⬆️ Winners in the Search Innovation category
Dear friends!
This article will help small and medium-sized businesses choose a performance marketing agency. First, let's define a performance marketing agency. A performance marketing agency works with activities based on analytics, such as SEO, Paid Advertising in Google, Meta, and other platforms, content marketing, and email marketing. Sometimes, a performance marketing agency is called a digital agency. If it specializes in search engine promotion, it can be an SEO agency; if it is paid advertising, it is a contextual advertising agency. But the core is the same: marketing based on data and analytics in the above activities. Some expert communities call it inbound marketing.
Performance marketing can come in the services of large full-service agencies. But they mostly work with large businesses. If we talk about small specialized agencies, we can name SMM agencies (engaged in social networking and advertising), PR agencies, creative agencies, branding agencies, and other types. We do not aim to give a complete classification. We aim to identify the agency that can solve marketing problems for small and medium-sized businesses with performance marketing.
The advantage of agency business for clients is that it has the expertise of a team of versatile specialists involved in several projects simultaneously and with comprehensive experience. And the cost of these services in the agency is lower than hiring each specialist as a staff. Only a large business can afford that. If you imagine a sandwich of two pieces of bread and stuffing, the upper slice of bread is a large business that can hire a team of performance marketing in-house and the lower slice of bread is a very small business or startup that hires freelancers for a specialized spot activity (targeted advertising in social networks or maintenance of these social networks). It all depends on the turnover of the business. Figures are very tentative, but, for example, in Ukraine, the trigger when the business is turning to the agency — about 20,000 dollars a month turnover. Depending on the business's profitability, performance marketing takes 10...20% of the company's turnover. The higher the turnover, the lower the percentage. But in other countries, these figures may be different.
There are two important points when choosing a performance marketing agency for the client — how to set the task and by what criteria to choose. How to set the task depends on what the agency of performance marketing can do: to increase organic traffic to the site, raise the position of the site by keywords, customize and optimize the advertising campaign, increase the number of conversions, optimize the cost per conversion, to achieve the target ROAS, in a long-term work on the project the agency of performance marketing can improve the quality of traffic and requests on the site. Among other things, it can do so through content marketing. A performance marketing agency generally helps clients achieve business and marketing goals through applied marketing tools. Typically, the agency is not involved in setting business goals and marketing objectives in general. The agency can help formulate them with certain testing activities, but the businesses themselves form the final business goals.
And about criteria! Over a decade of negotiating with clients, we have encountered many selection criteria. We will not list all the irrelevant and exotic ones. Focus on the requirements that are important for the client based on our experience. So, the essential criteria for selecting a performance marketing agency are:
We wish you the best of luck in choosing a qualified performance marketing agency. If you already have a task, leave a query, and we'll discuss it together!
