The relationship with your Inbound Marketing Agency is a very personal one. You’re putting your trust in them with strategic elements of your business and that’s not something that should be taken lightly.
First things first. Any Inbound Marketing Agency should know that in the today's world it’s all about generating leads for sales, and the agency should have the sales enablement experience and background to align the marketing effort with sales to increase the sales pipeline.
So merely a string of monthly or quarterly campaigns isn’t going to create momentum amongst your target audience – you need them to implement a clear process over time to prove how many leads have actually been created by the agency’s activities.
Whether you’re evaluating your existing agency relationship with them or looking for a new one, bear in mind the following ‘must-haves’:
B2B Marketing success is driven by content creation. It is the energy source of all your marketing channels – can your agency represent your company and its messages in the best way for your ideal prospects? A good marketing agency with get inside your head and absorb your hopes and dreams in terms of the leads you wish to gain. Therefore, they need to have the process and communication skills and a high level of organisation in terms of time and resource in order to execute your campaign successfully. Remember: They are there to make your job easier not harder! They should add knowledge, not take it from you.
So they’ve got content creation skills, their social media case studies look great .Have they strung it altogether into a comprehensive strategy and have a process in place? This is where the real value is. Your marketing agency, or prospective one, should be able to justify their lead generation methodologies for prospective clients. If the agency has delivered ROI to other clients and they can clearly show you their processes and the time and resources required. Then, there’s a plan it place to do it again for your company too!
Making sure your agency capabilities are going to meet your marketing goals is essential. Just because they’ve built you a brand new website doesn’t mean you will automatically see visitors flocking to your site. Although it seems logical to assume they go hand in hand, these are two completely different skills sets. Ensure they have both design-heavy and content-heavy expertise in order to attract more traffic and leads. Do they have traffic generation services such as blogging and content creation, SEO and link building, and social media marketing? If it’s more leads and customers that sculpt your marketing aims, then marketing automation services may be something else to consider. In short, be certain that the agency you use has the right tools & skills for the job and the right methods of achieving your objectives.
If they are crazy about campaign measurement, barmy about benchmarks and adore analytics then they will be able to map progress and focus on your goal success in an evidential and data-driven way. This should be measured at every step throughout your campaign and a performance report should be available to your company regularly.
Agencies need to practice what they preach so if they aren’t regularly blogging and engaging with social media or have properly optimised landing pages and content then think twice about engaging with them. An effective inbound marketing agency should be its own best case study. Wouldn’t you worry if a company doesn’t make the services it sells a priority for its own business?
Is your current agency not ticking all the boxes? Why not see how Intellegentia can enhance your business!