Choosing the right marketing agency for your business can be difficult. It’s easy to make huge mistakes when choosing an agency that can be detrimental to the company.
Many business and subscription box owners get excited to hire an agency and outsource their marketing. It often seems that hiring an agency could be just the growth driver of your business that you’ve been looking for. But without asking the right questions, you can quickly discover that you hired the wrong agency. The wrong choice can waste a TON of money and could end up really hurting your business.
So if you’re looking to hire an agency, here are 4 things you should consider before signing the contract.
At Harbor Marketing Agency, we specialize in working with subscription box companies. We know how to market subscription boxes, and we’re good at it. It’s just what we do.
If a real estate agent, a gym owner, or a business with some other niche inquired about our services, we would turn them down. Our team doesn’t know how to market real estate or gyms, we know how to market subscription boxes.
If you’re considering signing with an agency and they don’t have relevant case studies in your niche, then it’s probably not a good fit. Instead you should find a marketing agency that specializes in whatever industry that you’re in. If you’re a subscription box owner, you know that Harbor Marketing Agency is a good fit for your business; if you’re in real estate, you know that we’re probably not a good fit.
The second thing to consider when evaluating an agency are the expectations they have (or haven’t) laid out. An agency’s job is to partner with you and help you figure out how to get sales for your business. They should know how to implement all the best marketing practices and what those practices are.
But they don’t control the ad platforms and they don’t control how your customer responds to your product. There are lots of external variables that are outside of an agency’s control, so it’s their job to be up front with their clients and share that valuable information with you. That way any client that enters a partnership with the agency (possibly you and your own business) does so with the right expectations.
So if you’re talking with an agency and they are making claims that they will skyrocket your business overnight or that all these amazing things will happen and happen quickly, this is probably a sign of an inexperienced agency. A good agency will always do their best to under promise and over deliver.
Whenever we take on a client, we perform a thorough audit of their entire business. This is called a Results Action Plan and it takes us a full month. We will go through your website, your Facebook ad account, your Google ad account, your email marketing, your Facebook page, your Instagram page, and pretty much your entire online presence.
So if you’re speaking with an agency and after one phone conversation with them they come back to you and say, “oh yeah, we can do that… it’ll be $10,000 a month… you’ll get great results!” but they haven’t even performed an audit of your business, this is a massive red flag!
How could the agency possibly know what they’re getting into by taking on your business without first performing a thorough audit? They won’t.
The fourth question to ask when evaluating an agency is what communication between the agency and your business will look like.
You don’t want to sign a contract with an agency and get into a very costly agreement just to find out that they’re only going to send you an update once a month. You should want to know exactly who your main point of contact at the agency will be ahead of time.
You should also know what communication will look like; will you have a structured monthly reporting call, will you have the ability to hop on calls with them whenever you want, etc. Choose an agency that over communicates and has a communication style that will fit in well with your own.
Make sure to consider all four of these things as you’re evaluating an agency. If you are in the subscription box space and you’re looking for a good agency that will be up front with you and help you scale your subscription box, schedule a call with us today!
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