In our last installment, we shared a guide to pre-meeting preparation. These questions help you set the stage for your first marketing agency meeting. In case you missed it, you can find that article here. You have planned that first meeting for the information that you will bring to the conversation. But what is reasonable to expect during the conversation? We’ve teamed up with Chris Kim from Mighty Marketing. He's helping us understand questions to ask your prospective agency:
1. What level of complexity for projects and campaigns do you deliver? What are the range of services you provide?
2. Discuss the scope information you planned out ahead of time to come to a common understanding of the services needed. Make sure this conversation is specific to properly scope the work.
3. How are the services delivered? How is communication during the delivery process managed? Here it is important to understand if the team that is pitching the work is the same as the team delivering the work. If not, make sure to have a clear understanding of what to expect in the delivery process.
4. Mutually discuss and decide upon what constitutes success. What will you measure? If you can’t put a number to it, it can be really hard to justify a budget over time. Consider how this might tie into other operational metrics that you already measure.
5. Review the agencies industry experience. Have they worked with your audience before? If they have not, will that require too much time from you to educate the agency? Or will they be able to bring new insights to how you are addressing that audience?
6. Ask how they bridge the gap between marketing and sales. It’s important to have a partner that is able to help you bridge this gap, as it provides a higher likelihood of success.
Red flags- it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of getting help with your marketing. Visions of getting something off your plate dance in front of you. Before you get ahead of yourself, here are a few potential warning signs to watch out for:
1. The discussion on measuring success and the key performance indicators. Make sure you are comfortable with the KPI’s and how they relate back to your business. Impressions don’t matter. Engagement might matter. Conversions really matter. Make sure it is real traffic and not bots or other things.
2. The marketing industry has shifted from demographic to psychographic marketing. Watch out if you are only being provided demographic information.
3. Specific claims about the results you can expect are made without asking you how you are getting your current results. I.e. Claiming you can get a 300% increase in a KPI. Yet you aren't asked what you are doing today to gain your existing results. It's very difficult to guarantee that level of KPI without understand existing processes.
4. If they don’t ask any questions about how you operate today, that is not a good sign. Make sure they are asking about your processes. Make them sign an NDA if you need to share this information.
5. Specific industry experience is claimed, but they can’t give you any use cases or examples.
6. They don’t ask to talk to key staff that are running functions today. It will be hard to ensure you are create a scope of work that will be successful for all parties if key staff are not included.
7. No questions are asked about sales and marketing handoffs. These handoffs are necessary to ensure sales and marketing processes are cohesive. If there is no plan or place to coordinate with sales, this isn’t a good sign.
Remember, you don’t have to say yes to the first firm you talk with. Understand if they know your industry. Agree upon what would constitute success before you get started. This will better position both parties to have a successful outcome.
Amber Christian
Amber is the founder of Wonderly Software Solutions and creator of Bella Scena.
