Do you lack the time or experience to market your business? Here’s what you need to know to get the best results when working with a marketing agency!
9 Tips for Working with a Marketing Agency for Top Results
So, you’re thinking about hiring a marketing agency to help build or improve your business’ online presence.
Building a strong digital presence is an important part of attracting new leads and potential customers. Creating a website and getting “found” online can become overwhelming without experience doing marketing yourself. If you’re like most business owners, you lack the time or expertise to handle most aspects of digital marketing, which means turning to a marketing agency becomes necessary to improve your overall business goals.
Let’s discuss what to look for in choosing your marketing team and how to work with a marketing agency effectively!
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Should You Hire In House or a Marketing Agency?
Before understanding how to work with your marketing team, it’s important to have a better understanding of your needs.
- What are your business goals?
- What are your expectations – both of your marketing team and the amount of work?
- Do you have the time to hire the right talent?
- Are you willing to invest in SEO tools?
No matter your needs, in-house marketing and utilizing a marketing agency each have their own benefits.
When to Hire an In House Marketing Team
Many businesses who choose in-house marketing find that it’s easier for employees (or contractors) to become more familiar with the brand. Voice, style, values and processes.
Because your marketing team is in-house, they’re accessible, will be solely focused on your business and you’ll have control over the marketing strategies used internally.
If you need greater flexibility and control over marketing activities, hiring an in house team might make more sense. However, hiring an in house marketing team can be costly. You’ll have to factor in:
- Employee costs
- Recruiting talent
- Employee turnover
- Software expenses
- Scalability
Having some knowledge of marketing processes and KPIs can help you to hire the right talent.
When to Hire a Marketing Agency
In the early stages of a new business, many business owners find they have time to do their own marketing. Some even enjoy figuring out how marketing aspects work through some trial and error.
At some point, you may find yourself wondering if now’s the time to hire a marketing agency. Here are some ways to know it’s time to trust a marketing agency with moving the needle for your business:
- You don’t actually like marketing.
- You’re wearing too many hats and the marketing isn’t getting done.
- You’re reeling in poor quality leads.
- Sales are stagnant.
- Something worked, but you don’t know what it was that succeeded.
- Your budget doesn’t allow for an in-house marketing team.
If you’re interested in hiring a marketing agency, check out the red flags to watch out for.
Top Tips for Working with a Marketing Agency Effectively
Working with a marketing agency comes with a few benefits:
- You’ll likely have access to a few professionals with expert skills in a variety of marketing spaces like SEO, social media, email and PPC, for example.
- Costs can be lower than hiring a dedicated marketing team.
- You won’t have to fund expensive tools and resources yourself.
- You may see faster results (although it’s wise to ask about results as each area of marketing varies in the time it takes to be effective).
And while there are benefits to working with a marketing agency, it’s important to understand that every agency is different. To get the best results from your new team, keep these tips in mind:
Have a Marketing Budget
Having an estimate of your overall marketing budget will help you to know how much you can spend and make decisions about how and where to split your budget when necessary.
To begin with, it’s important to look at any marketing efforts as an “investment” rather than a cost. While there are some risks and few guarantees when it comes to SEO, viewing marketing as an investment with anticipated returns can be helpful.
We often see that those clients with shoestring budgets struggle to compete in their industry. Unrealistically small budgets hamper the amount of time your marketing team can spend on marketing tasks, impede results in ad spend, increase the time it takes to see a return.
Get quotes from marketing agencies and/or review marketing salary ranges to get an idea of what is possible. And most importantly, don’t assume you’ll get satisfactory results just because you can hire someone cheaply.
Some marketing activities you can plan for:
- SEO
- Web development
- Content Creation
- Email marketing
- Ads (PPC, etc)
- Social media marketing
Know Your KPIs
A KPI is a key performance indicator.
What quantifiably specific objective or objectives are you looking to achieve for your business through the use of a marketing agency? Examples would be:
- 10 new (high quality) leads per month
- 35 monthly sales
- Improve conversion rates by 15%
- Increase organic traffic by 40%
- Improve Click-Through Rate by 10%
- And more
Knowing your business objectives will help you to convey your goals to your marketing agency.
Set Realistic Expectations
This is going to be the job of both the agency and yourself to set realistic goals. It helps to let your agency know what you hope to accomplish and what you define as success, but it’s important to not be too rigid.
By this, we mean that expecting to increase organic traffic by 40% or conversion rates by 15% in 3 months may not be realistic. Discuss what you hope to achieve, but lend an ear to your marketing agency to help set goals within the timeframe they believe to be possible.
Offer Up Some Trust
A good digital marketing team is going to be worth their weight in gold but they can’t be a good team (or be effective) if you can’t trust their process.
We understand it’s a tall order to put faith in others when it comes to your business success, but micromanaging and requesting the agency to change their processes “because you read x on the internet” only serves to delay and/or derail results.
Listen to the Experts
It’s just as important to your marketing agency to get results as it is for you … it’s how we keep clients and get good reviews to keep the business going. That said, we do actually want to do the best work possible and offer up our recommendations based on data and findings.
If your agency is recommending a lower search volume keyword to target on a page than you’d like, there’s probably a pretty darn good reason for it.
Keep Communication Clear and Concise
Are you unsure about why a particular recommendation was made? Ask for clarification. This is just one active listening skill that will go a long way in improving communication.
Have an idea for the campaign that you think can help improve the project? Let your agency know.
No matter what you need to communicate, review your written communications prior to sending it over to ensure you’ve not deviated from the point but adequately covered your thoughts.
It’s also helpful, when you disagree with recommendations, to provide:
- An explanation of “why”.
- Ideas about what could have been better, utilizing specific, actionable ideas for improvement.
This can help massage ideas into something relevant and usable, rather than sending your team back to the drawing board. And this is something an effective marketing consultant tries to do with their clients.
As with any relationship, effective communication with your new “team” is essential in helping them understand your brand and messaging.
But, this process doesn’t happen overnight. The more you work together and learn how to effectively communicate with your team, the better the relationship and the work gets.
Remain Flexible & Embrace Experimentation
Through audits and analytics of both your site and your competitors, your marketing agency is inevitably going to come up with tons of interesting ideas and recommendations for your business.
If your instinct is to say no to every idea that arises outside of the original plan because it seems complicated or sounds irrelevant, understand that the team wouldn’t have mentioned it if it didn’t come up in their analysis somewhere.
Before nixing an idea, ask for clarification on the idea or recommendation.
The great thing about marketing is that many things can be “tested” for effectiveness and reverted if things don’t go as planned.
Give Your Agency Time to Plan for Changes
Thinking about changing your strategy? Want to update the website?
Before making changes to any part of the website or process, it’s helpful to discuss your plans with the marketing team first.
Removing pages, changing headings on the site or moving to a new domain can wreak havoc on any SEO campaign – from taking a nosedive in rankings to losing valuable organic traffic.
Check with your marketing team if you’re wanting to make changes to the site or strategy. Given enough notice, your marketing agency can adjust to help you make informed decisions and either prevent or lessen unwanted negative effects.
Hold Effective Meetings
Early in the project, we find that more frequent meetings are beneficial to both parties as we get used to communication styles, understanding the business, understanding reporting, etc. In the first month or two, we think meetings are essential.
When we’re acting as consultants within a larger team or on very large projects, more frequent meetings may be necessary.
According to AskCody, once you factor in setting up meeting times, prep-work, searching for files and other communication to build meeting agendas and do follow ups, a 1-hour meeting takes much much more time.
As you feel more comfortable and trust that the marketing team understands your business, opting for less frequent meetings gives your team extra time to productively analyze, strategize, recommend and implement ideas for greater results.
We like to ask ourselves “does this really need to be a meeting, or can we effectively convey our message in a quick email?”
Either way, meetings should be productive as teams provide overviews of work completed and include expectations and action items for upcoming work.
From Our Experience
In the 12+ years we have been working with a variety of clients across many industries, we have seen projects thrive or get stuck and everything in between. It’s our greatest motivator to get the results our clients are looking for and help them reach their goals, hence we audit our projects to see what sets them up for success.
It is NOT the niche or business vertical they are in. We spend time and energy to understand the business, including their audiences and goals, but certain aspects come out clear that sets our successful projects apart.
Our best projects have in common clear goals and reasonable expectations, a level of trust that allows us to “do the work”, to test, review and optimize. We love our clients to be involved in the project and preferably have some time to review our recommendations, suggestions and maybe even create expert content for us. The ability to make changes to the website, OR have a web developer available will also help move the project along.
Another important factor is the right budget for the tasks at hand. It proves very difficult to present satisfactory results on a shoestring budget, especially when competitors seem to invest a lot more in their marketing efforts.
Lastly, we truly enjoy brainstorming sessions with our clients to get creativity to flow and explore new ways to enhance the website and online visibility.
Why Hire Us?
We love working collaboratively with our clients. Not only do we enjoy our work, but we take pride in being transparent and see every recommendation as an opportunity to teach our clients. We want you to consider us as a partner in your success.
Our best clients have seen great success and enjoy long-term relationships with us, and we hope to provide the same for you.
Reach out today to discover how we can help your business grow!
Contact GYBO
Passionate digital marketing expert with over 10 years of experience. Broad, hands-on marketing skillset, from web developer, SEO, PPC, Data Analytics & Tracking.