7 Questions to Ask Your Marketing Agency

The benefits of working with a marketing agency are plentiful, offering easy access to new skills, techniques and resources that may otherwise be invisible to you.

However, before taking an agency on board, you need to check that they’re right for you – assessing if their values align with yours and check if they have relevant experience within your market sector. While vetting your prospective agency is incredibly important, it’s also essential to stay in the loop when you’re working with the agency, too.

After a few months’ working with your marketing agency, here’s a few things you should be asking the team to check your getting the most out of your spend:

Your 7 Questions

Want to ensure your marketing budget is being used effectively? Want to know how you’re performing? Here’s 7 questions you should frequently be asking your marketing agency:

1. What actions are you taking to improve results?

When it comes down to it, the main reason you employ an ad agency is to get results. What those results look like will be different to all businesses – it could be sales, website visits, search rankings, enquiries etc – but that result is the bottom line.

Your ad agency should be constantly working to improve the results that they deliver for you, so be sure to ask them exactly how they’re doing this. It might be something as small as making optimisations within a campaign, or there could be larger projects that could help you to achieve your goals – building bespoke landing pages or A/B testing your online checkout process, for example.

2. What is your long-term view of my account?

Ideally, your marketing agency shouldn’t just be thinking about the here and now. They should take a longer term view of the account, planning at least a quarter ahead if not further. Depending on your business and the services that they provide for you, it may even be possible to plan as much as a year in advance. Be wary of those that promise big results in a (scarily) short period of time. It should be an investment that you’re in for the long run.

This plan shouldn’t be set in stone though – while it’s important to plan ahead and know where you want the business to go, it’s just as important to be reactive. As we’ve seen in recent years, we really can never predict entirely how the future will go, so your agency needs to be able to work flexibly. Proactive and reactive is the way to go.

3. Can you give any competitor insights?

Every business owner is aware of their competitors, and has most likely conducted thorough competitor analysis. But have you really got into the details of their marketing?

Your marketing agency can carry out additional competitor research for you, and really drill down into the nitty-gritty of their activity. They can pull information like ad spend, average cost per lead, impression share and so on. This information is invaluable when it comes to planning your marketing strategy, as it will help you to benchmark your activity and understand where you need to be in order to push ahead of your competition. Make sure you regularly ask for updates on what your competitors are up to. And then, how you can do it better.

4. Are there any other channels we should be using?

While you may work with a marketing agency on one particular channel, like your PPC or SEO, they may be able to recommend other avenues that will help you to achieve your goals more effectively.

Nobody likes to overly upsell their services, so ask your agency outright if they think there’s scope for your brand to use other marketing channels.

5. How and how often do you monitor/optimise my campaigns?

Marketing is a technical field. It’s not just about writing the best ad copy or designing the nicest-looking ads – it’s about making decisions based on data. And, if your marketing agency isn’t constantly looking towards their data to both track and optimise your campaigns – you almost certainly won’t be getting enough bang for your buck.

Ask your marketing agency about benchmarks, metrics and how they’re analysing your performance. If they’ve not got benchmarks in place, they probably don’t have an overarching strategy in mind. And this relates back to point 2 – the long-term view of the account. Ask for monthly reports, ask how your campaigns are doing and stay in the loop.

6. Can you identify any missed opportunities?

You want your marketing agency to not just solve your immediate pain points, you want them to go the extra mile and identify missed opportunities that you didn’t even know existed. Opportunities that would be otherwise invisible, unless you’re a specialist in the field.

If the experts at the marketing agency see a chance to elevate your campaigns to the next level, you need to know about it. Even if your budget isn’t the highest, it’s good to know what you’re missing out on so you can make a compromise or two to maximise your budget. Don’t be so certain that you know the ins and outs of your business – there’s always room for improvement.

7. Is my budget working?

The final question on our list, and perhaps the most important, ask if your budget is working. What’s the point in spending money on marketing if you’re not seeing that return on investment?

You need complete transparency. If your agency is trying to hide poor performance metrics or issues in your campaign by sugarcoating the metrics, that’s not the honesty you need. If you’re paying someone, you want to know what you’re getting for your money.

The final takeaway…

It doesn’t take much to ask a few questions and ensure your marketing agency is performing as they should.

Overall, your biggest takeaway should be to stay in the loop. Transparency and honesty count for a lot. So, if you’re on the lookout for a reliable, approachable and honest full-service marketing agency – look no further.

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