Marketing assets include your Facebook Ad Account, Google Ad Account, Google Analytics Account, Google Tag Manager (GTM) Account, Facebook Pixel, and other tools and resources. These assets are critical to your business’s online visibility, customer reach, and overall growth. As such, you must have complete control over these assets.
The Consequences of Not Owning Your Marketing Assets
Not owning your business marketing assets can result in several serious repercussions. For instance, if a third-party agency has control over your assets and they decide to terminate their services, your business could be left in a precarious situation.
- Losing Access: If the agency owns your marketing assets, you could lose access to these crucial tools, causing immediate disruptions to your campaigns.
- Data Loss: A more severe consequence would be losing all the historical data associated with these assets. The loss of this data can be detrimental, as it contains insights that can guide future marketing decisions.
- Starting from Scratch: In the worst-case scenario, you might have to start from scratch with a new account, which means losing all the momentum, reputation, and audience segmentation that you’ve built up over time.
The Benefits of Paying Directly for Ad Spend
To further promote transparency and control in your digital marketing efforts, we recommend that businesses pay directly for their ad spending through Facebook or Google. This practice has two significant benefits.
- Transparency: By paying directly, you clearly understand where your marketing budget is going. There’s no room for any hidden markups that an agency might add.
- Control: Direct payment gives you control over your marketing budget. You can increase, decrease, or pause ad spending based on your business needs without going through an intermediary.
Case Study: The High Cost of Not Owning Your Marketing Assets
The Introduction
Our client had endured a series of disappointing engagements with marketing agencies. Each followed a similar pattern: grand promises followed by steep fees and, ultimately, underwhelming performance. After severing ties with one such agency, she decided to take a more personal approach, hiring what she believed was a trusted family friend to manage her Facebook advertising campaigns.
The Problem
Relying on their relationship, she trusted this individual to handle her digital marketing assets responsibly. This person set up a new Facebook ad account and Pixel under his agency’s name. Over a year, he demonstrated poor performance in managing the ads.
When our client realized that her “friend” was not performing adequately and was pocketing her hard-earned money, she terminated their agreement. However, she hit a brick wall because she wasn’t the ad account and pixel owner. The agency refused to surrender ownership of these assets, leaving her without access to a year’s worth of crucial data, representing a substantial portion of her investment.
The Impact
The data collected over a year could have been invaluable for a new agency in setting up effective ad campaigns. However, she was denied access to this critical information due to the lack of ownership. The situation inflicted heavy losses on the client monetarily and in terms of wasted time and missed opportunities.
Consequently, she was forced to start anew, investing more time and money and experiencing disruption to her business.
The Solution
This problematic experience taught our client a crucial lesson about owning one’s marketing assets. Had she owned her Facebook ad account and pixel, she could have smoothly transitioned by removing the old agency and adding a new one without losing data or momentum.
She now realizes that owning these marketing assets enables a seamless change in digital marketing services while retaining a continuous record of valuable user data, crucial for her business’s growth.
The Conclusion
This case warns other businesses about the pitfalls of not owning your marketing assets. Ensuring direct control over these vital tools safeguards your investment, maintains continuous access to essential customer data, and facilitates seamless transitions between marketing service providers.
This client’s story also serves as a reminder that trust in personal relationships should never replace diligence in managing business assets. Decisions involving your business’s digital assets need to be informed, careful, and always in the best interest of your business.
The importance of working with a company that believes in transparency and honesty
At MRB Media, our approach to doing business is built on the twin pillars of transparency and honesty. We believe in empowering our clients by ensuring they own their ad accounts, pixels, and other marketing assets. This principle secures their business independence and provides a clear window into the performance of their advertising campaigns. Clients can review their ad performance anytime, offering a real-time check on our service delivery. We supplement this transparency with regular marketing meetings—monthly or quarterly—where we discuss and align on marketing goals, compare them against the results achieved so far, and strategize on future action plans. Our commitment to transparency means our clients always know how their investments are performing and what value they derive from our partnership.