When searching for a new marketing partner, your organization will find a wide variety of firms ready to offer their services. Do you know what you’re looking for in a marketing partner? Read on to learn how to separate the firms that can offer you what you need from those that won’t be a good fit.
While every organization will be looking for something slightly different in a marketing partner, there are some overarching qualities that every company should prioritize. Your organization should seek a firm that:
While any new partner will need to get up to speed on your specific organization and needs, one who has knowledge of or experience in your industry offers significant benefits. They can bring to the table a wealth of insights about your audience, competitors or even sales strategies. They can also contribute knowledge gained from similar marketing campaigns to save you the time and effort associated with a more trial and error-focused approach.
Your organization doesn’t just want a firm that offers robust data collection and analysis or creates compelling creative assets. No, you want to work with a marketing partner that combines both, and that understands the new marketing value chain. You want to work with a marketing partner that knows how to glean insights from data and use them to inspire effective content and compelling creative.
Any organization you partner with should share your goals and know how to take steps to achieve those goals, in terms of sales, audience recognition and more. Similarly, it’s important to find a marketing partner that shares your overall values, so that you can trust them to make decisions that your organization can stand behind.
Ultimately, one of the biggest benefits of a marketing partnership is the ability to gain an outside view of your organization and its efforts. When selecting a marketing firm to work with, ask each firm you consider a number of questions. How do they see your organization from the outside? How will they work to make sure they can continue to share an outside view even as they work closely with your organization? How will they use this view to push your organization to consistently improve?
No matter what else you seek in a marketing partner, there are three things every organization should expect and demand. They are:
In addition to your own internal goals for a marketing partnership, it’s important that your partner firm establishes growth objectives that match your organizational business goals.
Once those objectives are set, your marketing partner must track the appropriate metrics to measure their progress. Work with a partner who sets benchmarks to track progress against.
Those metrics must then be clearly and regularly reported to you, the client. Talk to a marketing partner up front about how and how often they will report on the metrics they track. A good marketing partner will provide data that is meaningful to your organization, not just numbers out of context.
To read about how Movéo helped one client establish a metrics reporting framework, read our Molex case study.
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