How to Hire an Advertising Agency That Cares About Your Business

As most business owners know, generating leads or sales to your business is not an easy task. At times you might find yourself spending thousands of dollars and not see any return on your investment. That’s when most business owners warm up to the idea of hiring an advertising agency to take over their marketing efforts.

Before you do just that, let me tell you some things to consider so that you do not make a mistake. I have worked with many advertising agencies in the past that have a high volume of work. Usually that means you just become a number to them because their clientele is simply too large. In most cases, they do not really care about you or your business.

Most of the tips that I will talk about in this article will be from what I’ve learned while working with clients at AdFicient. We at AdFicient have taken on a massive undertaking in trying to increase our reputation and improve the quality of our work. At certain times, we’ve had to make drastic changes that have impacted our workflows, customer support, and the way we view our clients. This is something many advertising agencies have started doing in an effort to increase their brand awareness, clientele, and online reputation.

Specialization Is Not Necessarily an Advantage

There are many different types of advertising agencies. Some agencies are full-service and work with virtually every type of advertising and design project, while others are specialized and only work with one or two areas.

My experience has been that clients usually do not need just one type of service even though many initially only ask for one. It is very hard to run a marketing campaign with only one specific service or spreading the work around to multiple different agencies.

Let’s take a look at a basic pay-per-click advertising campaign to get a better idea.

Step 1: Setup PPC accounts for keywords, keyword groups, budgets, and so on.

Step 2: Design a landing page that makes sense based on knowledge we know from the start.

Step 3: Set up an A/B split testing campaign to optimize our landing page.

Step 4: Run the campaign.

Step 5: Constantly monitor and optimize the campaign.

So just one little PPC campaign involves at least five steps that could take a long time to complete. If you hire an advertising agency that solely works with PPC, you will find it difficult to accomplish steps 2 and 3.

One route business owners take is to hire couple of specialized agencies to accomplish each task. The problem with that is you need to have excellent communication between those agencies in order to realize maximum potential of your advertising campaigns.

The best solution is to hire a full-service agency that is knowledgeable and has the resources to tackle your entire campaign. This helps prevent communication issues between agencies as well as improve the overall workflow.

Size Doesn’t Matter Much

As mentioned in the previous section, the advertising agency you hire needs to have the resources required to implement your entire campaign. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to hire a large advertising agency though. In fact, the opposite is true in many cases.

Large advertising agencies tend to take on more work, which makes their client relationships much less significant. As a business owner, you should appreciate a good client-agency relationship because that is what ultimately drives improvements and strong results.

Advertising agencies that are vested in your business care about your success more than large ad agencies that have hundreds of clients. You are likely to achieve best results by hiring a small to medium-sized advertising agency that has the resources to take on your entire advertising campaign from start to finish.

Give Freelancers a Chance

If you are a business owner who truly only needs one type of service such as website design, then you will be better off finding a freelance web designer. Freelancers tend to be very specialized, which increases the quality of their work. This is especially important in web design because if you are paying thousands of dollars for a new website, it better look good and work even better!

Conclusion

Those are the most important lessons that business owners can use the next time they need to hire an advertising agency.

Three main points to keep in mind:

• Find an agency that has resources to handle your entire advertising campaign
• Smaller and medium-sized agencies tend to offer more personal service
• If you need specialization, try a freelancer

What is your experience when dealing with advertising agencies? Let us know about it in the comments.