How do you differentiate between paid media agencies?
A lot of people think it's about performance.
But that's a given. Paid media agencies have to do well with paid media buying.
The differentiating factors are actually strategy and strategic thinking.
We look at strategy in three different areas: Leadership, Improvement, and Ideas. Let's drill down into leadership.
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is having confidence about making the right decisions. Paid media can be a massive investment that will often yield big and tangible results for a business. If done wrong, paid media can hurt a business.
Your paid media agency should be the leaders in the room; they should have the confidence to help you make decisions. They should be giving you recommendations that are supported by facts, by data, and by experience, to ensure that it's obvious what the next steps are. You should never be in the dark about how your paid media is operating.
The second step of this is improvement. Facts, data, and experience should be leading to campaign improvement over time. Your paid media team needs to be providing the plays step by step; They need to be the sherpa so that your campaign starts with a baseline of performance and it shows improvement over time. These decisions will arise from day-to-day campaign optimizations, from the buyer's review, from your account team, and from oversight by the agency's leadership team. Facts, data, and experience applied correctly lead to improvement over time.
And finally, we have ideas. Paid media is complex. The starting point for many conversations is to determine the channels you should run with your paid media. With so many channels, platform ad types, and optimization strategies, determining a starting point can be a really important first step that leads to a lot of good things down the line. You should expect your paid media agency to keep you aware of the opportunities that are directly applicable to your business.
They should be giving you creative ideas, feedback about product and market fit, and insights that tie directly back to how your business operates.
