The Office Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Marketing Performance

The business manager at what was then Pensacola Apothecary faced a monumental problem in 2016. Fortunately, the company could rely upon its decade-long partnership with Lucid Advertising to work through this problem.

As it made the transition from a local pharmacy to a national one, Pensacola Apothecary required a complete rebrand. After working with Lucid to refine its brand identity and associated content, the company emerged as Everwell Specialty Pharmacy. Under this moniker, it has enjoyed roughly a decade of market success.

Introduction to Agency Collaboration

In some cases, new company owners and/or their hired office managers can handle their own marketing, relying primarily on repeat customers, direct recommendations, and word-of-mouth reputation for incoming business. But, at some point, growth stagnates, and further expansion becomes impossible without the help of specialized marketing professionals. This is when companies commonly turn to a marketing agency for help.

However, even the most brilliant of advertising executives is unlikely to deliver optimum results if they don’t take the time to thoroughly understand your specific wants and needs. A highly collaborative approach is essential if you want to position your marketing campaign to outperform your closest competitor. “In other words, a ‘one size fits all’ approach to marketing just doesn’t work anymore,” explains Lucid while outlining its dedication to custom digital marketing strategy. “Your business is unique, and so is your customer base.”

Establishing Clear Communication Channels 

While you should take care to partner with a marketing agency that emphasizes client communication and takes a proactive approach to staying in contact with you, a wise office manager will do their part to ensure that they receive important campaign updates. This might mean signing up for an online platform, setting up regular meetings, or providing relevant feedback via email, telephone, or your communication channel of choice. Although the ease and convenience of modern communication methods cannot be discounted, it is important to remember that face-to-face interaction remains the most powerful way to converse, correspond, and collaborate with others.

Defining Marketing Goals with Your Agency

A productive agency-client relationship must begin with the formation of clear and relevant objectives. Setting these objectives should be one of the first collaborative activities that marketers and clients share. It is important that your stated goals be realistically reachable, easily measurable, and entirely strategic in nature.

As an office manager, you should be closely involved with all facets and stages of marketing goal-setting. However, you will want to place particular emphasis on objectives that identify and convert target customers. While setting goals, you must constantly confirm that they remain aligned with your company’s fundamental mission and vision.

Understanding Reports and Metrics from Agencies

A quality marketing agency will give you a comprehensive and transparent picture of your campaign’s progress through regular reports that stress key performance indicators (KPIs). The raw data of KPIs can tell a comprehensive story about campaign health to those who are able to read them.

Essential to ongoing monitoring and evaluation, important KPIs will differ from market to market and industry to industry. However, Harvard Business School has identified the top seven KPIs as impressions (displayed marketing content), search engine rankings (placement on Google returns), click-through rate (the percentage of impressions that result in a click), cost per click (how much a client pays for each of those clicks), and conversion rate (the percentage of click-throughs that result in a sale or another desired action).

Assessing Agency Performance

Beyond the timely assessment of KPIs, you should look for a marketing agency with positive client references, a record of professionalism, and the ability to deliver an attractive return on investment (ROI). Because no organization can get better without constructive criticism, you should also look for an agency that seeks ongoing feedback from its clients. To get the very most out of the feedback you deliver, you should ensure that it is specific, timely, and behavior/results-oriented.

Optimizing Agency Partnership and Marketing Strategies

Stressing collaboration, communication, objectives, metrics, and assessment, as detailed above, can go a long way toward making your marketing agency relationship more effective and productive. This will help you and your agency develop a strategy that benefits both of you! Furthermore, Forbes stresses that “even the best ad copy, blog post, and landing page can’t fix a bad product or offer.” In other words, you must do your best to give your marketing agency something to work with! Contact the professionals at Lucid today for a free consultation.