9 Questions to Answer before Choosing a Right Marketing Agency

Hiring a Marketing Agency is a Big Deal. Some just claims to do big things while some go on with a partnership for decades. We can consider it as a very important decision for your business, yet difficult and perplex to choose.

Why a company hires a Marketing Agency?

Although there could be n number of reasons, but ultimately all reasons are arising from the one, i.e. LOW SALES. Well, you can have an in-house Marketing team too, but you might end up giving huge salaries to a team of few people (that too, having limited resources) which will be equal to outsourcing a Marketing Agency. If you hire an Agency, your main concern will become quality and control. By outsourcing Marketing, you can have access and control over trained professionals and advanced marketing technologies.

On what grounds you should hire a Marketing Agency?

So, finally we have reached to the root topic of our blog i.e. how to choose a perfect fit for your Company. Here is the comprehensive questionnaire checklist for agency selection which will help you to form a long lasting relationship with them :

What are you looking for? Good sales and leads? New Audience? Simply Online Presence? Or Unsatisfied by the current agency? Take time to have a good internal research of your prospects and Customer reviews. It should be a time consuming task so that you can analyse and evaluate each and every aspect of your Mission.

Before Hiring an Agency, explore about marketing. You should at least have a basic of it otherwise you won’t be able to know whether your agency is doing well or not. Get a brief knowledge about techniques and some of the commonly used tools.

The RFP will allow you to find a suitable agency for your company, an agency that actually understands your objectives and meet all of your Conditions. Give a short brief about your company and your work. After that list your objectives, challenges and advantages you are trying to seek. This will help you to shortlist some of the Agencies.

The Agency needs to be able to demonstrate the ROI from their Marketing Campaigns. They should be able to actually explain how actually they work. They should be able to explain the whole marketing processes, the tools they use and its importance, the work divided into different teams and finally what innovative they will do to achieve your targets. In short, they should be able to give you confidence about them. While hiring an Agency, it’s very important to know that whether they are innovative or not because Marketing is a trendy arena and algorithm changes frequently. If you wouldn’t go with the trend, you will surely lag behind.

Actually, all marketing companies work beautifully, after all you are hiring professionals. But all marketing agencies may not understand your business needs. Choose the agency that can look through your lens, explore real opportunities and can make effective, profitable decisions.

All marketers focus on different things and are specialized in different technologies, so it’s important to have a clear idea of what you want them to have. For example, some focussed on Digital Marketing but they haven’t tried and tested direct mail campaigns that much. That doesn’t mean that they are bad at it. It’s just they prefer something more over another. Some agencies have a narrower field, can be either SEO or SMO. So, it’s you who need to decide what your business wants.

A company’s website can say a lot about it. So, explore its website and all the Social Media platforms of them. Do you like their look and feel? Are they actively blogging and tweeting? If you don’t like the way they are representing themselves, it’s unlikely you are going to like how they will represent you.

By knowing about their clients, you will get to know how long they have worked together. Talk to some of their current clients, you will get to know about the results and quality of the services they provide. Review some of their testimonials and case studies. This will show whether the agency is a good fit or not. Ask them about some of the examples of successes of their campaigns.

The most underrated and overlooked factor of successful client- agency relationship is respect and the ability to listen well. These are some of the qualities which are hard to test. So, before finalising the agency, lean back in your chair and ask yourself, whether the person sitting across the table will be there in the tough times of your company. Can they challenge your current state and push you to see the things differently, while respecting you and your present knowledge?