As a critical component for the success of your business, performance marketing isn’t something to take lightly. This is why you need to choose the right performance marketing agency.
Investments in marketing can be a risky undertaking for businesses. It’s especially true for most types of marketing – there is always a chance that a company will not get its return on investment.
And this makes performance marketing a cut above the rest.
To give you an idea about how performance marketing works, we’d like to use a partnership analogy.
In a partnership, two entities or people join forces to work together towards building a mutually beneficial business. Each of the partners has unique roles and accountabilities and these may be defined in a contract.
Also, the contract defines the conditions of sharing profits and what’s considered as a liability. And this is very similar to the contract you’d be getting with a performance marketing agency.
Partnerships aren’t time-bound but may last for as long as both partners see the benefits.
It’s worth noting that when companies partner with performance marketing agencies, they place trust in agencies’ media buying expertise to achieve specific goals.
More importantly, agencies are incentivized to help scale businesses. The agency gets paid only when specific results or particular actions occur. This could be in terms of the number of leads, sign-ups, sales, etc.
To give you the desired results, these agencies can use a mix of paid and organic marketing channels such as:
- Search Engine Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media
- Influencer Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native Advertising, and more
To be efficient in any one of these strategies, an agency must have its own tools and inventory to help you achieve the desired results without wasting money.
However, not all performance marketing companies are created equal.
With that in mind, here are the tips for finding one that can genuinely help grow your business.
How to Find a Performance Marketing Agency – The Four Tips
Tip #1 – The Right Agency Can Manage a Whole Campaign Channel
Over the years, some of our clients have used multiple performance marketing agencies to manage a channel. This was not the smartest move.
Why?
By distributing their media buys across agencies, as opposed to one exclusively, the possibility of buying from sources that don’t work multiple times is highly likely.
An experienced agency will have the relationships and tools to work with clients transparently to maximize reach without wasted ad spend. They can monitor performance and ensure value consistently.
Working with one agency and allowing them to monitor the sources holistically would ultimately mean spending less and getting better results.
Here is a fantastic example of how this tip can be of tremendous value to clients.
We had a client in the durable medical equipment (DME) healthcare space. They were new to performance marketing. So, they trusted us to manage the campaign exclusively.
So, we became an extension of their marketing team. We worked together to make media buying and optimization decisions. Systems we used shared real-time results with them, thereby making collaboration seamless.
We were able to scale their volume without wasted time or money in the most profitable manner.
Tip #2 – Choose an Agency That Has Experience in Your Industry
Every industry has its own language. To communicate effectively, the agency and the client need to be on the same page. Therefore, it’s essential that the agency businesses work with have experience in the industry they serve.
It’s impossible to be great at everything. You can leverage the agency’s experience with connections, resources, and tools that simplify the inroads and growth of the performance marketing program being implemented and/or expanded.
Simply put, working with an agency with experience will give you the right results faster.
Tip #3 – Ensure They Have the Right Tools
A performance marketing campaign requires technology. A lot of it. Knowing what tools to use and how to use them efficiently is critical to the success of a program. Some agencies have built proprietary tools to ensure all facets of a client’s campaign are monitored, analyzed, and optimized.
The performance marketing industry is evolving quickly and technology needs to keep pace to improve profitability and costs down for themselves and partners alike. Both parties take a risk in a performance marketing relationship. Minimizing this risk is necessary to sustain and grow long term.
Tip #4 – The Best Agencies Have Access to Exclusive Inventory
Not all agencies have access to exclusive inventory. They simply broker or are the middle man between the end traffic source and the client. Additional value can come from working with an agency that owns and operates its own properties and/or has unique relationships with traffic providers that only they can get.
Choose Your Agency Wisely
What are the critical elements of a great performance marketing agency?
For one, it’s the ability to run a campaign channel exclusively. This means the agency has the capacity to monitor all your marketing sources to get the best results. They can also make quick optimizations to ensure everything is running smoothly.
And to achieve all that, the agency needs extensive experience in the field and the necessary tools and inventory to put you one step ahead of the competition.
The bottom line is that if any one of these elements is missing, it may be best to keep looking until you find an agency that checks all the boxes.
Further Reading
Wondering if performance marketing is right for your business? Contact us today for a FREE evaluation of your marketing strategy.