6 key areas to explore before selecting a marketing agency
Working with the right marketing agency can catapult a company’s growth, improve customer experience and differentiate the company’s brand in highly competitive markets. If your marketing agency is not aligned with your business objectives, they could negatively affect your customer experience, hinder delivery of product/services and, in some cases, even damage a company’s reputation.
It is therefore critical to not only evaluate a marketing agency’s quality and cost of service but to also think through attributes which will make the partnership successful and mutually beneficial in the long term.
Here are six key areas to evaluate before selecting a marketing agency:
1. Understanding of your business
The time that an agency invests in understanding your business strategy and the perspective it brings to the table based on that understanding during the selection process is an important indicator of the potential impact the agency can have on your business. To effectively build and execute marketing strategies, the agency needs to develop an in-depth understanding of the client’s business strategy and its target customers. Only then will the agency be able to translate the company’s vision and brand promise into campaigns that resonate with the target audience and as a result drive business results
2. Culture of Transparency
It is an agency’s primary objective to deliver on its clients’ marketing and consequently business objectives. Agencies have the shared responsibility, along with the client, to define the marketing strategy and tactics to be deployed to achieve the desired results. They also have control over spending a significant portion of the paid advertising (PPC) budget. So when it comes to reporting on the outcomes of a campaign, the agency can be biased, intentionally or unintentionally, towards sharing only positive results and overlooking outcomes that are not so great. This can be an issue for startups as most are still trying to find what really works with their target audience. There isn’t any historical data to compare performance with. Hence, learning from every campaign is critical in optimizing future spend. Ask the agency for campaign recaps, anonymized as necessary, that they’ve put together for other clients. Look for a healthy mix of success stories and learnings in the reports and what the recommendations were based on the learnings.
3. Breadth of its Offerings
More often than not, customers interact with a company’s brand across multiple channels and assets. These include the company’s website, its blog, social media channels, paid advertisements and brick and mortar stores, to name a few. It is super important to ensure that customers see consistent messaging, vision and the brand’s look, tone and feel across all these touch points. Moreover, it is also essential to deliver these various touch points to customers at the right time and at the right place. This takes significant effort in terms of planning and coordinated execution of a marketing strategy. An agency that has expertise across various channels and tactics such Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content, Web design, Creative development and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be crucial to the success of a truly integrated marketing strategy. Be sure to test the proficiency of the agency across various channels that your company cares about. It isn’t easy to be an expert in every aspect of marketing. Try to find the best trade off between hiring a separate, dedicated agency for each channel vs finding one or two agencies that can cover all of your needs.
4. Prior Experience
Does the marketing agency have prior experience providing the services you are requesting; specifically providing them to businesses similar to yours? Evaluating prior experience will give you a sense of the agency’s capabilities, subject matter expertise, and skill sets required for providing the services you are seeking. Talking to the agency’s references will give an idea of the pain points and what worked well (and what didn’t) in the agency’s prior engagements. References should also be leveraged to get insights into the day-to-day experience of working with the agency.
5. Key Performance Indicators
What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you are going to use to measure the agency’s performance? Is it timely delivery, impact on key business metrics, customer perception of the brand or something else? What is the agency’s track record in delivering on these KPIs to other clients? KPIs will not only help you evaluate agency performance quantitatively, but also provide the agency with specific measures that are important to you. Make sure agency fees have a fixed and variable component. The fixed component can scale with either your ad spend or other operational measure. The variable component should scale with the delivery of mutually agreed upon business KPIs such as actual sales, conversion rates on the website or customer acquisition cost (CAC or CPA).
6. Value of your business to the agency
When it comes to agency management, it is better to be a big fish in a small pond. The top clients are usually guaranteed top tier service and, if you are not already getting that level of service, you have the negotiating power to clearly state your service needs. In situations where there is a marginal difference between service, if you’re given a choice between being an agency’s major client or being one of many, your choice should be the agency where your business is a key client account and is therefore more likely to receive top tier service.