Engaging a marketing agency can feel like a huge risk when you run a business, particularly if you’re doing it for the first time. You’re going to need to give up some control over your company’s image, and hand over large amounts of money and that’s a big deal.
So, with that in mind, we’ve got some great tips to help ensure that you get the most out of working with an agency.
Your Responsibility: Show The Agency Your Cards
The marketing relationship cannot function effectively without transparency. This means you need to have a truly honest conversation with your agency.
What are your short-term and long-term objectives? What have you done in the way of marketing in the past? How did it perform? What do your ideal clients look like? What do you in your pipeline in terms of new products or services?
The more information that you share with the agency, the more they can get a clear picture of your business and the market you operate in. This allows them to develop an effective strategy that is focused on getting results for YOUR business, rather than using an off-the-shelf generic “one size fits all” marketing plan.
The Marketer’s Responsibility: No Ridiculous Promises
Your marketer also needs to be honest with you, in turn. We’ve never met a marketer that didn’t want to make sales for their customers, after all, that’s how you build a professional reputation and win over more clients in the future.
However, no marketer can make a promise of success in any activity. Take advertising, there are simply too many factors outside of the control of any marketer to guarantee performance. You might have the best ad in history and the best placement of that ad but if a national disaster strikes as the campaign rolls out? Nobody may even see it.
The Marketer’s Responsibility: A Process Of Education
The good news is that even a “failed campaign” can be of value to your business. Assuming that your marketer is collecting valuable data (more on this in a minute), then, they will learn from this data.
It takes time in a relationship to truly understand WHO is the ideal audience, HOW to target that audience and then determine WHAT content helps to persuade that audience to take action.
Thus, the data can help point the way to make future campaigns better targeted, to lower the costs of those campaigns, etc.
In turn, it’s the marketer’s job to bring this information back to their clients in a way that is easy to understand, and which helps the client make constructive future decisions on ad campaigns.
The Marketer’s Responsibility: Don’t Drown The Client In Data
There is a tendency in the modern world for people to report all the data that they collect. This may seem like a good deal when you’re paying for the data collection, “the more the better”, right?
Well, not so much. In fact, what you really need to know from your marketing agency is the specific data which allows you to make business critical decisions, otherwise, you get lost in “analysis paralysis” and get trapped in going through the data rather than taking action.
Good marketers find the right data to give you clear insight and they don’t try to hide bad news in dozens of tables of figures, either.
Final Thoughts On Transparency In Marketing Relationships
The better the level of clear communication in a marketing relationship, the easier it will be for your business to see a return on its investment in marketing. That starts with laying out your expectations and current insights to your marketer and then, in turn, with the marketer providing you with data and insights that promote better marketing decisions in the future.
