Have you ever been to one of those awkward company Christmas lunches? Once when I attended such an affair while seated next to an executive there was quite a shock. I worked in digital marketing, so when he said, “We aren’t doing any marketing,” I was stunned. The company was spending about $30,000 a month on Google Adwords campaigns.
He either was not aware of this monthly spend or was absent-minded in that particular moment. How could a key executive not know the company was spending $360,000 per year on Google Adwords?
One could probably reason that his lack of intimate awareness of these digital campaigns and the cost involved resulted from how busy he was, the fact the digital marketing was mostly executed by an off-site digital marketing agency and that he had very little direct interaction with those people. The digital marketing agency was located in another region of the country and a different time zone. Our company had hired them some years back to make updates to our website, run the social media accounts, handle the search visibility and manage the Google Adwords campaigns.
There wasn’t much regular communication between our company and the digital marketing agency. Adding to this gap was the fact that the senior executive often delegated work he was not very interested in to another executive. This guy was usually swamped with operations work and didn’t have much bandwidth for digital marketing. He also was not well versed in the field. The digital marketing agency sent us monthly reports with the Google Adwords details such as the monthly spend, visits to the website, spend per location, etc. but no one was reading them closely, except for myself.
Both executives were very busy and neither asked me about the Google Adwords account very often. The operations guy would sometimes tell me to instruct the digital marketing agency to make changes to specific campaigns, but that was usually the extent of the communication.
Google Adwords spend can easily balloon out of control — anyone who has run such campaigns knows this. So what was the mistake? One might venture that effective leadership frequently communicates about disciplined cost controls. Communicating frequently about them embeds cost controls into organizational culture so all employees pay attention to costs and report back frequently so the executives know what is happening. Another mistake is hiring a digital marketing agency but not communicating with the staff there on a regular basis to discuss costs and results.
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