How to measure your marketing agency

Partnering with the right agency can deliver astounding results for your business. Here’s how you can tell if your current marketing strategy is helping you achieve your business goals.

Why do we spend so much time and money marketing our products and services?

To understand how to measure your marketing agency, you have to look at why you hired them in the first place.

It all boils down to sales.

Sales is the lifeblood of a business. Everything we do on a day to day basis, from hiring the right talent, to our marketing efforts and improving our customer service levels, ties back to growing our bottom line.

Sales: the true measurement of marketing success

As much as some people believe that the measurement of marketing success is subjective (and the internet is riddled with varying opinions on the subject), the truth is that the best measurement of marketing success is sales.

Sales and marketing go hand in hand. When your marketing and sales strategies are tightly aligned, your bottom line will reflect this.

 With this in mind, your agency should be measured on the merit of their work and how it contributes towards achieving your sales goals.

How to track whether your marketing efforts convert to sales

Website traffic, clicks, views, likes and follows all have their place, however these metrics are vanity metrics (a superficial show of a successful marketing strategy). Unless this traffic is converting into good quality, sales qualified leads that are likely to convert to customers, you won’t be generating revenue.

There are multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track to measure the actual success of your agency’s marketing efforts. These include:

• Traffic to lead ratio
  It’s important to understand that not all website traffic is the right website traffic. To check whether you’re attracting the right visitors to your website, you need to track how many of these visitors are converting to leads (e.g. filling out a contact form or downloading a content offer).
  
  

• Wins by lead source
  This KPI tracks the initial point of contact of a lead that converted to a sale - this could be a form filled in on your website, social media, prospecting, and so on.
  
  

• Cost per acquisition (CPA)
  Monitor your CPA on an ongoing basis to see if this number decreases over time. A lower cost to acquire a lead indicates that your marketing strategy is working.
  
  

• Bottom line profitability percentage
  Comparing your actual profitability percentage to the initial goals set for your business for the year will give you a good idea whether your marketing strategy has achieved the results you needed.
  
  

• Customer retention and brand loyalty
  Most importantly, track the customer delight factor - happy customers lead to referrals and brand promoters (the most powerful form of marketing). While loyalty itself is difficult to track, monitoring your customer retention rate, amount of repeat business and opportunities to upsell products or services will give you a good indication of a winning marketing strategy.

An integrated marketing strategy helps you measure offline marketing activities

We live in the age of digital - even your offline marketing efforts can (and should) be tracked. An agency not driving an integrated digital and traditional approach will never give you results. There’s too much room for unknowns.

Integrated marketing allows you to drive your audience to a place where you can capture leads. Traditional media also relies on digital media to track engagement online and accurately measure your campaigns’ performance. If, for example, we run a TV ad and see an instant spike in website hits, we can use that insight to buy the right media in the future.

Want to see what a successful integrated marketing strategy looks like in action? Take a look at these 3 examples of marketing integration.

Tips to ensure you get the best results from your agency

• Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely)  goals.
• Make sure you’re tracking the right measurements.
• Brainstorm ideas with your agency, making decisions collaboratively. Treat the relationship as a partnership - you’re the expert in your industry and your agency is the marketing expert. Your knowledge must drive the strategy to help us make it work.
• Keep the lines of communication open.
• Push the boundaries together and don’t be afraid to challenge each other’s thinking.
• Don't take criticisms personally, it’s always about the brand and achieving the results you need to grow your business. Your agency is there to advise you and ask the hard questions, if they’re not doing this then they can’t add value.
  

Connect with us for strategic support 

If a campaign flops, does this mean your agency isn’t a good fit?

No. Try to avoid knee jerk reaction, as much as we try to be right 100% of the time, we can’t be.

The agency-client relationship is a partnership. If you find that your agency’s goals and your goals are misaligned, then it’s probably not a great fit - but give your agency a chance to optimise the campaign before declaring it a failure.

A/B testing is the key to marketing success. Your strategy should constantly be evolving in line with the behaviour of your audience. On an ongoing basis, your agency should be making small tweaks based on the available data (to optimise for conversions), reviewing the results and trying again. If the strategy still isn’t working (on multiple platforms), then you need to look at all possible causes (examining your entire marketing mix) to establish where the roadblock is.

We want to help you and your clients stand out from the competition with a killer cross-platform marketing strategy. With our Integrated Marketing eBook, success is well within your reach.