Part of my job at Workshop Digital is to make sure our services are aligned with our clients’ needs and that our strategies are customized to their businesses. To do that, I talk with a lot of senior-level marketers to get a feel for their challenges and pain points.
Lately I keep hearing the same thing, over and over, that the daily life of a Chief Marketing Officer gets more stressful every quarter (job titles vary across companies, so we’ll use CMO to represent all levels of marketing management). If you are reading this, and you are one, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.
CMOs are constantly pushed to “get more” from their digital marketing efforts: more results, more persuasive data, more clarity and transparency, and more integration with other departments. Pulling this off with internal resources is difficult enough, but incorporating data from a digital marketing agency (or multiple partners) usually increases the complexity several times over.
To help our clients and other CMOs start delivering more, we embarked on an ambitious project that resulted in a laundry list of checklist items and questionnaires to streamline agency partnerships and align around common goals.
Then we threw it out. Why?
CMOs Are Busy
We couldn’t possibly capture every unique marketing scenario or business challenge so we distilled it down to just 4 things to look for in a digital agency partner.
- How are you helping us meet our quarterly business goals?
- Are your services competing with other digital marketing efforts?
- How are you helping me communicate results?
- Does your work strengthen our brand?
By focusing on just these 4 areas, marketers can know which questions to ask your agency, and which answers to demand.
For CMOs, these answers are the difference between defending qualitative results versus proving quantitative ones to the rest of the C-Suite.
Want to know more about how we chose these questions, and what types of answers are acceptable? The 13-page PDF, along with insights and case studies, is available as a free download.
