How to choose a marketing agency for cooperation?

Wondering what performance marketing agency you should choose? Many people when choosing a marketing agency are based on such basic criteria as:
- company size,
- experience in promoting similar services and the industry,
- opinions from existing clients of a given agency.
These criteria are sometimes important and will help you reject the first unsuccessful proposals, and will even save you time by contacting agencies with whom you will never sign a contract. However, to choose a partner who will successfully conduct your advertising activities, you need to pay attention to several additional issues.

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Check the account maintainer

Which agency you choose is not as important as who will ultimately conduct your advertising activities. The agency can boast of great testimonials and case studies, which are experienced staff (we work on it as consultants ourselves, because many of our clients are marketing agencies), but your account may go to a trainee who is just learning.
Before starting cooperation, ask to meet the person (or team) who will be responsible for activities for you and ask why they were assigned to you. This can be in the form of a short conversation via video conferencing or telephone, so you can save time and money on getting to the agency. If the agency does not agree, you can always ask for the name of the assigned specialist and check his experience on the Linkedin profile. If this is a problem for the agency - he probably has something to hide.


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Determine the agency's responsibilities

In the sales process, many agencies will convince you that they offer a comprehensive service without restrictions. But what does comprehensive service really mean? For you it can mean something completely different than for a given agency. Don't settle for this information. Drill down and ask what it means and what exactly you will get within the amount proposed.

Define the goals of cooperation

In order for cooperation with a marketing agency to be effective, it should have a clearly defined goal, which is:
a) countable - the goal cannot be, for example, "increasing market recognition", because verifying its performance will be very difficult or even impossible. Increasing recognition can, however, be the result of achieving a set goal. In this case, it would sound like this: increase in website traffic from direct entries by X percent.
b) embedded in the timeline - the deadline for achieving a defined goal is very important. Without it, you won't be able to enforce it from the agency, so when defining your goals, it's a good idea to set a date that will be a specific day in a given month or year. Do not define the delivery date as e.g. September 2019, because it can be both the first day of the month and the last. So your date should be e.g. September 20, 2019 to the end of the day.
However, remember not to put agencies against the wall and impose goals that may not be possible to achieve. Define the goal with her. Thanks to this, you will be sure that both parties know what to expect. If the goal is far set on the roadmap of advertising activities - also set short-term goals that will bring you closer to achieving the main goal. Thanks to this, you will quickly see if your partner is "doing a good job" or not.


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Expect reliable effects reporting

In many agencies, reporting effects is an Achilles heel. To save time, agencies often download ready reports from Google Analytics or other tools and send them to clients. This is problematic because you, having no technical knowledge about advertising systems, will have a problem with drawing valid conclusions from such reports.
Beware of clichéd reports and those that do not contain results analysis and comparisons with previous periods (previous months and corresponding periods in previous years) or compare different values ​​in different months. Before starting cooperation, ask the agency to send a sample, anonymized report that it is able to offer you as part of cyclical reporting. It does not have to be extensive and be a multi-page document, but it should contain the most important information. It's also important to distinguish between these types of conversions in these reports. For example, visiting the contact tab will have a completely different value, and sending a contact form will be completely different.
For activities that are permanent and cyclical, reporting min. Once a month is the market standard. If the agency does not normally offer such reports to its clients or they contain significantly longer periods (e.g. quarter or year), you should light a yellow lamp.