Hiring the best talent is a byproduct of asking the right questions. If you are looking to hire an advertising marketing agency, there are questions you should ask upfront.
You are looking for ROI when you are about to hire an advertising marketing agency for e-commerce business growth. It’s your money. You owe it to yourself to hire the right marketing agency and to ensure that you get the results you seek.
Agencies do what agencies do, but it’s your responsibility to ensure that the relationship works. Here are the most important questions you should ask:
Can you provide examples of creative ads you’ve produced in-house?
The first thing you’d want to see before you hire any advertising marketing agency is their creative examples of advertising marketing campaigns.
Advertising marketing agencies worth their salt should always be creating, iterating, tweaking, testing, and rolling out campaigns--either for themselves or for their clients.
No other discussion is possible without existing samples, artwork, creatives, and actual campaigns to show.
What do you believe is achievable in terms of performance and ROAS?
Everyone can throw statistics such as “The average conversion rate on a website is around 2 percent globally” and “The campaign has the potential to achieve 42 percent ROI”.
The trick is to specifically ask marketing agencies you are about to hire for industry-wise and campaign-wise breakdowns of previous performance and results they achieved.
Based on that information, ask “Given your category of business (e-commerce) and your industry (fashion? electronics? beverages?), what are some of the KPIs your agency can achieve within a specific time frame?”
What is the timeline for these goals?
“We’ll do it someday,” and “Results come in when they come in” are not answers you want. For advertising campaigns, time is money. Marketing campaigns that don’t work are a drain on resources and costs.
For each ad campaign, it only makes sense to ask for specific timelines for creation and launch, along with timelines for getting results or meeting specific goals.
Do you produce creatives or designs in-house?
Creatives, ad copy, images, graphics--these are part of the “half-art and half-science” conundrum that marketing can be.
At this point, you would already have asked for samples and campaign examples to show (see above).
Next, ask about how these creatives are produced.
Are the creatives, copy, graphics, images, and other aspects of creative work produced in-house by full-time teams, or are they outsourced? If they’re outsourced, who does the job?
How do you measure success (which metrics) and what does your reporting look like?
An agency’s success is not the same as the success of a typical e-commerce business. The ultimate goal of an agency is to provide services to get you results and make money. As long as results come in, their billing is justified.
The question is this: What are the results? How do you measure success?
What exactly does success mean? Clarify.
How do you measure success? Show me the proof.
What KPIs do you measure success with and how does your reporting look?
How do you optimize ad performance over time?
One of the most crucial (and result-oriented) tasks a marketing agency will do is to optimize ads, creatives, and copy over specific periods of time (including A/B testing) and reporting.
One of the primary questions you should be asking your potential agency is their process of optimizing campaigns.
What happens in one month if we don’t manage to reach our goals?
Not everything works out the way you (or the agency) expect. So, what’s the plan B?
That’s not to mention that not all businesses are the same, not all campaigns are the same, and not all goals are permanent. If and when they do change, advertising marketing agencies should have the capability to absorb changes, implement new campaigns focused on new goals, and more.
You can ask your advertising agency what happens if campaigns don’t perform or if goals change. What’s the plan B, C, and D that your marketing agency will resort to?
How do you gather inspiration and how can we decide on campaigns together?
The best advertising marketing agencies don’t just rely on collective creativity. They also depend on the inspiration they can find from other clients they’ve worked with, ongoing campaigns different businesses use, and more.
Agencies don’t just invent “awesomeness”. A large part of creativity also comes from inspiration.
So, where does your agency come up with inspiration? Is it from overall advertising and marketing campaigns all around? Do they use sites like ReallyGoodEmails, Dribble, or elsewhere on the web?
Note: Panoramata is a tool that helps pick the best campaign ad examples on boards for inspiration.
Do you work with other brands in our industry? How well do you know our niche?
It’d be good to know if the marketing agency has experience in the exact (or at least similar niche) your e-commerce business relates to.
While the principles of marketing more or less remain the same across industries, you’d still want some relevance to speed things up and to rely on the expertise that comes through working in the same industry vertical you operate in.
Which attribution window are you using?
Attribution modeling is tricky. It usually calls for sacrificing one attribution model for another or maybe finding a sweet spot that works to ensure that you understand how your marketing is getting the results you deserve. According to Klaviyo, “There’s no perfect model.”
Marketing attribution is not etched in stone either. Yet, you’d do well to ask about attribution windows your agency uses, how, and why they switch, if they do, from one model to another, and how they make decisions about which attribution model and/or attribution window they choose to measure results.
How do you identify competitors?
Before working with your e-commerce business, how does your agency gather intelligence on your competitors?
In other words, what does your agency do about competitive intelligence and competitor benchmarking, and how does it find your competitors in the first place?
If working specifically for one or two industry verticals and e-commerce categories (see above), advertising marketing agencies would have specific lists or processes to identify your competitors quickly.
Note: Tools like Panoramata are a must-have for every agency that works with paid media campaigns. It will help you launch campaigns the smart way. Panoramata will guide you with inspiration, active lists, compilation, and gathering intelligence quickly and efficiently.
What tools do you use?
Does the agency use tools that build, test, personalize, and analyze ad campaigns before sending them? What kind of tools does your agency use for ad campaigns?
What other tools does your marketing agency use for deployment, measuring, testing, analyzing, and reporting?
Conclusion
These are just some of the questions you should ask your advertising marketing agency. Only when you’re satisfied with the answers should you proceed with the hiring process. We wish you all the best on your brand’s marketing journey!
