Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Marketing Agency: Part One
By Lily Whorl
When hiring a marketing agency, you must ask many questions. There are the questions you need to ask yourself as a business and the concerns you need to address with your prospective marketing agency. This week we’ll be covering the essential items you’ll need to ask yourself first.
When asking yourself questions, there are many different angles you must take. Do this by remembering various aspects of your business such as budget and purpose. Making sure you cover all bases is vital when successfully hiring a marketing agency.
What are your goals?
Before making any changes to your business, you should always ask what your goals are. By doing this, you can identify your purpose as a business and lay out a blueprint to achieve those goals. Asking this question is specifically crucial when hiring a marketing agency. According to The Marketing Blender, “When you bring your goals or challenges to a prospective agency, they can better assist you in driving change and growth than if you simply bring a list of projects.”
What sets your business apart from others?
It’s important to understand your strengths and weaknesses as a business. This question can be challenging at times, but it’s essential, to be honest with yourself and your company. Once you’ve found the answer to this question, you’ll be able to share what makes you unique with your future marketing firm. Hunt Interaction explains that “any marketing firm or consultant will want to dig into this aspect of your business and you need to be prepared to answer this question.”
What’s your budget?
Oh the dreaded word: budget. No one likes to talk money, but it’s a critical aspect in any business. How much are you willing to spend, and how much can you afford to pay? The last thing you want to do is allow the potential marketing firm aid you in deciding your budget. Already having this information will enable you to narrow your searches when looking for a firm, which not only saves your time but the time of the marketing firms that are out of your budget as well.
Figments lay budget out into three different tiers all achieving different goals. Though, it is hard to set a specific budget without understanding what type of services you are looking for and need. It’s essential to have an understanding of what you’re struggling with as a company. Maybe you need to define your brand, get your ads seen on Google, or even need a whole new website; the list really could go on so once you have a better understanding of where your business could use some help. Then, with a little bit of research, a budget will come quickly to you.
Why are you considering a marketing firm? What type of marketing do you need?
When considering what type of marketing you need the best thing you can do is highlight your number one goal. This one goal is the problem you want to solve when considering what form of marketing can help you. Hunt Interaction created a simple set of inquiries to help you find the exact type of marketing you’re going to need. This is the set of four questions you want to ask yourself:
- Will we reach our top goal if more people know about our brand and company?
- Will we reach our top goal if we increase traffic to our site/stores?
- Will we reach our top goal if we convert our existing traffic into sales?
- Will we reach our top goal if we get our current, good, customers to buy again or upgrade?
Once you’ve found which solution will help you reach your top goal, all it takes is merely matching up your answer with a particular form of marketing.
If you answered yes to question one, you’d want to seek out the services of branding and public relations.
If you answered yes to question two, you’d want to seek out the services of an agency that offers customer acquisition, which are things such as SEO, PPC, Affiliate, public relations, etc.
If you answered yes to question three, you’d want to seek out companies that excel in customer experience or conversion optimization.
If you answered yes to question four, you’d want to seek out companies that specialize in customer loyalty and retention.
If you answered yes to all of the above, a full-service agency like ours would serve you best.
Who are your customers?
When running a business in general, this question is fundamental to ask. Who are your customers? Having this answer laid out is vital to your company and can be extremely helpful for your future marketing firm.
An article by The Huffington Post highlights ten critical questions to ask when determining your target market:
These ten questions are:
- What demographics do they belong to?
- Where do they live?
- How do you live their lives?
- How much money do they make?
- In what industry do they work?
- What’s important to them?
- How do they get their information?
- Who’s important to them?
- How do they communicate?
- What problems do they face?
Once you’ve answered these ten questions, you’ll have a deeper understanding of your key demographics. Essentially your key demographics are your building blocks when it comes to any marketing content.
Asking yourself these five questions will help to map out exactly what services you need. Hopefully giving you a more narrow look at what marketing agencies you’ll want to consider.
If you feel like you’re ready for help implementing your marketing strategy and tasks, be sure to review our services to see how we might be able to help you achieve results.
