Before hiring a marketing agency, get to know it. You need to learn if the agency is a good fit for your company. Ask these 11 crucial questions about the agency.
What’s your process for taking on a new client? Learn how the marketing agency operates, how they get to know you and your needs, and how they go about creating and implementing a marketing campaign.
How do you communicate with clients, and how often? Will the agency keep you up-to-date, or only make emergency phone calls when something goes wrong?
What’s your dream client? What do they expect from their clients? If their idea of a dream client differs from who you are, you can keep searching for your dream agency.
Who are some of your previous clients? Get contact info for those clients, and talk to them. Check out the results of their marketing campaigns. Doing this helps you find out if the marketing agency can do what it says it can do—and how honest the agency is about the results.
What results do you measure? The marketing agency better know what key performance indicators are essential in a marketing campaign. Find out how they present the results to you: all the numbers you could ever need but never understand, or broken down into relevant and easy-to-understand reports?
Can the marketing efforts scale smaller or larger? Due to a change in the economy, you might need to trim your marketing budget. Or you might realize your current marketing campaign isn’t enough and you need to expand. Ask how flexible the marketing company is.
Can you handle various aspects of a marketing campaign, or do you only do one thing? It takes more than just social media, or just content, or just email to create a successful marketing campaign. Find an agency that can handle a full campaign. You might think about hiring a company that’s a whiz on Facebook. But what does that matter if the people in your email list don’t even know you’re on Facebook?
Will you stay in budget? If the agency has a habit of overspending on clients’ budgets, think again (unless, of course, you’ve got extra money laying around). Does the agency know what you need and how much that will cost – exactly? Or are they guessing and hoping it comes out all right?
What’s your plan for the future? Take note: this is not asking about their marketing plan for you, but about their plan for them. Hiring a marketing agency should be a valuable, lasting relationship. Look for an agency that plans to stick around.
“Are [you] growing?” asks ElementThree.com. “If they can’t grow themselves, how…can they help you grow?” The marketing agency needs to know how to market itself and get results. If they can’t, why waste your time and money on a marketing agency that obviously knows nothing about marketing?
Get the answers to these questions before you hire a marketing agency. ASJ would love to talk with you about what we can do for you, so contact us. Come back later for 10 more questions to ask.
