I recently spoke at a small gathering of insurance professionals about online marketing and during the Q&A session at the end, it dawned on me that:
- there are companies who are heavily reliant on their marketing agencies
- yet they are not really sure what they are paying for or what they are going to get.
Here are a few questions you should be asking any agency who is looking to help you with your marketing.
What am I paying for?
Let’s start with the big one. Understanding what you are going to get for your money is a key factor in knowing if this is likely to work for you. If you simply get an invoice with a description of “marketing work”, then the first thing you need to ask for is a breakdown of what that includes. Without knowing what they are doing it is hard to understand or ask any of the following questions.
Any decent agency will not hide behind a wall of secrecy – yes they may feel they have some kind of secret sauce, but in all truthfulness, they probably don’t and should at least give you a major breakdown of activity.
Why are you choosing these methods?
Once you have the above information, you can start to ask further probing questions. So for example, say the brief was to drive traffic to the site quickly, it could be argued spending money on SEO could be a red flag as this will not drive traffic quickly.
On the other hand if they are suggesting PPC or social media advertising, this would make sense.
Even at a high level, you do need to understand what types of activities agencies will carry out for you. It could just be for your own peace of mind.
What are the goals or objectives?
Do you have goals and objectives for your marketing spend and if so have you communicated that to the agency? If so, have they confirmed that is possible at your budget and timescale? Have you asked them? Don’t assume!
What guarantees do you offer?
Have you asked what they will guarantee? Now this is not about guaranteeing rankings as no agency can do that! And if they do, you need to think long and hard about whether to proceed with them.
But in this instance, I would suggest what level of work are they guaranteeing? 4 blog posts a month, 4 ad variants per month on your PPC account, daily management, daily posts to your social media etc.
In this way you can both understand if things are being delivered as agreed.
Got any case studies?
Insurance marketing is a funny industry and sometimes agencies that can perform wonders in other industries can really struggle as they don’t understand the products or buying cycles in Insurance.
Make sure any case studies they provide are relevant to your industry and budgets. Having an AVIVA case study could be fantastic for a case study but the budget levels and then ROI could be massively different so you bear these things in mind.
I hope these questions give you some food for thought – not only if you are looking to take on an agency but also these could be questions you should ask of your current agency, if you don’t know the answers already.
