Key Questions for your Marketing & Advertising Agency: A Guide for Success
Your company’s success in strategic marketing & advertising hinges on the quality of service from your agency partner. Below, we offer four critical questions that will help determine if your agency is setting you up for triumph.
1. What is Your Approach to Evaluating and Safeguarding Brand Decisions?
In the world of advertising and marketing, one cannot overlook the importance of brand safety. The industry has seen its fair share of criticism due to careless digital media purchases, resulting in damaged partnerships and wasted resources.
Long gone are the days when algorithms solely determined placement recommendations. Now, every media purchasing decision requires careful, manual evaluation.
At Cool Nerds Marketing, our dedication to brand safety surpasses basic media evaluation. We delve deeper, assessing overall topics, messaging, tone, and content support to prevent conflicts with our client’s brand and values.
2. How Do You Identify and Target Audiences?
“Timing is everything” isn’t just a cliché—it’s a fundamental rule when you’re backing campaigns with significant investments. Without precise identification and targeting of audiences, you risk generating meaningless numbers.
Your agency should assist in discovering, reinforcing, and optimizing various aspects of your audience & targeting. These might include geographical region, age range, preferred device, active time, online behaviors, and personal preferences.
At Cool Nerds Marketing, we target audiences so specifically that their device, interests, and active times align perfectly with your brand communication. Through this level of organization and segmentation, we establish clear client expectations regarding timelines, benchmarks, and results.
3. How Does Your Agency Ensure Transparency?
Transparency is a buzzword that often gets thrown around without much substance. Some agencies claim transparency simply because they provide reports, but the real value lies in the insights these reports provide.
We’ve seen agencies that only provide vague, screenshot “reports” which fail to provide a comprehensive picture.
At Cool Nerds, our transparency is embodied in custom reports tailored to each client’s unique goals. We use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track progress related to our client’s campaigns. We often supplement biweekly reports with discussions to review strategic decisions based on data.
4. How Do You Identify and Measure Success?
When collaborating with an agency for marketing and advertising needs, it’s crucial to establish means to measure their work in relation to your goals. A single end goal or number won’t suffice—you need to track progress proactively to ensure success.
Teams can use industry or platform-specific KPIs and compare them to campaign benchmarks. This ensures that all campaigns and teams hit each crucial mark in alignment with the end goals.
If your current or prospective agency does not offer a detailed level of brand safety, audience targeting, report transparency, and success measurement, perhaps it’s time to explore other options or give our nerds at Cool Nerds Marketing a call.
