Choosing the Best Marketing Team for You

Finding a marketing team is like finding a spouse. Marketing agencies (good ones, at least) hope to grow a lasting partnership with you. But not every agency will be compatible with your business. The last thing you want to do is waste your valuable time and money on an agency that fails to provide what you need or doesn’t value their relationship with you… beyond your money. Any marketing team you bring on should easily fit in with your company, forming one team devoted to a common goal.

To help the process, we’ve compiled five steps to guide you in finding a full-service marketing agency for you.

1.     Know what you want.

You need to know where you want to go. You don’t need to know how you’re going to get there, but you definitely need to know where “there” is. Ask yourself and your team: What are your goals and challenges as a company, division, or brand? What results are you looking for? Dig deep. Come up with something more specific than “get more sales.” For example:

• Decrease the average time it takes to close deals by X days
  
• Boost comparable sales by X%
  
• Leave the trade show with X closeable leads
  
• Increase customer spending on online orders by X%
  

Great marketers are strategically creative. If you’re specific about what you hope to achieve, your marketing firm can take your challenge and design measureable solutions that meet your goals and objectives. When you find the right team for your company, they might even talk you out of some of your proposals. Maybe your company has grown bored with its logo, but it still makes your customers happy. A great marketing team will veer you away from wasting your money and instead find solutions that optimize it. Like when you take your best friend shopping with you, and she tells you honestly that the dress does, in fact, make you look fat.

2.     Know and share your budget.

More than once, companies have come to HeavyDuty without a budget. It’s like asking a contractor to build a home for you without specifying how much you want done. They could build a modest one-story cottage or a bona fide mansion, and you would have to pay for it. The sky is not the limit.

Don’t hire a marketing agency if you don’t know how much you’re willing and able to spend. You definitely don’t want to spend your marketing dollars on creative ideas that you cannot afford to put into action, and you also don’t want to find out that you could have reached more people if you had aimed higher. And, unfortunately, there are those that will try to swindle you into unnecessary ventures and charge you more than their services are really worth.

Once you know who your marketing partner will be, you can trust them to use their expertise to build or refine your plans according to your budget. A good agency should honestly demonstrate how they use each dollar you spend, and they should prove how your budget is better spent with them. You should spend exactly enough with them to achieve your goals. No more, no less.

3.    Look for relevant experience.

Has the agency taken another company where you want to be? A marketer doesn’t need expertise in your specific industry to be the perfect fit, but you want a firm that knows how to handle challenges similar to yours. They might have an impressive repertoire with companies that have thousands of employees, but they might not know how to make solutions suitable for your 15-person powerhouse.

For example, if you want to increase your network of distributors, look for ways they’ve assisted other companies to do just that. You will then have peace in knowing that they can bring aspects of their time-tested strategies to the table while developing solutions unique to your business. Savvy marketing agencies typically have online portfolios and case studies where you can see their previous work for yourself.

The ideal agency should be a pragmatic, seasoned team of marketers and creatives who develop and execute innovative strategies, in-house or through a rich network of trusted affiliates. Their work should show versatility and precision. That way, you only have to search and hire once. You can be confident that when a new challenge arises, you have the power to conquer it. One of your needs could be crafting an advertisement while another could be building a trade show booth—very different.

Bonus tip: If one of your objectives is to increase social media engagement in any way, check out the agency’s own social media accounts. Now, if they have stylistic differences or a different tone of voice from how you perceive yourself as a company, it’s not necessary to worry. But, come on, multiple grammatical errors, poorly communicated writing, shoddy graphics—those should signal you to reconsider their expertise.

4.    Get to know them as people.

Prior to a discovery meeting with the candidates that you’ve selected so far, get together with your own team and prepare a list of questions for the interviewees. Don’t ask solely about your specific project. Find out how the agency gets any project started, how they treat their client relationships, and how they handle logistical tasks like billing. Great questions allow both parties to get a better understanding of whether or not you’ll be a good fit for each other. This is a relationship. When meeting with agency candidates, try to get an understanding of their culture and values. You might think of your company as family. You might pride yourself on your attention to detail. Your business partner should share those values.

When you meet with prospective agencies, is the atmosphere harmonious with yours? Or can you sense someone’s personality traits—especially if they’ll be working with you directly—clashing with members of your own team? It could become a bigger issue than you realize at first. If you value your timeliness, how would you feel about a company that doesn’t give you deadlines? If you think of your company as family, how would you feel about a company that only cares about profits? A company’s core values and personality give insight into your future relationship. Culture compatibility increases the potential for a successful collaboration, and with the right firm, it should spark a personal connection.

Our favorite question to answer is “Why do you do what you do?” One value that you should look for in any company, regardless of industry, is a results-driven attitude. Plenty of marketing teams have brilliantly creative minds and high accolades but fail to focus on the goals of the campaign. They’ll try awesome, wacky solutions that might garner attention in the short-term, but in the long-term, cannot sustain your brand alone. Don’t go with an agency that just wants to get its own creative fix. Choose a team that will do what it takes to see you succeed.

5.     Make your decision.

The selection process requires knowledge of the firm: their culture, their team, and their capabilities. Hire based on how the company has demonstrated their creativity, ability to achieve results on budget, and their values as people. After you’ve checked off your requirements on paper, hire the marketing team that you feel in your gut is right.  

To see how HeavyDuty does things as an agency, schedule a free 30-minute meeting with me.