Your Marketing Agency Needs To Be Your Accountability Partner

So, here’s the questions you should ask to determine whether or not your marketing agency or consultant is a true accountability partner and the real tie-in to bird dogging reference at the beginning of this post.

  • If your marketing agency needs you to review something or provide information to move their work for you forward, do they reach out regularly for status updates and to remind you to ensure critical deadlines are met?
  • Does your marketing agency send you an e-mail after a meeting documenting what work you or your team are responsible for completing before your next meeting?
  • When your marketing agency senses that you are unable (for a variety of reasons) to review documents, provide information to inform their work for you, or complete hands-on work yourself, do they reach out and offer to help or to talk you thru what’s needed via a phone or Zoom call? Do, they do the aforementioned on a timely basis so that time-sensitive deadlines and deliverables are met?

I was talking with fellow marketing consultants this week and shared this famous line from the movie Jerry Maguire related to effective client-agency relationships, i.e., working collaboratively to move work forward, both successfully and efficiently: “Help Me, Help You.”

Does Your Marketing Agency Act Like Part Of Your Team?

Ultimately to determine if your existing marketing agency or marketing consultant or a prospective one is the right fit, in addition to the strategic-partner and accountability-partner questions above, you should ask yourself, does my agency treat me with respect and like a partner. Do I feel like my agency is as committed or even more committed than I am to my organization’s success? Does may agency feel like part of our team, and in some ways like family? Meaning, they’d do anything for you to help you succeed and only want the best for you?

I hope and believe that clients or prospective clients asking themselves any of the many questions outlined above arrive at answers that make them confident that the Results C & R team is both a strategic and an accountability partner and that we have our clients’ best interests are at the heart of everything we do!