How to Hire a Marketing Agency for Your Business?

Don’t you love the feeling of showing up to a meeting totally prepared? Check out these tips for getting organized before your first call with an agency.

Contents

Take a Full Account of Your Current Status

Evaluate Foundational Marketing Elements

Understand Your Business, Services, and Goals

Collect Internal Direction & Buy-In

Hiring an agency partner is an important decision, and it’s not one to take lightly. Just like any hiring decision, you’ll want to do some planning and prep work before you get started. We regularly see folks who work to hire an agency and then, halfway through the process, they realize they don’t have enough insight into their own organization to start the partnership. Here are four tasks you’ll want to complete before hiring an agency:

Take a Full Account of Your Current Status

As with any partnership, transparency is key. You hire an agency because you don’t have the internal capacity and/or knowledge to complete all of the marketing activities necessary to meet and exceed your goals.

Let’s start with what your team is good at. You should be able to clearly communicate the strengths of your internal team to the agencies you are vetting. When you are looking for a strategic agency partner, understanding how to leverage the strengths of your internal team effectively is a big deal.

For example, in the past, we’ve worked with teams who have the ability to write but struggle to manage their paid media efforts, lead nurture campaigns, and other aspects of marketing. In these situations, your hired agency can help develop content strategies, oversee the optimization of content, and promote that content on social media—while your team focuses on writing the content.

On the flip side, you’ll also want to make sure you have a strong understanding of your shortcomings and strengths before talking to an agency.

Most importantly, you should be transparent and detailed when talking with potential agency partners about this information. In the past, we’ve seen potential clients cover up or minimize their weaknesses. Great marketing agencies won’t judge you for what you’ve been able to do at your current capacity. The fact is this: Agencies are here to help you—that’s our whole job. If you can’t communicate your opportunities for improvement, it can be harder to start off on the right foot with an agency.

Ultimately, your agency partner can’t create a custom plan to match your needs if you haven’t first sat down to take a full account of your current state and shared that information.

When you are looking for a strategic agency partner, understanding how to leverage the strengths of your internal team effectively is a big deal.

Evaluate Foundational Marketing Elements

As part of auditing of your current state, you’ll want to take a hard look at foundational elements of your marketing:

Does your brand reflect where your company is today?
Is your website out of date?
Do you have the marketing technology you need to support your desired marketing efforts?
If you don’t have the right marketing technology, will you need to migrate any resources from an old platform to a new platform?

These are just some of the questions you’ll want to ask before talking to a marketing agency. If you don’t evaluate foundational marketing elements, you risk having an agency drive traffic to an out-of-date website with branding that doesn’t reflect what you do or who you are.

Understand Your Business, Services, and Goals

It might be surprising to hear, but we often talk with potential clients who are not certain about the basic elements of their business. One minute we are talking with a marketing manager who thinks their ideal buyer is a CTO or CIO at a Fortune 500 company, the next minute we’re talking to the marketing director who thinks the ideal buyer is a systems administrator at a mid-sized business.

Likewise, it’s unsurprising to have prospective clients who haven’t taken an inventory of today’s business performance. At a high level, it’s helpful if you can talk about the following:

Your current traffic volume and what channels drive the most traffic
Where most of your leads come from
Number of new customers secured in a month
Which channels provide the most customers
The average value of a customer
Approximate annual revenue

With this in mind, it’s helpful to have a clear understanding of how you would like these numbers to improve over the next six months to a year.

If you’re able to articulate business performance today and where you want it to be in the future, along with details about your products, your business, and your buyer, then an agency should be able to create a custom plan that fits your needs. Without knowing where you are today and where you want to be in six months to a year, it becomes difficult to build a custom plan that’s right for your business goals.

Collect Internal Direction & Buy-In

In the perfect scenario, you’ll meet with an agency after having already discussed your marketing needs with your leadership team. This might look different for everyone depending on the size of the organization. In some cases, it might mean involving your CEO, COO, VP of Marketing, or other senior-level members. If you’re the CEO of a smaller business, it might mean talking to your team about what they need help with.

You should talk to key stakeholders early to save yourself time later. If you don’t, here’s what might happen:

You meet a few marketing agencies and have one or two meetings with each, and then a proposal review with a select few. You decide that you like one of the proposals the most and bring that to your leadership. At this point, it may not sound like you’ve spent a lot of time, but you’ve likely invested 10+ hours in introductory meetings, proposal presentations, reviewing proposals on your own, writing emails to agencies, researching agencies, and discussing selection with other marketing team members. Not to mention, you might have brought other people on calls with potential agencies, so you’ve used their time too.

After all that work, you have a full proposal to take to your CEO for final approval, and what happens? They decide that the marketing agency should be focusing most of its time on creating sales enablement content and managing paid search, neither of which is accounted for in the proposal. Now you have to go back several steps in the process to try and realign your efforts. Plus, your CEO is upset that you brought them an inadequate marketing plan.

The point is this: If you get buy-in and direction from leadership early, you can save yourself time and headaches later. Plus, any time that you tack on to your search process is time that could have been spent driving results.

Red Flag: There’s a reason we’re recommending you do this initial legwork—any agency who’s worth partnering with will ask you about these items. They’ll ask because it helps them build a proposal that best fits your needs. If you talk to agencies who don’t press for this information, it’s likely that they are either a) guessing at your needs or b) giving you the same out-of-the-box solution they give everyone. A good agency doesn’t just talk about tactics, they work to understand your world and your business so they can give you the best possible plan for support.