When you outsource your digital marketing efforts or work with an agency on something new for your business (like your website), you’re building a partnership unlike any other. Getting the best final product or results requires a great deal of trust, transparency, and dedication on both sides.
To ensure you’re getting the best possible outcome for your business, keep these tips in mind when working alongside your marketing agency.
Make Sure All Necessary Stakeholders Are Involved
In the project management world, stakeholders are defined as “individuals and organizations who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected due to project execution or successful project completion.”
As you can see, by this definition, there are a lot of stakeholders to consider with your digital marketing project.
When we say “make sure all necessary stakeholders are involved,” we don’t necessarily mean that one person from every stakeholder category gets a seat at the table. Instead, we mean that we want their perceptions, needs, wants, pain points and other crucial details considered when strategizing and executing a marketing project.
Stakeholder perceptions should weigh in on the direction of your project, which is why it is so important that you truly know your target audience. Depending on the complexity of your project, your agency will ask a lot of questions about your typical customer, or they may offer to perform customer interviews to gather information straight from the source.
The more stakeholder details an agency has to reference, the more likely you’ll see impactful results with your marketing.
Provide Clear Feedback
When an agency presents deliverables for you to review, there’s a good chance there will be at least one round of revisions that will need to happen (which is a good thing; more on that in the next point).
Because of this, you should provide clear, honest feedback to help push the deliverable to meet your expectations.
To make sure your agency is getting the most out of your feedback, consider the following:
- If you’re asking for other team members to weigh in on your deliverables, provide consolidated feedback in one delivery after you’ve received everyone’s thoughts. This will decrease the chances of submitting contradictory feedback and give a more cohesive view of the edits that need to be made.
- Get as granular with your feedback as possible. Don’t worry about being too detailed or over-explaining your thoughts. Agencies greatly appreciate this over vague feedback any day.
- If you can provide examples of visual concepts along with your feedback, agencies will LOVE you. Even if it’s a “rough” idea of what you’re looking for, it will really help with the revisions.
Be Ready to Collaborate
At GreenMellen, the most successful projects we’ve created included heavy collaboration between our clients and our team. While we understand and appreciate that you outsourced these projects to save yourself time and work with a professional who knows how to get the results you desire, you must dedicate some time for collaboration.
Agencies never want to dictate or force clients to move forward with their ideas; they always strive to treat you as a valuable partner and incorporate your thoughts into the ideas they present. It’s this kind of collaboration that results in proven success time and time again.
When working with an agency, it’s a good idea to have a conversation about the process, who will be involved from your team and theirs, and how your team would prefer to collaborate (whether it’s going over deliverables during weekly meetings or asking an agency to provide screencasts with each deliverable).
Share Your Industry Insight and Knowledge with Your Agency
Unless an agency is built with a team of individuals who have served directly in your industry or field, they will rely on you to provide key insight into your world.
More likely than not, they will ask many questions about your business, industry, customers, and overall industry trends and challenges at the beginning of a project. Come prepared to share your knowledge! As stated earlier in this post, the more information you can provide your agency, the better!
Trust the Process
All agencies have a method to their madness and continuously work toward perfecting their process. When you enter into an agreement with an agency, they will (or should) explain their process and why specific steps come before others.
The best work from agencies comes from clients who follow along with their process and don’t try to skip steps to get their results quicker. For example, this could be when a client asks to bypass the website wireframing stage and go straight to design. As a web agency, we know the importance of wireframes and how they significantly impact the page layout and functionality, so it’s up to us to explain the importance of this step within our process.
In short, trust the agency’s process. And, if you ever have any questions or pushback on any steps within it, have a conversation with them about it.
Working with an agency can sometimes feel overwhelming and uncertain at first. However, once you see their capabilities and ideas for your business, all of those feelings will melt away.
To learn more about how an agency like GreenMellen can help you get the most out of digital marketing needs, contact us today!
