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Frequently Asked Questions

Hi, we’re TPM, and we’re pleased to meet you. Here are the answers to questions we’re often asked as visitors get to know us.
  • Working with a Third-Party Marketing Agency
  • AI in Marketing
  • Working with TPM

Working with a Third-Party Marketing Agency

What Do Agencies Do?

The right marketing agency helps you:

  • Fill gaps in expertise, resources, skills, or time
  • Translate business goals into actionable marketing plans
  • Build and run campaigns to drive awareness, leads, product launches, sales, and revenue
  • Accelerate time to market with proven processes and frameworks

(Here’s a list of TPM’s services.)

Yes. A strong external agency doesn’t replace your team — it levels them up.

  • Technology: An agency can help your team adopt or optimize the use of marketing and automation tools
  • Maturity: Experienced agencies equip your team with strategies, processes, and best practices proven to work in your industry orvertical

Do I Need an External Agency?

Some common signs you need external marketing support:

  • Your messaging doesn’t land — prospects don’t understand what you do or why you’re different
  • Your sales team wants more leads, cleaner messaging, and content that drives deals
  • Your site underperforms — minimal conversions, poor traffic, low rankings

If you have clear goals, access to your analytics/CRM/automation platforms, an internal owner for approvals and communications, and you can provide access to SMEs when needed, you’re ready. The right agency can help refine processes and modernize your stack.

How Do I Choose an Agency?

Here’s a quick checklist for evaluating a digital marketing agency:

  • Do they understand your industry, competitors, and audience?
  • Can they quickly grasp your ICP, value prop, and differentiation?
  • Do they offer strategy or just execution?
  • What level of experience does the team you’ll work with have?
  • Do they have specialists in content, design, SEO/AEO, paid media, etc.?

Alignment comes from open communication and mutual accountability. Create a unified plan with timelines, priorities, and dependencies. Set shared KPIs, maintain regular check-ins, establish a clear approval workflow, and give the agency access to your systems and insights.

What About Pricing?

Pricing varies by scope, specialization, and engagement type. Typical ranges are $5-$15k/month for ongoing retainers and $10-$75k+ for standalone projects, depending on complexity. Here’s a list of TPM’s packages.

Projects are best for one-off deliverables, like websites, branding, or audits. Retainers are ideal for ongoing needs like SEO, AEO, content, and demand generation — where consistency and long-term optimization matter. A hybrid model often works best for tech companies: start with a project and shift to a retainer to maintain momentum.

Your contract outlines deliverables, timelines, roles, tools, and success metrics. It generally excludes ad spend, software subscriptions, and work outside the defined scope — unless added later. (At TPM, you’ll work with senior leaders and experts — no juniors. We offer weekly or bi-weekly cadence reporting based on your needs.)

When Will I See Results?

Timelines vary. Paid ads and CRO can show results in weeks; SEO/AEO and content marketing typically take 3-6 months for meaningful impact; brand and GTM programs often unfold over a quarter or two.

A marketing agency should add value in two fundamental ways:

  • Efficiency gains: Faster campaign execution, increased content output, reduced internal workload, more consistent lead flow, higher campaign velocity
  • Strategic uplift: Improved audience engagement, shorter sales cycles, increased close rates, sales and marketing alignment, more accurate ICPs/personas, and segmentation

Typical KPIs include organic traffic, rankings, lead quality, conversion rates, ad performance, engagement metrics, pipeline contribution, and revenue impact.

Yes! The right agency provides clearer messaging, stronger enablement content, more qualified leads, and targeted campaigns that help prospects progress faster and with less friction.

AI in Marketing

Understanding AI in Marketing

Answer Engine Optimization helps your content rank in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. It focuses on structured, concise, authoritative answers that AI models can easily surface and cite, rather than focusing on using keywords to attract traffic from search engines.

Technical and executive buyers increasingly use AI to research solutions. Chatbots, voice assistants, and AI search tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity) summarize information to answer questions rather than provide links. Making sure they know who you are and what you do is vital to maintaining traffic and leads as search patterns evolve.

Use structured, Q&A-friendly content, authoritative sources, clear explanations, and up-to-date information. Aim for direct, scannable answers that AI models can easily interpret and present to users.

AI in B2B Marketing Strategy

AI can assist with audience targeting, personalization, content creation, A/B testing, and performance optimization – but human oversight remains critical to developing high-quality campaigns and content. TPM’s Irene Schouwenaar offers guidance on AI challenges.

Niche audiences need precision. AI can be a valuable resource for summarizing documentation, transforming technical specs into value messaging, and producing persona-specific versions of complex content — as long as you provide:

  • Clear ICP descriptions
  • Detailed product descriptions
  • Industry terminology
  • Pain points and use cases
  • Messaging pillars and tone guidelines/li>

TPM has extensive experience creating audience-specific content using AI tools.

AI doesn’t replace human marketing experts — it accelerates them. Risks only appear when teams use AI-generated content without reviewing — then AI can:

  • Use outdated or hallucinated facts
  • Miss subtle compliance or regulatory nuances
  • Create content that doesn’t address audience pains

That’s why AI + human expertise = best results. Andrew Kita of TPM explains here.

AI in Lead Generation

AI can help identify high-intent prospects, personalize outreach at scale, automatically score leads, and deliver targeted content that matches buyer needs — resulting in more qualified inbound and outbound opportunities.

AI can analyze historical performance, detect patterns in buyer behavior, score account fit, predict likelihood of conversion, and surface opportunities for personalized follow-up — giving you clearer visibility and stronger results.

Yes. With better targeting, personalized content, and predictive insights, AI helps you deliver more relevant experiences that move prospects through the funnel faster. AI also ensures consistency across your website, case studies, product sheets, sales decks, paid media, email campaigns, and partner materials — making your message tighter and more repeatable.

Preparing for AI Adoption

You’ll need clean data, clear goals, secure governance policies, the right tools, and internal alignment on how AI will support — not replace — your workflows. Read TPM’s guide on getting AI adoption-ready.

Working with TPM

Services and Specialization

Our main focus is on serving B2B customers in the technology sector. Our experience working with companies like PayPal, Adobe, fabric, Yokogawa, Turnium, and Digibee has given us a broad and deep knowledge of the tech space that many agencies lack.

We are a full-service agency and provide a range of services, including:

TPM’s home office is in the heart of beautiful Vancouver on the west coast of Canada, but our fully remote, high-availability team is located in countries around the world. We currently serve customers across the US, Canada, Asia, and Europe.

While our primary business model is built on serving tech-focused B2B companies, we do work with consumer-facing businesses that seek us out. Check out StudioTPM for more on our B2C services.

We’re team AI and proud! (Any marketing agency that says they don’t use AI at all is fooling themselves.) Our dedicated AI team is continually testing and evaluating new tools to identify new ways to serve you without compromising on quality. Check out our AI Tech Stack product page for more information — but rest assured, nothing goes out the door without careful editing and review by our expert team. Here’s what one of our clients had to say:

“TPM leverages its AI Tech Stack to help us quickly convert technical videos and PDFs into blogs and other shareable copy. Together we do manual checks of course, but the AI Tech helps us reduce publishing times and cuts out inefficiencies in the creation process by over 30 to 40%!”

— Geoff Hultin, CMO, Turnium

Our primary focus is on creating unique campaigns and content for our clients, but we do occasionally find time to host webinars or participate in industry conferences. Get in touch if you’d like us to participate in your event.

Pricing and Contracts

Our flexible contracts are built to support your success. We bill monthly and offer short-term, long-term, or ongoing contracts for customers of all sizes — from one-person IT shops to multimillion-dollar technology giants.

Choose the package that best suits your needs.

  • Project-Based (usually 2-4 months): Designed for smaller businesses or startups interested in consulting, strategy-building, or assistance with priority projects.
  • Foundational (usually 6-12 months): Designed for companies looking for top-of-funnel support to increase site traffic, subscribers, and reach.
  • Enterprise (ongoing): Built for organizations in need of multi-channel lead generation plans featuring concurrent campaigns. Ongoing contracts include full social, PR, content marketing, and sales support.
  • AI-Assisted (variable): Ideal for companies that need to tighten their marketing budget without sacrificing momentum. We use AI marketing tools to generate marketing campaigns and human expertise to polish them to our high standards.

No magic formula can tell you how much to spend on marketing. Setting your budget will depend on your marketing goals and what is required to reach them.

We’re happy to sit down with your team to help you identify and establish goals and work out how we can help you achieve them. Reach out for assistance setting a budget or choosing a marketing package.

We do not typically offer free trials. If you want to see our work, you might enjoy our case studies. We also provide a variety of free playbooks and guides in our resources section and regular updates on the marketing world via our blog.

Collaboration and Communication

Every client engagement at TPM begins with a kickoff call and interviews with your SMEs so our team can develop a deep understanding of your business, offering, audience, and needs. We’ll gather and review your existing assets (if applicable) to familiarize ourselves with your style and identify content gaps or refreshment needs.

We love working closely with clients and typically set up regular weekly or monthly calls so we can update you and vice versa. But once we have the information we need from your team to start building a strategy, you can be as hands-on or hands-off as you choose.

  • Want to write your own blog posts and have our team polish them?
    Can do.
  • Want to thoroughly review every asset we create before it goes live?
    Ten-four.
  • Want to focus on other things while we handle all things marketing?
    We’ve got you.

If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can reach out through our Contact Page. Working with clients, we are happy to embrace the communication and project management channels that best suit you. Our favourite collaboration tools are Slack, Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Trello, Asana, and DropBox.

Once we kick off work on your contract, we’ll set up regular check-ins based on your schedule so you can provide feedback, discuss new initiatives, and ensure projects are proceeding the way you’d like. Check-ins are usually scheduled weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Of course, we’re always available via email, Slack, or Zoom for conversations between regular meetings.

Results

There are many ways to measure success in the marketing world: impressions, lead generation, cost-per-lead, cost-per-sale, customer lifetime value, return on investment, and so many more. How we measure results for your campaign will depend on your goals and the type of work we’re doing for you. We work with you to establish KPIs and then provide monthly progress reports with recommendations for how to improve. Our favourite metrics tools are Hubspot Analytics and Google Analytics.

Careers

Thanks for your interest! We are not actively hiring right now, but we’re always happy to hear from our colleagues in the marketing world. Drop us a line with some details on what you’d like to do at TPM and why you think you’d be a great fit.

GET IN TOUCH

How Can We Help?

We’d love to jump on a call and talk about how we can help you succeed. We’re pretty much online 24-7 so we’ll get back to you really quickly.
Call now on 1.855.646.8662