How To Start An Agency Marketing Services Contract Off Right

Congratulations! You’ve found the agency marketing services provider you want to work with and the ink is drying on the contract. Now, how to ensure you can show the powers-that-be at your company that you made the right choice in marketing consultants? Here are just a few things you can do to ensure you get a fast start and an even quicker ROI from the word ‘go!’…

Step 1 – Give Them Access To All Internal Experts – If your agency marketing services provider is going to be creating content for you – blog posts, infographics, social media posts, landing pages – they’ll need access to everyone you can point them towards who can provide inside knowledge on your particular slice of industry. This will help to cut down on the tedious back-and-forth between you and your agency contact, and it will empower your marketing partner to take full advantage of your organization’s wealth of knowledge – resulting in better content the first time…not draft after draft after draft.

So, go ahead and make a list of everyone on your team that can be tapped as a font of knowledge. Further, be proactive and give your agency a full list of your competition and thought leaders in the industry. This will help your marketing consultants to become experts much more quickly – and to create marketing campaigns that really speak to your company’s marketing needs and goals.

Step 2 – Let The Agency Experience Your Work From All Sides

You should give the agency marketing services provider the opportunity to go through your sales process. Have the key agency contacts speak with Sales, give them product and service demonstrations and, let them test drive products and services whenever possible. In essence, what you’re doing here is making them the customer. Then, flip the script and have them experience your company from your side of things – so they can get a feel for where your strengths and pain points lie.

Remember, this marketing services contract is a partnership – and in order for them to become a new evangelist for your firm, they’ll need to know what makes you tick from a customer perspective – and what makes you special.

Step 3 – Give Them The Tools

As embarrassing as it might be to show how hackneyed some of your last ditch marketing efforts were before you hired them on, if you’ve done any marketing in the past, you probably have used a whole assortment of tools and, well, hacks, to execute your inbound marketing. Was there an email marketing provider you used? Give the new agency marketing services provider access to those files, usernames, passwords, the whole enchilada. Same with a CRM, CMS, analytics, social media, survey tools, ecommerce platforms, a landing page builder template and on and on.

Make a master list of all of these tools and hand them off to your marketing agency contact. Remember, they’re part of your team now – and a big part of their job is to review these tools and learn how they were used – all to help them understand more about your internal process for creating marketing. Once they know that, they can more effectively take over the admin of these accounts and streamline your efforts using an integrated marketing platform.

Step 4 – Set Clear Communications Guidelines

A major concern dealing with a new agency is communication – and it’s no wonder. Communication is the key to creating credibility and building trust.

If the agency doesn't currently use a project management like Teamwork or Basecamp, then you need to insist on it. Emailing content and commentary back and forth is messy and ineffective. Neither of you should be wasting time looking for files or notes or trying to remember when deliverables are due.

Setting up a collaboration system that allows your team and the agency's team to share files, communicate feedback, and outline tasks and deadlines will ensure that everyone is on the same page. This also helps you to see what agency marketing services are being worked on, how they’re progressing – and that transparency means there’s one less thing to worry about every day.