3min
So, you are considering hiring an inbound marketing agency. But, you’re finding it difficult to relinquishing control of an activity so essential to your businesses success to be managed by anybody else, because you are a self acknowledged control freak.
The OCD control monster inside you is starting to panic at the idea of not being totally aware of what is happening day in and day out, the lack of total control over exactly what goes on and realising that you’ll have to overcome the desire to continually check in to find out how things are proceeding.
Please try and relax your tortured soul, because once you know how to select an inbound marketing agency that'll take your business as seriously as you do, you'll find it a great deal easier to give up some control.
Let’s have a look at what you need to understand about an inbound marketing agency
Marketing Plan & Strategy
Any marketing agency "worth its salt" will not produce a complete marketing plan until there is a mutual commit to work together. Nevertheless, with some particular info from you, such as, your current performance, your business goals and current problems your encountering, they ought to have the ability to supply a fundamental outline of what they would do for you.
But please note, it's important that they must also be able to clarify "why" they are suggesting this specific play book.
Questions to ask
- Considering our current position, objectives, and challenges, what do you suggest as an effective course of action? Also, how would your prioritise each phase of the plan?
- Exactly how will this plan target our challenges and accomplish our objectives?”
Evaluating Results
It's impossible to effectively manage activities that are not being monitored, measured and evaluated. An inbound marketing agency will have a technology platform it employs for evaluating exactly how well results are progressing. These results help the marketing agency to continually amend and maximise the plans. You need to understand how they evaluate, how often they examine metrics, KPIs and reports, and how often they communicate this data with you.
Questions to ask
- How do you determine effectiveness?
- What's your approach to continually monitor and optimise my businesses marketing plan?
- How and when will you communicate these reports with us?
Client Management
Although it is probable that a few people inside the marketing agency will contribute to your marketing strategy, it’s likely that there will be one or two individuals chiefly managing your account. You need to discover more about their experience with inbound marketing and what industries they’re acquainted with.
Often, an inbound marketing agency can't perform each element in-house, so they’ll subcontract a portion of the work to outside partners. Ask, what element of your companies marketing plan they will contribute to.
Questions to ask
- Who is my primary point of contact?
- What's their experience with inbound marketing? What type of clients have they worked with?
- Will you outsource any of the activities in our marketing program? If yes, what specifically and why?
Technology
Every inbound marketing agency makes use of a technology platform to manage and implement inbound marketing. What you need to understand is how knowledgeable they are of their platform, how it’s functioned for them, what sort of accessibility you’ll have to your account, and if they offer training for your team.
It’s typical for agencies to use and refer to other documents to control and schedule your inbound marketing plan. Feel free to ask what documents they use and will you have access to the documents.
Questions to ask
- What inbound marketing technology platform do you use? What is your experience with it?”
- Does my current CRM integrate with your system or do you offer an alternative?
- Will we have login details and do you offer training for the system?
- What other planning resources do you use and will we have access to these documents?
Research
If the inbound marketing agency will be creating your content, ask them how they’ll research your brand and industry to produce content that is informative, worthwhile, and beneficial to your audience. Considering they’re almost certainly not specialists in your market, they’ll have to do a lot of research to be able to compose content in an authoritative manner. It's possibly that they'll engage with you and your team to help with the research by interviewing the specialists in your business on specific topics or to interview existing clients .
Questions to ask
- Will our team be employed during this stage?
- How do you conduct research since you aren’t specialists in our business or market?
So, there it is...
You might think that it's too much to get through, however getting the answers to these questions will provide you fantastic insight about how any inbound marketing agency operates. Fundamentally, it will enable you to select one that will be the best fit for your brand.
As soon as you know exactly how included you and your team will be in the process and how committed the agency will be towards your brand, I guarantee you’ll feel a lot better about giving away some of that control!
