North Star Digital
In this case study you’ll learn exactly how to overcome one of the biggest challenges as a modern business owner: successfully delegating your time-consuming marketing work to proven experts, to increase sales and free up your schedule.
Letting go of your own work and progress can be risky (and complicated). But if you want your business to compete at the top level, then most of your time as the owner must be spent developing the business—not worrying about what your next creatives are going to look like.
Delegating your marketing work successfully starts with picking the right people to take over your campaigns.
And today, you’ll find out how the director of a B2B business called Omix managed to delegate his marketing work, and increase his monthly online sales revenue by 29%, while saving over 20+ hours of his time per week.
All he needed to do was understand the components of a marketing team that drives real results, instead of risking it with any agency or marketing partner setup.
Read on to learn everything you need to make the right call when it comes time for you to pick the right experts to help grow your business.
Our success story today is Omix, a company that sells instant beverage powder and beverage dispensers to other businesses.
Like many modern entrepreneurs, Omix’s director started out managing his online marketing campaigns from scratch. And things were going well, as his online campaigns were driving over 1 million THB per month on average.
But after dealing with some bumpy months where revenue started to drop, he realized that looking after the campaigns was taking way too much of his time away from being the owner of his own company. Plus he didn’t have a solution to get results back up.
The next step for him was then to hire an agency to delegate the work to. But as you may have experienced firsthand or heard about through other business owners, it can be incredibly difficult to find people who can actually get the job done better than you can.
Omix’s previous experience with an agency didn’t work out, and the director took back all the campaigns to manage himself.
Here’s why the partnership didn’t succeed:
Fundamentally, successful delegation happens when an agency/marketing partner helps you:
When either of those points aren’t met, delegating the work can be painful, because you’ll risk losing the progress you’ve made.
And when results aren’t picking up, you’ll likely get back into micromanaging the campaigns, or even taking back all the work--which takes you right back where you started.
The most common reasons why handing over your marketing campaigns doesn’t work well are: the agency/partner isn’t qualified enough, and the business owner doesn’t fully know how to identify a qualified team before making the decision to start working with them.
This is mainly why 78% of 400+ business owners we’ve worked with don’t trust that agencies can drive real sales revenue for them.
The bad news is you ultimately can’t control whether an agency can drive results.
But the great news is you can take control of your business’ growth by learning the components of a high-performing marketing team, before deciding to delegate.
In the next section, we’ll be revealing the exact team structure we used to improve Omix’s campaigns--the same, proven structure we used to generate over 1.104 billion THB in sales revenue for our clients so far.
The table above is essentially the team setup that we use to drive the most sales revenue possible on a daily basis.
And if you’ve been managing your own marketing campaigns from the ground up, it’s not hard to see why marketing takes up so much of your time: You’re doing 5 jobs at once!
We’ve also included the average salaries of the different positions in case you wanted to know what forming your own in-house marketing team will cost on average.
But while hiring an agency that already has these people working for them is generally cheaper than hiring + training everybody yourself, the key is you need to understand how each position works, so you can stay in control when you are choosing who to work with.
So here’s a breakdown of exactly what each position does and how they collectively work to drive more sales revenue for your business:
1. Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
Also called the Marketing Director in some setups, the CMO leads the marketing team that you are delegating the work to.
They are ultimately accountable for your results, i.e. whether you’re making money from the partnership or not.
The easiest way to spot whether you’re talking to the right CMO is whether they have a proven track record of successfully growing business like yours with digital marketing.
And by businesses like yours, we mean businesses in a similar industry, size and budget to yours.
CMOs who only have experience leading teams under bigger budgets, for example, may lack the skills to grow an ambitious SME looking to get to the next level.
That’s why looking for a team lead with a proven track record in your business segment ensures the best chance that you’ll benefit from their work.
Since they’re in charge, you’ll be assured that the CMO will continuously be training their team to improve on skills that stay on the cutting edge, which is also to your benefit.
So when you’re looking for an agency/partner to work with, ask for the CMO’s track record and mindset before making a final decision.
2. Marketing Manager
This is the spearhead of the day-to-day work of creating and managing your marketing campaigns.
Marketing Managers both oversee your results and ensure team development is consistent with the CMO’s vision to stay on the cutting edge of digital marketing.
Like the CMO who needs a track record in leading teams to grow businesses, your ideal Marketing Manager needs to have experience in generating real sales revenue for businesses like yours.
Think of it as the CMO leads the overall vision to keep increasing sales, while the Marketing Manager is the one who ensures that a strategy that reflects that vision is put into work by the rest of the team each day.
This connection between the CMO and Marketing Manager is often the difference between agencies that are happy to be held accountable for your sales revenue, and agencies that just report how many impressions or engagements you received.
3. Facebook/ Digital Marketing Specialist
The Specialist(s) are part of the team members who do the nitty gritty of it all. They work closely with designers to plan your digital marketing ads, monitor your campaigns, test for better ways to drive revenue and communicate with you weekly.
If you’ve been managing your own marketing campaigns, you’ll know that these aspects take several hours out of your work week. So these are the people who will be saving you the most time.
Agencies normally recruit Digital Marketing Specialists as high-potential employees with a passion for marketing and growth. Led under the guidance of the Marketing Manager and CMO, they progress from working under their leadership.
For you, this means you’ll be getting a team of ever-growing marketers working with a sales-driven mindset. They’ll always be looking for the next best thing, instead of following routine work.
4. Art Director + Designer
Depending on the size of the team, your design work will either be done by designers or the art director themselves.
In a traditional agency, Designers receive briefs for creatives from the Specialist or Copywriter (covered below) and produce the designs. But in a sales-driven team, the Designer’s role goes beyond just designing on-brand content.
Your ideal Art Director or Designer needs to know how to design ads based on visuals that are most likely to drive sales for your business. They need a results and data-based approach over a preference-based one, and need to be held accountable for the results of their creatives.
This ability to design for different audiences, and to identify what works and doesn’t work visually, are the key differences between designs that just look good and designs that take your revenue to the next level.
5. Copywriter
Like Designers, Copywriters are also responsible for creating ads that result in more purchases for your business. But they are entirely accountable for the text side of your ads: the caption, the ad copy and often the briefs for the designer to produce into ads.
In addition to creative writing skills, your ideal Copywriter must be someone who has mastered how to write copy that drives sales.
The skills and abilities to read data from past ads and learn from their own work are also keys to ensuring your Copywriter is working to drive sales for you every single day.
So these are the components of a high-performing marketing team. To get a better picture of how they work together, here’s a visual representation of how the whole team should work on a weekly basis:
Again, while no structure is absolute, this is the team setup and working process that has worked wonders for us so far, including our efforts for Omix.
On average, 23 hours of deep work is what it takes per week to keep increasing sales revenue while saving the business owner’s time.
The objective of this structure is to get everybody from the top-down fully focused on turning the time taken into measurable results.
The CMO and Marketing Manager develop a strategy to increase sales, the Specialists work with Copywriters and Designers to make the weekly ads (based on the strategy) happen, and the ads are handed back over to the Specialist to set up and manage.
Keep in mind though that this layout is highly dependent on the skills of the team members and leadership of the CMO and Manager.
The above layout is generally enough to get 3-5 new ads out per week, which is the minimum amount of ads we recommend to maintain and improve results consistently. You can use this layout for reference when you’re picking out who you want to work with.
However, this process (and any process, really) will never be successful without this 1 common understanding: Everybody in the team needs to be fully aware of the primary KPI that increases your sales.
Whether you measure sales by direct purchases from your website, or by increasing the amount of messages and converting them into buying customers, the whole team needs to be on the same page. And they all need to know how to drive that KPI.
Let’s say the CMO says your team needs to drive more messages to get more sales overall, because more messages means more potential customers.
But if the rest of the team are too busy worrying about how much engagement or views their posts will get, for example, the strategy will never be effective enough for your business to reach its full potential.
This focus on 1 primary KPI along with the team structure was the backbone of our success for Omix.
And in the following section, you’ll see exactly how both aspects were applied to improve Omix’s marketing campaigns, and allowed for the director to fully step out of doing marketing work.
When Omix’s director started working with us, his goals with us were to:
1. Seamlessly hand over all of his Facebook marketing campaigns without wasting his money and time, and
2. Improve the results of the campaigns.
The first thing we did was to ensure a smooth handover from the director. This common understanding we established between the director and our team would then become the foundation for improving results.
We did this by:
a. Having a business/marketing audit with the director - to understand the current state of the business, as well as the KPI that drove him the most sales.
Since the director built his own campaigns from scratch, he was the best person to tell us what worked and didn’t work for him. This data was crucial to ensuring a smooth handover.
The important part to note here is that it was a handover, not a plan to start everything from scratch.
When you’re choosing someone to delegate your marketing work to, look for someone who asks for your current progress and builds on it, not someone who reinvents the wheel.
Many times agencies take over a client’s existing marketing campaigns and try to fit the work into a one-size-fits-all strategy or package.
The truth is this often does more harm than good, especially if you have campaigns that are already generating sales.
Having the agency continue where you left off and improving the campaigns means you won’t risk your revenue dropping immediately after handing over the work.
And this is where the business audit with Omix came in. After the discussion, we agreed that our primary KPI was to generate more Messages to the brand’s Facebook page.
Omix’s director drove success with messages by treating the people who send messages as leads.
That meant we focused on driving more messages to the Facebook page and improving the quality of people who sent messages. Omix already had a skilled internal sales team to convert these people into buying customers.
And while messages were our main KPI, the success of our campaigns was measured by the increased revenue from our campaigns. This was the best way for us to see whether the people we were targeting to send messages were leading to more revenue for the business.
This goes back to the 1 KPI mindset, which everybody in the team applied. Everyone was focused on driving messages to increase sales.
This was the strong foundation that helped Omix’s director delegate his campaigns to us successfully.
b. Developing a powerful Kick-off strategy - based on having the owner answer a brand questionnaire + holding 1 introductory meeting to ensure we had everything we needed to carry out the campaigns.
That way the director wouldn’t need to step in and micromanage, and we could continue right where he left off.
The brand questionnaire especially helped us better understand the brand and what it needs. And internally, it served as a reference point for the team to always remind themselves what the client’s objectives are.
c. Taking over Omix’s Facebook marketing campaigns - with the goal of first maintaining results, and then scaling the budget to increase sales revenue.
An important note here was we only took in the campaigns after we knew for sure that we could retain existing results for the director. If we knew we couldn’t help him but worked with him anyway, we’d be setting him up for a loss of progress, time and money.
So after the first 2 steps were taken care of, we used our winning team structure to work based on what worked and didn’t work when Omix’s director was running the campaigns himself.
His campaigns were on a revenue decline before coming to us, so our first mission was to stabilize the revenue. After we successfully helped bring sales back up, we focused on improving results.
d. Daily performance tracking - to keep track of all sales on a daily basis so we can monitor all progress, and whether progress was made or not.
This was also how Omix’s director had the peace of mind of keeping track of his results without having to step in and micromanage.
We filled in the number of messages we received each day, and Omix’s team filled out daily sales. Monitoring these together lets us know whether our KPI-driving focus on messages was making them more money.
e. Monthly performance reports - where we recap the progress of the current month, and how to improve in the next month.
Instead of regular marketing reports that show secondary metrics like impressions, clicks or reach, these reports focused mainly on the agreed KPI of messages, and sales revenue.
The purpose of the reports was to continuously align our strategy with the director, and keep him informed of strategic changes.
The reports were scheduled, so he knew exactly when to expect them and manage his time without the hassle of having to step in for hours at a time.
We also did all of our marketing work in the director’s own Facebook advertising account, meaning he could see everything we were doing if he ever wanted to check. And the best part was he could still own all of his data, even after delegating his marketing campaigns.
When we took over Omix’s marketing campaigns, his results were on a decline. Within 1 month of starting work on the campaigns, we brought results back and increased monthly online sales revenue to 1,200,000 baht.
In addition to improving the results, the success of our team structure plus our 1-KPI focus means Omix’s director now has a strategic partner he can trust.
CEOs are already overworked by nature. Average CEOs work 62.5 hours a week, according to this Harvard study, and that’s not even including managing marketing campaigns.
And by saving 23 valuable hours worth of time by delegating his marketing work to a proven agency partner, Omix’s director can finally focus on improving his business and staying ahead of the crowd.
Delegating your marketing campaigns to someone you don’t know or trust can be a huge challenge to overcome. And it can hurt when it doesn’t work out.
But Omix’s story is an example of how successful delegation can open up endless opportunities for businesses to grow further.
The director’s final decision was made because he had full clarity about what he needed, and found the right revenue-focused agency partner to hand the work over to.
And if you keep the points in this case study in mind before making your final decision, you’ll be equipped with everything you need to find the right marketing partner for your business too.
