5 questions you should ask a marketing agency before working with them

Take a look at the agency’s previous work and find out what sort of clients they’ve worked with to help you determine if they’re a suitable fit. It’s important to ask for relevant examples and understand whether they’ll have the right knowledge of your sector and audiences to be effective in their approach.

For example, if the agency you’re looking at has only worked with retail clients and you’re a public sector organisation, odds are they won’t have valuable insight into your sector and won’t understand how to market you to the right people. At Eleven, working predominantly with organisations in the public and third sectors has allowed us to carve out specialisms in charity, education, healthcare, public sector, rail and social care - particularly foster care recruitment. We dedicate our time and resources to really understanding our priority sectors and can therefore offer our clients specialist and relevant expertise.

Look for case studies and testimonials on the agency’s website to see evidence of their impact and the outcomes they’ve delivered. This will help you to get an idea of what the agency could do for your organisation.

Good relationships are the key to success, so it’s important to make sure the conditions are just right for building a great one with your agency. One element of this is making sure the agency’s values align with your own. This could be as simple as a shared passion on a specific issue, like accessibility, or a shared commitment to a certain way of working e.g. being truly collaborative, or a more fundamental alignment of purpose.

At Eleven, our ‘marketing for good’ ethos helps us to identify who would be a good fit for us, as well as helping potential clients to decide if this approach is right for them too.

Although good results take time, your marketing agency should have a good idea of how to measure and report on how the activity is going. A credible agency will be able to demonstrate results clearly and regularly, along with helpful insight and recommendations for continuously improving your performance along the way.

A key part of effectively measuring success is finding an agency that will work with you to understand your objectives, so it’s clear you’re both working towards the same goals.

If you’re looking to partner with an agency on a long-term basis, you’ll want to make sure that you get a good idea of the people you’ll be working with day to day. You’ll also want to discover what their way of working is. For example, how often will they provide progress updates, how regularly will you meet with your account team, how will you need to provide feedback and so on?

Our approach at Eleven is to be clear about what is and isn’t involved in each project, making sure expectations and outcomes are clear from the outset. We’ll get to grips with your ways of working during our onboarding process and make sure the project runs as smoothly as possible. This ensures that the whole marketing process is not only as easy as possible for you, but enjoyable too.

Whilst many agencies will likely outsource some of their work, it’s usually wise to steer clear of those that outsource most of the specialisms they claim on their website. This is because if you’re looking to carry out a large project like a rebrand or campaign, it’s comforting to know that you have a named point of contact to hand.

At Eleven, our in-house team includes strategists, creatives, designers, writers, account managers and more. This means we have full control of your entire project at any given time, allowing us to move quickly for any tight or moving deadlines.

We hope by answering these questions, you’ll be able to identify the right marketing agency for you to partner with. If you think we might be the right fit for you, why not get in touch?