5 things to look for in a marketing agency

A guide for not-for-profits and social enterprises

Finding the right agency or consultant to help you with your marketing is important — not only do different agencies and consultants have different skillsets but their approach to their work will vary significantly. By understanding what you want out of the relationship you will be able to make a better match and have a much more rewarding relationship.

Here are the 5 things I recommend looking for in a marketing agency or consultant:

1. The right skills for the project

Marketing covers a huge spectrum of work and the different skills involved are many and varied. Some marketing agencies provide generalist skills while others specialise. You will need to choose based on:

1. The nature of your project — for example, if you are launching a social media campaign and don’t need help with any other aspect of your marketing, you might choose a specialist social agency. If however, your overall marketing is currently weak, a generalist agency could develop your campaign and provide insights into how to improve the rest of your marketing to better support the campaign.
2. Your availability to oversee projects — if you are using various specialists, you need the time and skills in-house to coordinate their efforts and ensure it all comes together nicely.

2. A strong values alignment

As a social good organisation, your values drive everything you do. You want to be sure that the marketing solutions put in place are closely aligned to your values. By working with a marketing agency that has a strong values alignment to your own organisation, you won’t have to constantly remind them or check their processes to ensure this is the case. If your marketing agency isn’t interested in having a chat about their values and how they embed them in their work, they are probably not a good fit.

3. The right balance of do and teach

Embedding marketing knowledge — and a marketing mindset — into everything you do is a great way to build the capacity of your organisation, become more resilient and achieve more for less. Also, splitting the work between a marketing agency and any internal staff you have (for example, they might do the design but your team does the content) can be more cost efficient.

Some marketing agencies will want to simply be briefed and then return to you with the finished product. This can be really efficient but it doesn’t add to your organisation’s knowledge or skills. Consider how you would like them to work with your team and find an agency that is willing to provide your preferred balance of doing the work for you and teaching you how to do it for yourself.

4. An understanding of marketing for social change

In addition to promoting your organisation to funders, donors, supporters, volunteers and customers, your marketing should work to achieve your overall mission. So if you are trying to end homelessness, you need to be promoting the ideas and behaviour changes needed to achieve this. Your chosen marketing agency needs to understand how to do this — educating on a cause and communicating to drive attitudinal or behaviour change are specialist skills and are often contradicted by traditional marketing methods. As such, you will want to know that your agency is able to deliver good social change, not just brand building or short-term campaign results.

5. An understanding of core social frameworks

Whether your organisation works to a human rights framework, strengths-based approaches, positive / empowering framing, individual agency or a triple bottom line, it is important to understand that social frameworks such as these that are familiar to social sector professions are not common or generally understood in the marketing space. Subtle choices in the type of tactics used, the framing of a message or the depiction of a social issue or demographic of people in an image can all undermine such frameworks if they are not understood. If your agency doesn’t have an understanding of the social frameworks within which you operate, ensure they are willing to learn and to explore how to interpret those frameworks into the marketing process to ensure congruency.

Of course, like all businesses, you will also be looking for value-for-money. Just remember, that doesn’t necessarily mean cheap — to get a good return on investment, you need your marketing to be effective and this may mean spending more up-front to get the return further down the road. Cheap, ineffective marketing will cost you more in the long run. Not only will you end up spending time and money trying to fix it but the lost opportunities it costs you may never come around again.

Has your organisation worked with a marketing agency or consultant? What worked for you and what didn’t? What did you learn that could help other social enterprises and not-for-profits to get the most out of their agency relationships?

This article originally appeared on the Just Good Marketing blog.