At some point, when running your small business or starting your small entrepreneur journey, you may decide it’s time to procure some help with your overall business strategy. From your company branding, advertising or marketing specifics, an external agency can definitely help. But how do you ensure that the agencies your consulting are the right fit for your needs? How can you decide who to turn to? We know that picking the right agency partner can be a stressful and time-consuming task. Here are some tips to guide you in your search.

Source: Pexels

Know Your Options

It’s imperative that you know exactly what you need your agency to assist you with before making a decision. Are you looking for a full range of marketing services or just need help with a one-off project? How involved do you need your agency to be? Can you feed ideas to them with minimal supervision or do you need to work with a team to develop your ideas? Knowing exactly what your marketing needs are, allows you to identify the best agency partner that can meet them.

Are They Interested In Your Needs?

Whether you’re a complete marketing newbie or an experienced campaign strategy manager, ask as many questions as you possibly can. It’s the best way to learn more about your potential agency and to pick out the ones that won’t work in the long run. Get the gist of things like, what services they offer, what resources they have access to and what their vision is for your brand. It may even be useful to see a portfolio of their previous clients, to get an idea of the level of skill and expertise they have to offer.

Asking many, and more importantly, the right questions will save you a lot of time in the long run if your agency turns out not to be a good fit in the long run.

Have They Given Your Proposal A Good Shot?

When it comes down to it an air-tight and well thought out proposal is the name of the game. No matter how flashy and impressive an agency may come across in an attempt to wow you, if the strategy is not up to scratch, you may not get the results you want or need. A good proposal document needs to have a well-researched and thought out strategy blueprint which outlines exactly what your agency partner will do for you as well as a clear breakdown of their costs and services. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and that you are striving towards mutual goals together.

Do They Understand Your Company Needs?

Does your creative partner demonstrate a clear understanding of your business challenges, ethos and motivations? When interviewing agencies, make sure that you explore this in detail when outlining your needs with them and make sure that you have a clear and strong brand purpose. A huge red flag? If you’re presented with a generic, copy and paste style template, it’s time to take your money and look elsewhere.