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Are you working with a Digital Marketing Cowboy?

With the rise of easy to engage online marketers, marketing business coaches and virtual assistants, the digital marketing industry is quickly becoming a race to see who can provide the lowest hourly rate for digital marketing services. Even if you are not using an outsourced marketing agency, it’s important to ensure you select the right care of your business.

1. Make sure your digital marketing manager is accessing your page through Facebook Business Manager

We get it – adding someone as an admin to your page is a two-second job, but someone who manages multiple clients, like your outsourced marketer, should always be managing clients via Business Manager.

Have you ever almost posted or shared to your business page, instead of to your personal Facebook profile?  It’s very easily done, particularly from your mobile.  Consider how many potential clients your outsourced marketer may be working for and the risk of potential mistakes. Business Manager makes it practically impossible to accidentally post to the wrong business page.

I will go as far as to say that if your outsourced marketer is not using Business Manager they are not a professional.

2. Confirm how your marketing person intends to create your Facebook Ads

Facebook makes advertising really easy, they put a promote button right on your page… unfortunately it is an imitation vanilla version of the real Ad Manager.   If your outsourced marketer is mostly boosting your posts or creating ads using the Promote button on your page, then they are doing your business a disservice.

Facebook Ad Manager allows you to create custom audiences of warm leads – retargeting your website visitors, targeting your mailing list – and you can’t identify or target these warm leads if you only use the Promote button on your page.

You also can’t create conversion goals such as add to cart or registering for your course or filling in a lead form if you aren’t using Ad Manager.   If your outsourced marketer is not using the Conversion objective (a type of ad) in at least one campaign per month, your business is missing out an important step in their funnel.

3. Ensure your marketing agency is using your Facebook Ad Account (and YOUR Pixel!) to create Ads

In the early days of Identify, our clients found it easier if we managed their ads in our agency account.  But as time went on we knew we wanted our clients to have full visibility and transparency when it came to our work. We wanted them to get full access to reporting, and have confidence that they ultimately had full control of their spend and activities.  It takes an additional few minutes of setup to get access to our client’s ad account but it is worth it for any business owner. It’s now a compulsory part of the Identify client onboarding process.

The benefit to you as a business owner is that it prevents the sneaky habit of your marketer installing their own pixel (tracking code) on your website and taking all your precious website data for themselves….. leaving you with nothing when the relationship ends (or leaving their tracking code on your site, until you or your new marketer notices it)!  Data is king, collect it and protect it.

4. Your outsourced marketing agency does not own your AdWords account (and check your contract!)

We have grown our AdWords capability exponentially in the past twelve months and unfortunately, it’s an area we see some of the sneakiest behaviours from fellow digital marketers.

If your AdWords account has been set up by an external resource, you MUST ensure you have access to your account…. yes I know it’s yet another account to kept track of but the beauty of Google is that there are a number of key business tools you should have access to and they are all accessible via your one Google Account.    It is worth the 10 minutes to confirm ALL of these are accessible to you as a business owner or key decision maker.

In terms of your contract with your outsourced marketer – did you know some agencies will delete all their work out of your account when your contract ends?

Do you know if you get to keep the content that is in your AdWords account when you move to another agency, end your contract for whatever reason, or decide to bring AdWords in-house?

Or will it be wiped clean and deleted forever if you move on?   Again, data is king – collect it and protect it!

And do you have a notice period or a minimum term in your contract?  You may be locked in for months at a time or need to give 12 weeks notice before moving on.  Make sure you know what they lay of the land is when it comes to moving on.

And if it ISN’T in your contract, don’t allow your outsourced marketer to bully you into a long notice period, there is no good reason to do this aside from a lack of ethics.

5. Use your own credit card for payments from Google or Facebook

So you’re paying an agency $600 per month for AdWords including your advertising spend…  how much is actually going toward your campaigns, and how much is going toward administrating your account?  If you ensure you have a login AND that your credit card is on the account you will be billed by Google directly – and you will know if your marketer is spending your budget as agreed.

The management and analysis of your AdWords campaigns should ideally be a fixed amount each month (unless the scope of work changes of course!) and four hours is the standard we spend per AdWords client, per month…have you worked out what hourly rate you are paying for your AdWords management?

Outsourced Marketing Management Checklist:

Is your marketing agency or person using Facebook Business Manager?

Do you have access to your Google AdWords account (check Google Analytics while you’re at it)?

Are your Facebook Ads being managed in your own Ad Manager?

Is your pixel (specific to your Ad Manager) installed on your website (and are there any other pixels that shouldn’t be there)?

Does your AdWords contract/agreement specify what happens if you leave in terms of your campaign data?

What notice do you have to give your AdWords provider if you want to move on?

Are you being charged directly by Facebook for ad spend?Are you being charged directly for Google AdWords by Google?

Are you being charged directly for Google AdWords by Google?

 

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