Questions to Ask Your Digital Marketing Agency
When our team meets with current and prospective clients, we have already built a strategic plan to ensure that we have insight on their business and can speak to their needs when it comes time to meet. Clients can depend on our digital marketing team as much or as little as needed, but The Sampson House is always bringing new ideas that will assist in the growth of a business and making sure that demographics and targeted areas are specific to our clients’ audiences, industries, and the consumers of their content.
Whether you are currently working with an agency or looking to put out an RFP to build your business's marketing efforts, below are five questions that you should be asking your agency of record.
Key Services Offered
Not all marketing agencies offer the same services. When looking for an agency, it is important to look for agencies that align with your business's needs. Make sure that you audit the prospective agencies' services, see what is offered, and research what their current client portfolio or case studies look like. It is also important to check if any of the client listings are utilizing the services you are interested in and research their content to see if it aligns with what you are looking for.
Some marketing agencies have primary services that they focus on. Asking for past metrics they’ve achieved or reference websites/feeds/etc., can give you great insight into the content they are putting out.
Monthly Metrics Reporting
The Sampson House provides all of our clients with monthly metrics reports that cover active ad campaign metrics, website performance, Google Ads performance, search engine results, and more. We highly encourage our clients to ask questions and lean on our team to talk through the month’s performance metrics that outline budget spent, changes in targeting and creative, platform metrics, etc.
Make sure that when you choose a marketing partner that they are willing to speak to the monthly metrics. You want to ensure that what you invest in returns successful results. Providing these metrics on a monthly or quarterly basis, in addition to your annual review, allows you and your team to speak to the efforts that are working for your business and assists in optimizations that may need to be strategically updated.
It’s important to know where and how your marketing dollars are best being spent to see the metrics your business needs to succeed and grow year over year.
Where/Who Should I Be Targeting and Putting More Budgeting Towards?
Asking your digital marketing team where they’re seeing your primary demographic interacting the most is key to a successful campaign. As an agency, we measure click-through-rate, and clicks on each of the utilized platforms, look at your peak post time, and monitor if you should be adding more budget into a certain platform or if we recommend shifting dollars into a new platform.
These are all pivotal questions that you can ask your digital marketing team to put together in a media mix that will best reach (and exceed) your marketing goals. This will even allow your business to reach new audiences. With our experience, we are able to take our insight and target groups such as Gen Z, millennials, and more.
What Strategies/Objectives Would You Recommend For My Business?
Having a marketing team that you can rely on to help segment your ads and target your key demographic is imperative. You should be asking your marketing team how they are segmenting out your ads to optimize toward your target audience. Your marketing team can also tell you what is going to work best and how to optimize your ads to help you meet your goals and reach the audience that you intend to receive your messaging.
What Is My Competition Doing?
Asking for competitor research is important to keep tabs on what others in your industry are doing and utilize their metrics to gauge a benchmark for your business. Although most marketing strategies are very specifically catered to your business's needs, looking at competitors' work is a great way to not only get an idea of what else is being done but also help your team figure out what will best work for you.
We’d love to get to know you and your business or aid in answering your marketing questions. Reach out, and let’s meet for coffee to chat more! For more insight on working with an agency, check out our blog, 5 Key Reasons You Should Hire a Marketing Agency.
