If you have decided to invest in an agency to manage any part of your business processes or marketing activities then it’s likely that you spent time reviewing, comparing and evaluating potential agencies before you came to a final decision.
Once you had determined your preferred agency, you probably asked questions of their experience, skills and overall performance and reviewed client testimonials. It can be easy, once you’ve made the transition from interested customer to client, to sit back and let the agency get on with their work and you can focus on yours. After all, that’s what your hired them for. Right?
Unfortunately not! As a client, it’s important that you’re taking steps to understand how well your agency is performing for your business, how effectively they are achieving your objectives and how this is impacting your overall business growth and success.
If this is the first time you’ve worked with an agency, it can be confusing to determine how you will effectively engage in performance monitoring.
Although your specific benchmarks will be dependent on your individual business goals and the relationship you have with your agency, below are 6 ways that can help you to pay more attention to the activities of your agency, assess how efficiently your goals are being achieved and maintain a consistent approach towards performance monitoring.
Establish your goals and objectives
It’s important that you set out defined goals with a target or clear outcome. By ensuring both your internal team and external agency are on the same page when it comes to goals, you will have something particular to benchmark against. Further to this, it’s crucial that you determine what achieving these goals will look like. If you’re targeting more leads, will you prioritise better quality, higher volume or a particular sector? Do leads need to have purchased from you, subscribed to the service or joined a mailing list to be considered a lead? The more clarity you can have internally and externally, the easier it will be to monitor how the agency is performing against your specific goals.
Take the time
If you’ve brought an agency on board, it’s likely to be because you don’t have the time to undertake the tasks or don’t have the capacity to employ staff and bring the work in-house. It can be easy to leave the work to your agency and assume it’s all running smoothly but setting aside scheduled time to monitor the agency’s progress on a regular basis will give you a better real-time understanding of performance, rather than getting 6 months down the line and finding nothing has been completed or achieved as expected.
What’s your timeframe?
To ensure you’re regularly reviewing the performance on your agency against targets, establish a consistent but reasonable time frame by which you will assess key targets, outputs and activities. Monitoring performance on a monthly basis will give you a greater overview of progress but will also give the agency adequate time to carry out tasks and make improvements where necessary. However, it’s important to consider key factors such as the length of the contract and the timespan of the particular goals in order to shape your own performance monitoring schedule around this.
Goal reporting
Determine a consistent and clear way that you can analyse and report on how the agency is performing and how well they are working towards goals. It’s important that you monitor your chosen elements or figures in a constant manner so you’re able to compare progress between months. Being clear with your agency about how and what you will be monitoring and the information you will require can help to maintain open lines of communication with your agency and develop a positive, lasting relationship that could benefit you in the long-term.
Opportunities for feedback
Take opportunities to discuss feedback from your agency. Alongside understanding the agency’s performance against your objectives, you may recognise that where targets aren’t being met you may need to reassess your goals. You could consider whether they were unrealistic or what sort of work will be required to achieve them. Performance monitoring your agency may not only give insights into how effectively they are working, but also give a better understanding of your own business.
Manage your expectations
It’s vital that you manage your expectations of the agency and consider what an acceptable level of performance is. If you think your agency may not be performing to the standard expected, ensure you are being realistic and approach the situation with a level head and clear evidence. A productive discussion about improving progress and performance will be more effective (and work well towards maintaining good relationships) than getting frustrated and making excessive demands.