So You’re Ready to Hire and Onboard a Marketing Agency. Now What?
Finding the Right Client-Agency Fit Series – Part 3
While starting fresh with a new agency can be an exciting journey, it’s fair to say there’s some anxiety and apprehension sprinkled into that voyage. Let’s alleviate some of that stress by diving into Part 3 of our client-agency fit series—hiring and onboarding a digital marketing agency. I discuss how to prepare for hiring, the step-by-step hiring and onboarding processes, and the red and green flags to look out for.
My Big Leap team and I have gathered these details and tools based on 15+ years of experience on both the agency and client sides to ensure you have everything you need to feel confident taking the reins.
Preparing: Is Everything in Order?
Before you move on to the first step, I encourage you to revisit the Part 1 and Part 2 discussions that discuss Solving the Dilemma of Agency, In-House Team, Freelancer, or AI and the Costs of Choosing the Wrong Agency. They ensure you launch your partnership journey with the appropriate foundation.
Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to start checking these items off your list:
Know Why You Need to Hire a Digital Marketer
Whether you want to scale, have been let down by your previous agency, or need to optimize resources, you should have a solid why for hiring a digital marketing agency. Use this why to guide conversations and inject the correct intention and goals in early discussions and campaign strategies.
Assess Your Digital Marketing Needs & Objectives
Have a list of needs that support the why. For example, you might want to optimize resources. If so, you should have already had conversations with your internal team about the specific tasks, projects, or strategies you want the onboarding agency to focus on.
Maybe your team will focus on SEO while the agency handles content marketing ideation. Perhaps you want someone to take on content outlines—how many content projects is your team aiming for per month or week? Maybe your team needs significant help with the technical side of SEO and CRO.
Know your objectives and be ready to share them with your prospective agency. The more direct and clear you can be, the smoother the relationship and transition of work.
If you’re unclear on your objectives or are hiring an agency to help you figure this all out, that’s okay. The right agency partner will determine the best way to delineate efforts to reach your objectives.
Understand Your Brand & Target Audience
You’re naturally protective of your business, so passing on some or all of your online marketing efforts to an agency can be a bit nerve-racking. Rest assured, finding the right agency partner is like having an extension of your own team. You’ll support each other mutually, and this involves laying the right foundation with branding and voice.
Your branding and voice guidelines are key areas that speak to your brand’s overall look and feel. Provide copies of these guidelines to the agency so they can hit the ground running on your campaigns.
Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Ensure you’re investing marketing money, time, and effort where it matters most. Use steps #1 and #2 to outline KPIs. The prospective agency can also help establish or finalize these metrics, making sure they’re realistic and everyone has reasonable expectations.
Moreover, the agency can map the connection between KPIs and how they impact the objectives set in Step 2.
Match Objectives to a Realistic Budget
Matching your objectives to a realistic budget is a common sticking point and one that often makes or breaks a campaign.
Budget factors worth considering include:
- Your industry
- The competitive landscape
- Where your brand currently stands (e.g. domain authority, how old the site is, etc.)
- What you want to achieve
- How aggressive you want to be
- What type of internal resources/manpower you have
With those metrics in mind, we’ve built this simple budget calculator tool, so feel free to try it. Discover how much to spend or reassure yourself that your numbers are in the ballpark.
Here are other valuable resources that add context to digital marketing strategy costs:
The Vetting Process: 9 Questions to Ask a Prospective Agency
Every agency has a vetting process for clients. You should also have a process for vetting agencies.
I’ve found that most of our best clients take a couple of months and many conversations to make a final decision. Taking time ensures both parties are on the same page with reasonable expectations. When clients jump in too fast, without due diligence, it often leads to problems later.
You want to find the right fit, and so do agencies. Use these nine questions to drive valuable conversations before signing on the dotted line and onboarding.
1. How Will Your High-Level Strategies Achieve Our Goals?
Your business and site are unique. Ask the agency how they can help you achieve the results you want. Some agencies follow a cookie-cutter marketing approach, so you want an agency that tailors their strategies to your specific needs.
A good agency will provide a 2-part answer:
- They will explain how they will proceed, based on the current information/insights acquired via conversations during the sales and vetting process.
- After the engagement begins and a more in-depth discovery process has been completed, the agency will follow up with additional details on how they will adjust to further align strategies with goals.
2. How Will Progress Be Measured and Metrics Tracked?
Choose an agency that makes data-driven decisions. Tracking metrics will help you understand whether the agency’s efforts are working. Ask the agency for specific benchmarks they plan to incorporate into your campaign and how they tie to your KPIs and objectives.
3. What Do You Consider to Be Quality Content?
Content is the butter to the SEO bread. Thanks to content, your business can generate more and better leads, boost conversions, and establish your company as an authority in the industry.
As your campaign may involve content optimization or creation, ask the agency to provide examples of their highest-quality content. Evaluate their examples and see if their perception of quality matches yours.
4. How Will Content Match Our Brand Voice and Style?
Discussing quality content is also a great opportunity to bring up brand voice and style. After all, you can’t exactly achieve quality content without the right voice, tone, and style injected into your campaign.
Ask the prospective agency how they plan to incorporate your brand voice and style into projects. They might have experience working with similar brand voices and styles, so they can share examples/case studies of those.
Whatever the case, you want to ensure the agency will stay true to your brand throughout the campaign.
5. Can We Meet the Team Working on Our Account?
Meet your direct contacts and get to know them. How well do you vibe? Do you get along and see yourself building a fruitful partnership with them?
As a final step, we want our clients to meet the actual team doing the work. It’s not always easy to accommodate, since we have paying clients with whom we’re spending time. Still, it gives our teams a vote of confidence that the client feels comfortable with the team when they sign the final agreement and get started. That sets the relationship off on the right foot.
6. How Is Reporting Done and at What Frequency?
Results matter, and you must know precisely what they are. Discuss reporting with the agency. Ask what metrics they’ll monitor and the reporting frequency. The agency should provide example reports before you sign on.
Great firms will be completely transparent in their reports, even if the numbers don’t look so good. More importantly, they’ll focus on campaign indicators that are important to your business and objectives.
Examples of reporting metrics include but are not limited to:
- Traffic
- Engagement/clicks
- Impressions
- Site sessions
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Backlinks secured
- Domain authority (DA)
- Conversions
7. Can You Give Me Details on How Contracts Work?
Be absolutely sure you understand the contract in full before committing. Is there a one-time fee and a month-to-month agreement? Is it a retainer that requires a set time commitment? Do you need to pay for a single month upfront? Six months upfront?
Agencies should ideally provide:
- Detailed pricing documentation that covers pricing models and the estimated hours the team will invest in specific services or campaigns.
- An example roadmap that can then be further customized after onboarding, based on your needs, audit results, etc. At Big Leap, we also have a “speed to results” approach where we have the first 3 months planned followed by a detailed discovery process for month 4 and beyond.
- A timeline or date for when the contract must be signed. They will also provide instructions on how the contract will be signed (e.g. in-person, virtual).
8. How and When Are Billing and Payments Handled?
Billing and payment information usually begins with the sales team. They collect all the information from the new client. Once the client has signed the contract, the sales team sends out an email with the details for billing.
In most cases, we require a form of payment by the time the client onboards. Most of our clients pay by credit card, ACH, or check. Our contract reads we require payment at the time of services or within 7 days of the start of each month’s services.
Requiring the client to keep a payment method on file or in our invoicing system streamlines our collections efforts. We keep most of our clients on recurring billing within our invoicing system since most budgets don’t change month over month.
9. What Is Your AI Policy for Content and Privacy?
Every agency should have an AI policy by now. AI is evolving as we speak, and the way agencies and businesses leverage AI is as well. You want an agency that abides by your standards while using an ethical and critical lens regarding AI practices.
Are you unsure where you stand with AI, or are you interested in learning more? Use these resources to get informed:
How to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency Step-by-Step
While the hiring experience varies, you can expect six overarching stages.
1. Discovery Process
Your team may already be at this stage. You’re looking at online reviews, seeking referrals, reading case studies, and scouring agency sites.
When you find a few agencies you’re interested in, you reach out to them for further information, whether through a form on their site or directly via phone or email.
2. Sales Qualifier Contact
You’ll speak with a sales qualifier, often on a phone or video call. This individual will get to know you and your business’s needs. Most importantly, they’ll assess whether their agency can fulfill those needs.
Every agency has specific criteria points for vetting clients. For example, at Big Leap, we have what we call BIICEP:
The conversation will help the sales qualifier determine whether both parties fit well. If we can’t meet your needs, we’ll provide referrals in our network.
This stage is also an excellent place to dive into the nine questions I discussed earlier.
3. Proposal Development
You can think of this phase as the initiation stage. If the sales qualifier believes there’s a good fit and you’re comfortable with the process, you’ll move forward with the proposal development.
This development looks different across agencies. At Big Leap, our sales team prepares a presentation that shows what we can offer our prospective clients based on their needs and goals. The proposal is essentially the decision-making phase—can you see your business working with this agency? Do you want to move forward?
We also see large enterprise brands send out a request for proposal (RFP) and solicit bids from qualified agencies.
4. Contract
This is when both parties establish a mutual contract that outlines the terms and conditions of the partnership. The contract phase often involves sorting out legal documentation such as:
Mutual NDA: Both parties agree not to disclose confidential information to third parties without written consent.
Master Services Agreement: Both parties agree to terms and conditions that manage all responsibilities between the agency and the client. This agreement may include terms and conditions that speak to:
- Building and optimizing a client’s strategy
- White label solutions
- Proprietary rights
- Limitation of liability
SLA (Service Level Agreement): This is a guideline for best practices for managing client communication and relationships. At Big Leap, we encourage our team members to have the flexibility to adjust strategy and work as needed to keep the client’s best interest in mind.
5. Finalization
Both parties negotiate and edit the contract. The goal is to establish a finalized document that satisfies all key stakeholders.
As mentioned earlier, the right agency will consider early conversations to craft a customized contract for your team.
6. Signing
You’ve finalized the contract. Both parties are satisfied, and the onboarding process officially begins when they sign.
What Does the Step-by-Step Onboarding Process Look Like?
The onboarding process happens after the agency and client complete the required documents and administrative tasks to initiate and fully launch your digital marketing campaign. It’s also a time to finalize campaign timelines and milestones.
Again, the details of every step of the onboarding process vary depending on your industry, objectives, and who your agency is. But the most important steps should be standard across the board. Here’s a high-level overview of what you can expect.
1. Pre-Kickoff Sync
The sales and client success team will set up a kickoff meeting with your team to ensure your campaign and budget are on track. This will usually involve an account manager or head of the fulfillment team. At Big Leap, that is a Client Success Executive (CSE) or SEO manager.
Depending on the services your online strategy involves (e.g., SEO, content marketing, paid media), you might include additional agency team members in the kickoff meeting. The intention is to get as much face time as possible with your new agency’s team.
The agency team will review all the information gathered in conversations up to this point and prepare a kickoff/onboarding presentation.
2. Kickoff Meeting
The agency and client teams attend the meeting, which involves four essential parts:
- Introductions: The agency team will introduce themselves and discuss your current campaign, business model, brand voice/style, and sales funnel process.
- Overview of your goals: This discussion will dive deeper into what you hope to accomplish through this partnership. The conversation may include topics like KPIs and business and partnership expectations and values.
- Overview of the agency process: Next will be an overview of how the agency achieves results and the plans for your business. The agency may provide examples of roadmaps, timelines, and reports.
- Next steps: This generally involves conversation on collaboration strategies and platforms we’ll need for campaign initiation.
3. Meeting Recap
The agency team will send a meeting recap to the client team. The recap involves critical notes on what you discussed and follow-up items for which the teams are accountable to complete.
4. Work Begins
Once you and the agency are aligned on objectives and strategies, the work begins.
Agency Green and Red Flags to Keep You Afloat
The client-agency process can initially feel overwhelming, especially if it’s your first rodeo in the partnership. For assurance, my team and I have compiled agency green and red flags we’ve witnessed throughout the past 15+ years. Use these signs to check in with your internal team on how the hiring and onboarding journey is going.
Green Flags
The agency is communicative. They follow up with phone/Zoom meetings with emails to recap the discussion and details on the next steps.
They take time to explore your site to understand your business and identify areas for improvement. Agency team members ask questions along the way.
The agency initiates a discussion about any project management and analytics tools they use and ways to streamline these tools with your team.
They’re transparent about project and result timelines. Experienced agencies understand that digital marketing is a long-term strategy. Marketing results take time to achieve.
The agency offers documentation to help your team understand the agency’s processes and pricing models.
They’re transparent and open to feedback throughout all hiring and onboarding stages.
Red Flags
The agency takes over a day to follow up on meetings and emails. It might begin to feel like you’re pulling teeth.
They focus on short-term methodologies instead of holistic, long-term tactics.
The agency promises immediate results.
They don’t ask about your short-term and long-term business goals, or don’t report on the goals that are important to you.
You don’t get to meet all the folks who will work on your account. This clue indicates a siloed organization.
The agency doesn’t provide documentation or a presentation on their process.
The same problems keep coming up.
Did I Miss Anything?
We want this series to spark conversations. There are several nuances when it comes to healthy client-agency relationships. My team and I want to help demystify as much as possible to help people like you feel more confident when hiring a marketing agency and moving forward.
So, I’m all ears. If there are areas I missed or you’re seeking more details, please reach out.
There’s More to All of This, So Stay Tuned
The journey doesn’t end here. Next in part four, I’ll provide deep insights into the inner workings of a powerful client-agency relationship. So grab a snack and get comfortable with what’s coming next.
- Solving the Dilemma of Agency, In-House Team, Freelancer, or AI
- The True Costs of Hiring the Wrong Digital Marketing Agency
- Hiring and Onboarding a Digital Marketing Agency
- The Inner Workings of a Powerful Client-Agency Relationship
- The Results of a Successful Marketing Partnership
That’s Enough
About Us.
Here’s the thing about our SEO agency: We prefer long-term partnerships that are deeply rooted in trust. Before we dive right into this, we’d like to get to know you better, get a feel for your current situation, and talk about your marketing goals and expectations.
You can call us now, or we can meet over lunch. Either way, we’re excited to meet you.
