Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Partner
Though specific needs vary from brand to brand, digital marketing partners are chosen based on a couple of factors:
Services offered matching perceived needs
Trust that the agency can get the job done (and exceed expectations)
Cost
Services offered
Confirming the services offered by an agency meet your needs is generally straightforward. If they adverise that they do it, or you have seen case studies of the work being done successfully, you should have a pretty good idea of their digital marketing capabilities.
Questions to ask
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This question makes them think. It requires the digital marketing agency to consider what they offer, what you need, and how they make money. Feel free to push back and ask about their rationale. Consider their perspective and how it might meet yours.
Some red flags to consider
Are they pushing paid media because they take a cut of the media spend?
Are they suggesting tactics that are easily pushed to low-cost third-party vendors and not doing any work themselves?
Do they know about the most recent changes and advances for each of the tactics they are providing, or are they using an old playbook?
Trust in the partner
Trust is a subjective variable, and it’s going to vary from brand to brand and agency to agency. Try to build a relationship during the proposal and negotiation stages. Does it feel good? Do you think they want you to succeed, or are they just trying to get their cut? Do you enjoy talking to them?
Everyone has their own threshold for trust and what they want from a partner. Lawyers often want a different type of digital marketing partner than a boutique hotel. And that’s fantastic. Everyone should be able to find their own partner, and don’t feel compelled just because they are the one you’re talking to.
Questions to ask
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Identify early on who you would be working with every day and ask them to be a part of the negotiation. One of the worst experiences can be meeting with a wonderful sales person but truly disliking the approach your account director is taking.
How we do this at Bend
Plan and simple: the person you discuss the sale with is the same person who will act as your Account Director.
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Engage early in a discussion about reporting and success. They will have their own internal marketers for business success, and you will have your markers for digital marketing and brand success. These should be known and identified.
You cannot control their internal business goals, but you need to set your performance goals in place early in the engagement. Identify the goals, the metrics associated with those goals, and the threshold for success. Those need to be documented and agreed upon. Goals may change, and that’s okay, but they should only be changed after a discussion and understanding of why they have changed.
How we do this at Bend
At Bend, we have a shared Notion client portal where we document all of our agreed upon goals and benchmarks, including specific standard operating procedures as to how we report on those metrics/goals. If there is a change, the change is documented, dated, and explained in Notion for reference.
Cost
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This is a great question to ask because you want to understand where your budget is going.
Are there ten people on a call? That 1-hour call cost you at least $1,000, likely more.
Does the work bounce between team members, or is there a core group who will get to know your brand?
What is the tenure of the people on the project?
How we do this at Bend
At Bend, we structure our teams to generally have an Account Director and one or two additional resources per tactic. We don’t want to overload a project with headcount unless it’s necessary to get the job done.
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Try to understand why the proposal has a certain number attached to it. You don’t need to know everything behind the scenes, but you want to have an idea for how the sausage is made.
How we do this at Bend
Our off-the-shelf programs are structured around what we believe it takes to do a good job, at a cost of $175 per hour. Some months, we put in more time, and the average cost per hour will be lower. Other months it may be higher.
For our custom programs, we start at the hourly cost and scope the project. It’s pretty straightforward for us.
As a rule, we never charge a percentage of media spend. It creates too much potential for distrust of tactics and value.
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This is a thorn-in-our-side kinda issue. Spec work sounds great on the surface: a potential client gets to understand the sort of quality an agency can deliver.
But while it seems free for the client, this work does get compensated: other clients pay for it. The team doing the spec work must be compensated somehow, and it’s built into the fees that other clients pay.
Why is this your problem? It’s your problem because someday you will be the other client paying a higher fee to compensate for spec work being done for future clients.
Just say no to spec work. Unless you’re going for the big agency where this is expected. And then, well, the laundry is your oyster (or something).
How we do this at Bend
We don’t do spec work. Or RFPs that want spec work.
Cost is going to be the both the first and last barrier for a lot of brands. And that’s good, because you can gather a lot of information about a digital marketing partner by understanding their cost structure.
We’re going to make some generalizations here, but these can be used as anchors to understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and hopefully help you identify the right partner.
Low-cost digital marketing support
There is nothing wrong with a low cost provider, but understand that the low cost has to be accounted for somewhere. It may be they live in a low-cost geography and are truly amazing at their task (this is the magic), or it could be that very little will be done on your account in any given month (this is the bummer). Likely, it’s somewhere in the middle. But understand why they are low cost.
Questions to ask
Big agency fees
The Widen+Kennedys, the McCanns, and the BBDOs are on the other side. They are incredible. But they are also bonkers huge machines that need to be fed money to keep the creativity churning. If you have the funds, by all means, put them to use there. It is implausible you will be disappointed by the work. They must keep delivering the stuff that grants them access to the Cannes superyachts.
If, as a business, you’re thinking about spending $100,000/month on agency spend (not media, just agency), then you already know what you’re doing. Or, hopefully, you’ll figure it out quickly enough.
The magic (wide) middle
And then there’s the in-between. Let’s call this the $5,000/month to $30,000/month range. A lot can happen in that range. For Bend, this is where we find the magic.
Pricing in this range generally signals a few things:
Reasonable team size to get a job done
Acknowledgement of cost and value that skilled team members bring to a project
Belief in a skillset to deliver return for a client