Is Your Marketing Agency Transparent Enough? Consider These Factors

Written by Charlie White

Transparency is more than honesty; it’s efficiency. When you invest significant resources into your digital marketing strategies, you need to know whether you’re meeting your company’s goals and seeing a good return on investment (ROI). With today’s technology and communication tools, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have visibility into your marketing agency’s workflow and performance.

At LaFleur, we ensure that our clients are up to date on their projects’ status and how their investment is benefiting their company. Keep reading to learn more about the importance of transparency and how we apply a transparent and efficient approach to our client work.

Transparency and Communication Are the Keys to Successful Client-Agency Relationships

Transparency and communication ensure the alignment of our work and assets with each client’s brand, voice, and vision. We work closely with our clients from Day 1 – helping prevent unwanted delays due to misunderstandings or miscommunication.

At LaFleur, we think every client deserves:

Easy access to artwork, content, and other created assets
Clear delineation between their spending on paid ads and costs associated with managing them
Access to project management, campaign, and website tools
Ability to verify and approve deliverables before they go live
Access to tracking tools so you can pull reports as needed
Peace of mind that your projects are being created and managed efficiently

Regular Check-Ins and Communication Build Trust and Rapport

At LaFleur, we work to accommodate our clients’ busy schedules while still providing them essential updates and information about their projects. While we do have local clients that prefer to hold meetings in-person, a significant amount of our communication is done remotely through calls, emails, and video conferences.

Regularly Scheduled Calls

In addition to communicating with clients in more long-form meetings, we also offer regularly scheduled check-in calls. Clients typically schedule a phone call or video conference every other week to go over their projects, performance metrics, and strategy. These calls usually last thirty minutes to an hour and can include:

Progress and feedback on new and existing projects
Monthly performance of their ads, newsletters, website, and other assets, focusing on traffic, click-through rates, engagement, and conversions
Confirming client approval of time-critical projects
Suggesting ways to improve their ROI and meet their goals
Educating clients about marketing best practices

Dedicated Account Managers

Another way we facilitate transparency and communication is by assigning each client a dedicated account manager who works as the client’s primary point of contact. Our account managers quickly become a trusted source of information for our clients, answering their questions, resolving concerns, and building close relationships.

This personalized approach makes communication easy and streamlines the process. Rather than spending time hunting down the right LaFleur contact, our clients know that their account manager will listen to them, find a solution, and report back to them.

Insist on Transparent Tools and Processes

Sometimes, you don’t have time to call or email your account manager. If your marketing agency gives you access to its project management tools, you can still access the information you need.

Project Management Software Encourages Collaboration and Communication

An essential organization and communication tool we use at LaFleur is Asana, a task and project management platform. Not only does Asana allow us to assign, track, and manage our clients’ projects and assets, it also lets us plug our clients directly into our processes.

Clients can access their company’s (and only their own company’s) tasks to see the current stage of their projects, add feedback, and ask questions. Some clients have passive interactions with Asana, only checking to see the stage and progress of their projects.

Other clients take an active role. For example, several of our clients, ranging from small law firms to sophisticated healthcare organizations, log in to Asana to edit content, provide feedback, and interact directly with our team. We even assign specific tasks and deadlines to these clients, ensuring that our projects remain on time and efficient!

Verify and Approve Deliverables Before They Go Live

Our content creation workflow has built-in stages that allow clients to look over and approve deliverables even if they aren’t plugged into Asana. For instance, for written blog content, we have multiple tollgates:

An initial onboarding meeting, where our clients get to meet our team and educate us about their brand and goals
A quarterly editorial calendar review that encourages dialogue
Blog and website content reviews prior to posting

We’re even willing to make edits after the content is posted online. We use similar processes for most of our deliverables, including website design, sell sheets, brochures, and major paid ads and campaigns.

Detailed Reporting That Goes Beyond Vanity Metrics

Reporting is a crucial method of improving both agency transparency and digital marketing success. Accurate and consistent reports let companies know exactly where their marketing spend is going and whether it’s meeting their reasonable expectations.

However, some people unduly focus on vanity metrics, such as page views and social media followers. Admittedly, these metrics can be satisfying – but they don’t help further your marketing goals or refine your strategy. The real value in reporting requires more digging. At LaFleur, we carefully assess our clients’ performance and focus on their ROI.

First, we compile information from our analytics tools and ask our clients for data about their new clients, customers, and sales. Then we reconstruct their marketing journey, using digital tracking and reporting tools. Did they organically find the website, browse around, and make a purchase? Did they see a display ad, click through, sign up for a newsletter, and then complete a contact form? After we identify the channels that influenced the lead, we can calculate the cost of obtaining that client.

Once we do this for all of the company’s new clients, we can determine which channels and messages are delivering the highest quality and most cost-effective clients. Then we can tailor the company’s strategies and budget to give them a better ROI and higher-quality leads.Do You Own Your Marketing Assets and Have Account Access?

Surprisingly, some marketing agencies retain ownership of their clients’ assets, including blog content, imagery, and even slogans. We’ve worked with clients that suddenly had to rework their brand or rewrite most of their content when they terminated their relationship with a prior agency. At LaFleur, our clients own their images, websites, accounts, and content. While this is part plain best practice, it also ties into transparency.

Even if you no longer work with LaFleur, you will still retain all the assets and accounts that we created and managed for you. A transparent digital marketing agency should provide access and ownership to every project and data they have, including:

Photography, graphics, and video
Website and hosting information
Social media accounts
Google and Facebook ads
Email management platforms and programs
Working files for written and graphic project

Get Efficient and Transparent Digital Marketing Services With LaFleur

At LaFleur, we work with you to help improve your business. From inception to implementation, everything we do is designed to align with your brand and your goals. And it all belongs to you. No tricks or restrictions. Just exceptional quality and proven results.

Contact us to learn more about our transparent practices and how we can help your business develop stronger digital marketing strategies. Call us at (888) 222-1512 or fill out our online contact form to get started today.