Choosing your digital marketing agency is hard work.
Since services offered by agencies rely solely on the people and processes behind them, it’s likely no amount of information you’ll find online will convince you to make a decision until you've talked to a sales rep.
You may have already narrowed down your options based on your needs and the information you gathered online, but the most important information and the info that’ll probably help you decide which one is the right for you is usually gathered through one-on-one interviews. You’ll probably have a lot of questions to make sure you think alike and they meet the needs and expectations you’re looking for.
But you will also need to respond to the agency’s questions.
Keep in mind that a responsible agency will analyze the information you’ve given to them to make sure that they are capable of providing the services you need.
You don’t need to know the answers to all of these questions. You may even work on these together with the agency as you go, but it’s important for them to have all this information when you start working together, to ensure great results.
About your present status:
- What makes you want to change or move to an agency?
- What have you been doing with your digital marketing so far? How do you feel it has been going for you?
- What do your marketing and sales teams look like?
- Do you feel your marketing and sales team have fluid communication and processes?
- Do you have internal team members who are in charge of design and programming? Is that outsourced?
- Do you work with other agencies or outsourced services?
About your marketing efforts:
- What do you consider to be your main marketing and sales problem?
- What marketing efforts do you do on a regular basis?
- Who is your target audience? What problems do you solve for them?
- In your strategy, do you use buyer personas? Lead scoring? Customer journey maps?
About your technology:
- Do you consider your company to be tech-savvy?
- Which marketing tools do you currently use? Do you currently have marketing automation? Do you use a CRM?
- How do you feel about your website and how it communicates your product/service?
- How often do you implement changes on your webpages? Describe that process.
About your competitors:
- Who are your competitors?
- Which of your competitors do you feel is doing the best job at inbound marketing?
- How do you compare with your competitors? What are your strengths and your weaknesses compared to them?
About sales:
- Do you know where most of your leads come from?
- What is your main sales problem?
- Do you have a sales funnel? How long is your average sales cycle?
- Do you have clear yearly/quarterly sales goals?
About your future, when working together:
- How much do you plan on spending on your marketing efforts?
- What do you imagine the best way to communicate with us would be?
- Who would be the main touchpoints in our relationship with your company?
- What is your biggest concern when hiring a digital marketing agency?
A good agency will go in-depth with these questions to fully understand your problems and try to give you creative solutions, with an outsider’s perspective. They should be your partner, bringing up questions that may trigger ideas to address your problems.
So don’t be intimidated by these questions! They’ll help you understand which agency is only in it for the money and which one is in it to really be there for you and help you continuously improve.
Request a free 30-minute growth consultation with our marketing strategists today and get to know us and how we can help.