How to Get the Best Results from Your Performance Marketing Agency
Updated: May 24
As a head of marketing, you understand that your success ultimately depends on your ability to generate leads, acquire customers, and drive revenue. That's why you've likely turned to a performance marketing agency to help you achieve these goals. But, how do you get the best results from your agency?
After hearing some horror stories of current costumes having hired agencies that charged them over £40K with only audit made of exports, no real reporting or results, we thought it was our duty to share how you can ensure that your agency is doing what they are supposed to.
Ensure you have a good base knowledge:
A good base knowledge of performance marketing will help you quickly understand the approach they are taking. If you don’t, that's ok. Just make sure you pick an agency that is willing to walk you through it openly, that wants you to learn because the only way you succeed is if both parties are aware of what it takes to run successful campaigns.
Take away: Pick an agency that will happily explain things so you increase your knowledge and grow with them!
Set Clear Objectives:
Before you engage a performance marketing agency, you need to set clear objectives for what you want to achieve. These objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, your objective might be to increase the contribution of paid to your business by 10% within the next six months. By setting clear objectives, you'll be able to measure the success of your performance marketing campaigns and hold your agency accountable for delivering results.
A good performance marketing agency will work with you to fine tune your objectives and feedback if expectations are too high or low based on their experience. This is vital in order to manage expectations internally but also not to demoralise internal and agency teams if unattainable goals are inevitably not achieved!
Take away: Set clear and realistic objectives so you can assess performance as well as work as team to achieve them!
Collaborate on Your Marketing Strategy:
To get the best results from your performance marketing agency, you need to collaborate with them on your overall marketing strategy. This includes discussing your target audience, competitors, unique selling proposition, and brand messaging.
By working together to define your marketing strategy, your agency can create campaigns that are tailored to your specific business goals.
Keep them updated with wider marketing efforts
Keep your performance marketing agency updated with any major marketing activities taking place. Although they won’t always need to implement any changes, being aware of other marketing activity taking place can often explain fluctuations in the data.
For example you could set a reminder at the start of every week to send a quick email with any company updated that include:
Events happening that month
Content being published on the website
PR and Outreach
Partnerships
Organic social campaigns
Take away: Involve your agency in your marketing strategy and keep them in the loop with what you are working on.
Leverage access to your creative assets:
Creative is the most important performance lever in any program – it makes or breaks your performance marketing accounts. You need to provide your agency with access to your creative assets. This includes high-quality images, videos, and other content that can be used in your campaigns. By providing your agency with access to these assets, they can feedback, and create more engaging and effective campaigns that resonate with your target audience. They can also leverage the data at a creative level to tell you what is working and what is not. I can’t overstate the importance of creative strategy and collaboration on this side of things.
Take away: Creatives are vital for success. Provide access to all your creative assets and expect to get feedback on them.
Communicate Effectively:
Communication is key to any successful partnership. You need to communicate your objectives, expectations, and feedback clearly and regularly. This includes providing your agency with regular updates on your business goals, customer feedback, and sales performance. By maintaining open lines of communication, you can ensure that your agency is aligned with your business objectives and can adjust their campaigns accordingly.
N.B. Don’t interpret this as micro management of accounts. Clear communication is great, but if the communication becomes too often, or analysis being done over too short of a time frame, then it becomes detrimental to performance.
Take away: Communicate with your performance marketing agency clearly and regularly.
Measure and Optimise:
To get the best results from your performance marketing campaigns, you need to measure and optimise your campaigns continuously. This means analysing your data, testing different strategies, and refining your campaigns to improve their performance. This is harder in 2023 than it has been in years previous due to changes in analytics systems, opacity of data from within the ad platforms, and the breakdown in 3rd party cookie data.
Your performance marketing agency should provide you with regular reports on campaign performance and recommendations for optimisation. Word of warning with this one though – analysis is great when done correctly, but it’s dangerous when done badly. Make sure you’re analysing things over a good period of time with enough data to make statistically correct decisions. Make sure the people analysing the data are capable of doing this correctly!
Take away: Set-up biweekly calls and get an update on performance, tests being run, any insights on the data and next steps.
Key Takeaways:
Ensure you have a good base knowledge: Pick an agency that will happily explain things so you increase your knowledge and grow with them!
Set Clear Objectives: Set clear and realistic objectives so you can assess performance as well as work as a team to achieve them!
Collaborate on Your Marketing Strategy: Involve your agency in your marketing strategy and keep them in the loop with what you are working on.
Leverage access to your creative assets: Creatives are vital for success. Provide access to all your creative assets and expect to get feedback on them.
Communicate Effectively: Communicate with your performance marketing agency clearly and regularly.
Measure and Optimise: Set-up biweekly calls and get an update on performance, tests being run, any insights on the data and next steps.
In conclusion, by following these 6 simple tips, you can start getting the best results from your performance marketing agency. Set clear objectives, collaborate on strategy, leverage all creative ideas, communicate effectively, and measure and optimise your campaigns continuously. With the right partnership, your performance marketing agency can help you achieve your business objectives and drive growth.