Marketing

Understanding Your Relationship with Your Marketing Agency

August 26, 2019 by Andrew Woods

To outsource or not to outsource is a marketing decision that every business owner will face. While many do choose to manage these services in-house, others choose to leverage the expertise and commitment of a marketing agency. To get the most of this relationship, it’s important to understand what you should expect.

Learn the Process

For the purposes of educating your team, getting to know the agency process will take away any hesitance of handing your esteemed brand over to a group of outsiders. When you hire a marketing agency, you become their client and at that point, you’ll work together to define your expectations, establish objectives, and communicate about the strategies that will lead to reaching your goals.

Every agency varies in their approach, but in most cases, you can expect the following process after your initial communication:

Discovery Phase → a meeting to reveal your needs, goals, and desired results as a client

Proposal → outlines an agency’s prospective timeline, the scope of their services, your investment, and expected deliverables

Contract → secures your working relationship

Kickoff → an initial creative meeting where you’ll be formally introduced to the team, discuss methodology, and next steps

Deliverables → your services will be delivered in the agreed-upon formats and according to the approved timeline

How to Measure Success

Once you’ve gotten the ball rolling with your marketing agency it’s important to understand how you’ll both measure success. That’s where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. With measurement comes the ability to track performance and make strategic improvements. KPIs can vary quite a bit depending on the services you’re receiving. Below you’ll find some examples of how success can be defined when working with an agency.

Revenue

Growth in sales and revenue is one the clearest indicators that your marketing campaigns are successful. It means that the strategies that your agency employ have a positive impact on consumer decision making. This can be measured from the results of specific campaigns, including paid social advertising or Google ads.

Design

Make the right impression, first. Professional design services not only elicit a visual response, but they help create an emotional connection between your business and your customers. Measuring the success of a new design is often more subjective than calculating revenue, but success can be measured in the form of brand mentions, direct website traffic, social listening and an increase in your brand’s Google Trend score.

Web Development

Taking advantage of your agency’s web design team can have a dramatic affect on your business. From improving page speed to the overall user experience and customer journey, a well thought-out website can make or break your marketing initiatives. Some statistics to measure success include page speed, pages per session, bounce rate, and conversion rate.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing campaigns can be applied to a diverse number of channels. From SEO to social media and PPC, an agency’s digital marketing team can assist you in reaching your target audience no matter the platform. Since marketing channels and campaigns can vary in their goals, measuring success will change from campaign to campaign. To give an example though, when running an SEO campaign, you would measure success via an increase in organic traffic, improved keyword rankings, and improved organic conversions/leads.

Calculating Marketing ROI

To calculate your return on investment in a tangible way, it’s important to segment the various campaigns. For example, you can numerically measure the success of your Google ads campaign based on the sales that it generates. In general, the simple formula for calculating your ROI is:

REVENUE FROM CAMPAIGN – MARKETING INVESTMENT ➗ MARKETING INVESTMENT


$20,000 – $5,000 ➗ $5,000 = 300% ROI

Once you’ve established your relationship with your marketing agency, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how the growth of your business will directly benefit from recurring services. In an industry that changes and evolves on a daily basis, having an agency partner will help ensure your continued growth.

It All Starts with A RelationshipLet's Tie the Marketing Knot

It All Starts with A RelationshipLet's Tie the Marketing Knot