3 Qualities to Look For in a Marketing Agency
Are you a business switching from one agency to the next trying to find the right one? In this article, we wanted to share some guidelines that will help speed up that process for you. Below are three key things you should look for when working with a marketing agency.
1. A service plan tailored to your needs
Often times, marketing agencies can become complacent and rely on cookie-cutter approaches to service all clients. They present you with pre-set packages and position you in the one that is most likely to fit your budget but not necessarily your needs. It’s important for your business to find an agency that takes time to understand your specific goals and challenges. Not all businesses should adopt the same strategy on digital or traditional marketing. Some could benefit from more advertising on podcasts and banners in bus stations. Some could do better by having a mix of LinkedIn and TikTok marketing. Depending on your target audience, the right agency should develop a custom plan that follows the optimal strategy for your business growth.
2. Easy, transparent and timely communication
Business is fast paced and marketing is a continuous process that needs to be adaptive. Your needs of today and tomorrow might come up unexpectedly. A great marketing agency should be able to deliver on that. You want to have a key dedicated account manager as a point of contact that understands your brand and that will be a trusted advisor for steps to take. Without understanding a brand thoroughly, marketing efforts by an agency are often inefficient. After all, we can’t fully tell a story we don’t know. Make sure the agency you’re working with allocates enough time to stay in sync with your vision.
3. A focus on business results, not vanity metrics
Your marketing agency should be obsessed with actual business results. At the end of the day, week or month, you should be able to have a good sense of what you invested and what return you got from it. A good agency will assess the purpose of a campaign and set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with you. There needs to be traceability of the efforts and resources put out. Now obviously some aspects of publicity and media are harder to measure precisely due to limitations of a platform and consumer data protection laws, but overall you should be able to see where you’re getting the most conversion in your sales funnel in order to plan the next campaigns.
Depending on the campaign objective, you could focus on impression and reach if your objective is to build brand awareness or clicks and actual conversion if what you’re looking for is maximizing sales for a particular service or product.
By having a marketing agency that embodies all of the above qualities, you’ll set your company up for growth and save yourself a lot of money and time. We hear stories from our long time clients all the time about how prior to working with us they had a misconception of what a marketing agency could be. They complained that the previous agency they worked with wasn’t responsive enough, that the work they did wasn’t consistent, that they often felt like a number and not a valued client. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are many great agencies out there, just keep these three things top of mind - you’ll be able to spot red flags more easily and make the right choice for your company.
Want to take your marketing further with a results-driven, customized approach? Let’s talk.