Luke Monterosso
Hiring a marketing agency can help take your company to the next level. You get to work with top strategic and creative talent without the huge overhead, training and recruitment costs. There’s no shortage of digital marketing agencies, so how do you go about choosing an agency that best suits your needs?
There are plenty of good articles with questions to ask your prospective agency but rather than getting concerned with the small details, I want to give you the questions to:
- Help you conduct due diligence effectively
- Guide you through the selection process
- Pick up on signs both positive and negative early-on
Selecting a construction marketing agency can be difficult, we hope that this will help you identify who will best suit your needs and weed out those who aren’t a good fit.
Important questions to ask when hiring a digital marketing agency
How do you measure success?
Goals:
If you are onboarding a digital marketing agency, you’ll probably already have some goals in mind. That should be the focus of the conversation. For most companies this will be a sales and revenue goal.
In the building product sector, a lot of companies accrue revenue through a combination of tactics including CPDs, tradeshows and repeat business. Ask your prospective marketing agency what metrics they can measure that will directly attribute their efforts toward your bottom line.
Whether this be through SEO, PPC advertising, social media, content marketing, print or otherwise. What will be important to you is the cost of acquiring a customer, number of customers acquired, the revenue generated, and the gross margin.
Metrics:
If you’ve ever worked with a digital marketing agency, there’s a good chance you’ve been inundated with numbers. Website traffic, keyword positions and social media followers often don’t tell a complete story.
Instead look for leads generated, lead quality and the flow of leads through each stage of your funnel and how these metrics play a part in that.
Green flag:
- Transparency
- Sharing all data
- Commitment from both parties
- Open to performance-based compensation
Red flag:
- Not speaking in these terms
- Not giving more detail than just ‘ROI’
- Murky around previous case studies and metrics
What’s your approach for marketing in my industry?
Here you can identify how well they know your industry or goal. You know your business best and the answer to this question will help you clarify if they know what they’re doing.
No, we have no experience in your industry:
If they don’t have specific industry experience but tick all the other boxes, don’t disqualify them yet. They might have fresh ideas from other industries, though do be prepared to be a lot more involved to help them understand your industry.
Be cautious of agencies taking a cookie cutter approach, often if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
Yes, we have experience in your industry:
Due to the nature of the building product industry, having someone who understands the specifier’s journey is important to help really understand what architects, specifiers and contractors want from your business.
How are you keeping up with industry changes?
Things change very quickly in the world of digital marketing. Ask how they are keeping up to date with these changes and the time they devote to training. How are they investing in your success?
Look for regular training and investment in a collection of industry standard tools
This will often be through regular training of their staff to ensure they are up-to-date with the latest digital marketing techniques. This also could be through a stack of software for analytics, competitor research and SEO.
You’ll likely get a list of SaaS products you haven’t heard them, jot them down and research how what they do, how they can help and how much they’ve invested in tools to help you succeed.
Be cautious of agencies not investing in their team
What was relevant last year may not be relevant this year. Ask about specialisms in their team, be prepared to reflect on where your gaps in knowledge are and how the agency you choose may fill these.
Team that keep up to date with digital marketing techniques and tools through conferences and training will be able to ensure your building product company has a competitive advantage.
Who will be on my account and doing the work?
Some more traditional agencies are notorious for having a senior, more experienced person pitch for your business only to be serviced by an entry-level employee.
Look for transparency and clarity
Some agencies will have an in-house team, others will use an account strategist and a network of engaged freelancers and others will simply contract it to offshore workers.
Whether they are a full service digital agency or not, ask who will be looking after your account and doing the work.
How will you be reporting results?
Find out what they will be tracking and how those metrics align to your goals.
- How frequently will we be reporting?
- What will be included on the reports?
- Will we have access to dashboards for daily reporting?
An inbound construction marketing agency will be focused on customers
For an inbound digital marketing agency client reporting will be focused around the number of leads generated, the quality of those leads and the number of new customers produced for their client.
They’ll also be focused on how various marketing strategies can be attributed to generating traffic, leads and customers.
And finally, will you be able to work with them?
We really mean it. Look for an agency to foster a long-term partnership and grow with. Ask about previous customers, case studies and process. While it may be the agency executing the process, ensure they are transparent, and you fully understand it.
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About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.