How To Evaluate Your Marketing Service Provider

In marketing, optimization and continual iteration should never stop. Passionate marketers love learning, and they learn through data. Marketers are constantly evaluating costs and seeking better return on investment from their channels and technologies. The same analysis and optimization should extend to service providers (agencies or freelancers you work with for expertise). Retrospectives, like A/B tests and campaign performance reports, are another important tool for gathering the data needed to analyze performance.

A retrospective is a collaborative meeting that helps teams reflect on how well the work was completed during the preceding period. This practice was born from the Agile Software Development process and has become widely adopted by marketing and project management teams and can be an incredibly useful way to improve the alignment and relationship between you and your agency or freelance service providers.

While marketers and vendors alike might find retrospectives to be daunting, they force marketers to think about their objectives and evaluate their effectiveness. This practice creates a culture of continuous optimization that should extend to the agencies and freelancers supporting marketing. Evaluating service providers during retrospectives creates feedback providers can use to tailor their service practices to your needs, and it signals your commitment to improving the ROI of every marketing dollar.

Quick, Efficient and Informative

Retrospectives should be quick, efficient, and informative. Retrospectives are not a tool for determining the value of in-house staff or service providers, they are a tool for improving the value of marketing staff and service providers.

Quick

Retrospectives should happen on a regular basis and have a standardized format so that they become routine. Regularity and structure create speed. It’s ideal to align retros with business reviews and goal-setting exercises. Evaluate long-term vendors during these review cycles and hold separate retros at the conclusion of large projects or service contracts. If you don’t have regular business reviews, start with a quarterly cadence and adjust as needed. Keep the format casual and conversational. Schedule a one-hour meeting (maximum) with your in-house marketing team. Don’t ask for prep work, and don’t invite the provider so you can get candid feedback from your team about the provider's contribution.

Efficient

Project managers are the best choice for hosting and facilitating retrospectives since they are accountable for managing the work. The next best choice, if you don’t have project managers, is to task a manager who is organized and can lead a well-structured meeting and encourage participation and feedback in a round table format.

No matter how you run your retro or phrase your questions, the end result should inform the following:

• Marketing goals & objectives - were they met, exceeded, or fell short?
• What worked well - identify successful strategies, tactics or unexpected wins
• What obstacles were encountered - identify difficulties and challenges
• How well did the team perform collectively - discuss collaboration & communication
• What should not be repeated - discuss ineffective tactics to avoid
• What could be improved - gather ideas for creating efficiencies

There are additional specific service provider questions you should ask after your team has reflected on overall project success: 

• How instrumental was the provider in meeting our marketing objectives?
• Did the provider complete the services they were hired for?
• Was the provider directed to perform the work they were hired for?
• How well did our internal team work with the provider?
• What is the provider doing well?
• What could they do better?
• What should they stop doing?
• What could they improve to deliver more value?

Select a format that makes sense for your team. Try to stick to it and come prepared with questions written out. Encourage team members to shout out answers and write them down on a whiteboard or a screen-shared doc to maximize participation.

When the feedback stops or you reach the meeting midpoint, it’s time to shift gears. Ask your team if they agree with each answer. Simply seek to understand whether there is consensus. The goal here is to understand the meaningful takeaways so they can be quickly summarized. 

Informative

After an insightful discussion and learning how effective your team was and how satisfied they are with your service provider, have the person managing the retro spend 30 minutes summarizing the findings. Save them, along with the original notes, for posterity. You’re done, right? 

Not quite. The value of any retrospective is that it informs action. The summarized findings need to be shared with the person managing the provider so that feedback reaches them through the right channel.

How feedback is communicated to the provider is up to you and your team; just make it clear that the feedback was received as part of a routine retrospective rather than a vendor assessment and leave the door open to receive feedback and questions from the provider. The best agencies will want to make sure they understand the feedback they receive and put a plan in place to improve how they serve you. Make sure you communicate the positive as well as the negative to help your vendor lean into what they’re already doing well.

Get Better Service

Don’t use retrospectives to hold your provider’s feet to the fire; use them to ensure your team’s needs and objectives are being met in the best way possible. Few clients share structured feedback with service providers on a regular basis; those that do get even better service and build a relationship based on shared objectives. Consider how to deliver the feedback in a constructive way that promotes partnership, clearly outlines your expectations and encourages the provider to meet them.

Retrospectives don’t just lead to improved service, they can also highlight issues with how your team is working with a provider, underutilizing them, or directing them to do work that isn’t aligned with your marketing objectives