Facebook marketing is not magic, although it might seem like it if you have no clue how to do it. Therefore, before anything else, the first piece of advice is: get to know the basics. Jonloomer.com is a good resource for that, as well as Facebook’s free training modules.
Now, to the actual point. A company may run Facebook marketing in-house or via an agency. For small companies, it often makes sense to do it yourself, but larger budgets require a deeper know-how and more time to get the best results. For these reasons, outsourcing is often chosen by many medium and large companies. When outsourcing, an agency can take care of organic Facebook marketing, paid advertising, or both.
But how to test the quality of your agency?
Well, remember the first advice – learn the basics of Facebook marketing. If you don’t know something, you cannot manage it. Second, you can ask these questions, before engaging an agency or during your relationship with them.
- What goals would you set for our Facebook marketing?
- How would you measure the achievement of those goals?
- Describe your strategy in achieving the goals.
- Describe your optimization process for Facebook marketing.
- Based on our Facebook posts, tell me something that I don’t know about my business
The first question reveals how well the agency grasps your business, and how they would fit your business goals to the Facebook environment. The goals don’t have to be exactly what you had thought of — it’s more important that they show innovativeness and general understanding of your business.
The second question reveals the metrics they would choose to measure performance – the more they are aligned with your general business goals, the better. In addition, if they are able to argue efficiently for both ROI- and non-ROI-oriented metrics, it’s a good sign as it shows an understanding of the general complexity of multichannel consumer behavior.
The third question tells how they would go about creating a Facebook marketing strategy — here you can pay attention to their proposed split between organic and paid, frequency of posting/optimization, target group definition, ad creation process, etc. You can ask specifying questions, e.g. about the suggested size of budget. That shows how they approach campaign planning on the fly – the better they know the environment, the better answers they can give.
Fourth, it is important to know how they would run the accounts in practice. For example, how much time are they willing to invest? Facebook marketing is a time-consuming activity, which is actually a major reason the optimization workflow has to be efficient to achieve the best results. For an agency it’s easy to spend money precariously because Facebook takes all the money you can throw at it — but optimization is a different ballgame.
The fifth question tells how well they have analyzed your accounts and prior Facebook marketing activities. Not all agencies bother to analyze the status quo in your Facebook marketing this before meeting you — or even when they are doing marketing for you — but obviously doing so communicates a genuine interest in closing/keeping you as a client, as well as attention to detail. If they are able to tell you something about your customers, for instance, that you didn’t know, it’s a very good sign.
There. Asking these questions and going through the associated discussion is, in my opinion, an excellent way to vet a Facebook marketing agency.
In addition, one of the by far most neglected aspect of managing digital marketing agencies is auditing. You should frequently have a 3rd party, such as another agency, audit your campaigns. Never be “forever happy” with an agency but instead always push for more. You want to show commitment so they see value in investing in the relationship, but you also want to keep them a little bit on their toes so they actually bother doing their best for you, as oppose to only chasing new clients.