8 Steps To Find The Marketing Agency That Will Make Your Life Easier
Marketing is arguably the most overlooked function in most businesses. It’s easy to understand why – the jargon, scale and complexity are best left swept under the carpet.
But as the person in charge of handling marketing, you have an opportunity to change this. But let’s face it – you need to bring in the A-team.
But hiring the right talent can be tough, and sadly, the performance marketing landscape is a minefield of GURUS, so-called 'experts' and agencies that promise the world with no intention of delivering.
If you’re reading this, you know this and are looking for some guidance on how to spot red flags.
This guide will list the questions you should keep in mind when looking to hire the right agency. In addition, under each section, you will find questions that you can directly use in your evaluation process..
1. Do They Understand Your Buyers?
This one is a no brainer - if your agency can answer this question, they’ve successfully completed half of their work. An agency with a good track record will attribute its success to understanding the buyer persona thoroughly.
Your agency should have a tried-and-tested process to construct buyer personas and use it to deliver tangible results. In real-life, a business will have multiple buyer personas. So, your agency should be able to research and understand what creatives and copy nudge these different personas to your desired outcome.
At Brick, we immerse ourselves into your brand and audience, we spend countless hours trawling through every customer review to dissect common pain points and frequently used phrases and words among other techniques to build out the buyer personas so we can hit the ground running and know what type of copy and creative will resonate.
Questions to Ask:
What is your process of discovering and learning about my audience? And how will this be applied to the deliverables e.g. creative and new copy angles?
2. How Do They Arrive At What Works?
Let’s say the agency has completed the first step of creating a well-researched buyer persona. Now, they’re tasked with testing their hypotheses about what speaks to your buyer and encourages them to convert. But what if their assumptions are wrong? Don’t forget - Your buyer is a person, and a person can be influenced by multiple angles.
We believe an agency should live by the mantra “Test, test, test”. An agency should have a constant list of copy, creatives, audiences and landing pages to test and optimize. But an endless list is not enough, it needs to have a testing methodology to back it. The right testing methodology can help you optimize your campaigns when things are going well but also aim directly when things are not going well.
Like all experiments, the quality of what you get depends on what you give. What this means is, that your agency shouldn’t test random parameters without an idea to back the test.
Questions to Ask:
What is your testing methodology for testing new creative, copy and audiences?
3. Do They Engage Proactively or Just Try To Hit Targets?
Steve Jobs was right when he said, “We hire smart people so that they can tell us what to do”. The same thing applies to your marketing agency. The right agency will focus on the targets you give, but they will also be dialled into your forecasts and explore ways to exceed your goals.
Finding a proactive agency that operates in this fashion should be one of the top criteria when it comes to your final selection.
At Brick, we map out entire business cycles so that we can be ready for any sales promotions, product launches or sales events that are important to our customers. This helps us be prepared with the strategy and be proactive rather than reactive.
Questions to Ask:
How do you plan ahead to ensure we are prepared for any sales promotions, new product launches or sales events?
4. Do They Set Realistic Expectations?
We get it – throw a stone out of the window and it’ll land on a marketing agency that promises a 69x ROAS. Far too many companies have been disappointed after falling for such promises, but the easy promise still traps customers.
A proficient agency will not promise anything unless they completely understand the scope of your requirements. Even then, they will set realistic goals and a scaling strategy. In short, the onboarding process will be transparent and facilitates open discussion and teamwork.
Questions to Ask:
Not to set unrealistic expectations, but what do you think are reasonable targets that we can achieve together?
5. Do They Communicate Properly With You?
If there’s one thing you take away from this guide, it should be that communication is the bedrock of successful marketing activity. As the client, you should be in direct communication with the person pulling the leavers in your account, expect prompt responses throughout the week and not have to wait 24 hours to get a response to your questions.
Part of our job, as an agency, is to make your life easier. This begins with making sure there is clear, streamlined communication.
Questions to Ask:
Who should I be talking to in your team for anything I need?
What communication channel will we use?
6. Do Their Marketing Reports Speak To You?
In the world of paid social, metrics are what inform our decisions, and it’s our job to report on these metrics regularly and in a digestible format that you can interpret.
You should expect more from an agency than regurgitated numbers from Facebook Ads Manager. After all, you’re employing an agency for their expertise and not their copy & paste capabilities.
At Brick, we believe that reporting is incredibly important. Not only is it a sign of good communication, but we absolutely HATE agencies that hide behind fluffy reports that don’t give the whole picture, and are only delivered every 4 weeks!
Your agency should be able to report metrics in a meaningful manner, the good and the bad which will help you gather insights. Provide a reason behind what’s happened, ideas and a proactive plan of action for how they are going to continue to progress your account.
This requires a fundamental understanding of the numbers seen on all platforms, how they correlate to a business’ growth and what they mean for your strategy.
Questions to Ask:
How do you report on my account performance?
How often can we expect to see them?
What is included in a performance report?
7. Do They Present Your Brand Well?
Your agency can come with the best marketing strategies, testing methodologies and creative processes. But if it doesn’t align with the customer’s brand guidelines, you are essentially cutting off your hand (we might be a little dramatic, but we have to convey the seriousness). If your agency doesn’t ask you everything about your brand before they begin their work, that’s a red flag.
Quality control is also important to make sure your ads are the best representation of your brand. The best ads have a brand recall value which should not be underestimated.
Questions to Ask:
How will you ensure your ads are consistent with my brand's image?
8. What Can Be Done Better?
While agencies should maintain a standard weekly report, an agency that takes care of their client well will find ways to continuously find angles for growth.
What this means is you should be having frequent calls with your agency to discuss what more can be done to improve your marketing foothold. They should come to this call fully prepared with an agenda, ideas and questions so it's jam-packed full of value.
There should also be clear and concise action items for both you and the agency as a result of the meeting.
A bonus advantage of finding such an agency is that they help you with understanding the latest trends and planning the future.
If you find such an agency, don’t let go.
Questions to Ask:
How often will meet?
What is usually discussed within these calls?
Will we have exposure to the meeting agenda before the calls?
Summary
We get it - finding the right marketing agency is a daunting task. Time and time again, brands come to us after a bad experience with agencies that have over-promised and under-delivered, having wasted everyone’s time and marketing budget.
There’s always something that can be learned from experiences - good or bad. We felt the need to step up and help the evaluation process, and this guide came into being.
In fact, most of these questions apply even to our own internal operations. We’ve seen success with this framework ourselves, so we hope it works for you too.
Have any questions or feedback on this article? Feel free to connect with me LinkedIn/Twitter
