40 Questions to Ask A FREELANCER OR AGENCY BEFORE SIGNING A CONTRACT

Ever wonder if your Digital Marketing agency is giving you the best service? Or, perhaps you’re trying to determine whether or a not a freelancer actually knows what they’re doing before signing a contract? Do you have to Google the majority of terms related to Google Ads? Whatever your reasons are, it’s beneficial to have a checklist on hand so you can ask the right probing questions before signing a contract or when it’s time for renewal. As a heads up, you don’t have to master the channels referenced, just asking these questions will help you weed out sketchy players. But, if you’d like a deeper dive, check out my curated list of Digital Marketing Resources.

Overall Strategy

What’s your goal? That should be the first question any agency or freelancer asks. From there, they’ll want to establish how you go about achieving these goals, based on your audience and product or service. The process I typically use for this is the Objective First Framework. This can be used for specific campaigns, or overall business goals.

• Objective: Goal of your campaign, such as lead generation or sales.

• Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): The metrics that will help you understand how efficiently you’re achieving the goal. For example, Conversion Rate.

• Design Tactics: Methods for presenting your business value in a way that focuses on customer/prospect need. This includes channels and messaging.

• Execute Campaign: Push go. It’s time to get some data coming in.

• Measure Outcomes: Make sure you have the right tracking in place such as the Facebook Pixel, and Google Analytics.

• Optimize Results: Identify opportunities for improvement based on our goal and KPIs. You don’t have to follow this exact process, but you should be able to cover off on all elements referenced. If you need help getting started here, check out my post on Digital Marketing Campaign Optimization.

Questions to ask:

• What strategy would you recommend to achieve our goals?

• What channels should we be on?

• How will we measure impact?

• What is your approach towards optimization?

• Can you provide 2 or 3 referrals?

Social Media

In most cases, this is one of the channels you’ll need to be on. In a recent HubSpot survey, 90% of all marketers say Social Media Marketing has increased their business exposure. However, your approach can easily make or break your entire Marketing strategy.

Selecting Social Media Channels

Choosing the right social media channels should be based on your target audience, resources, company type and competitor activity. The agency or freelancer you align with should ask several questions before recommending specific channels, and may need to talk you out of using some of your favorites. At a high level these are the optimal use cases, by channel. In any case, you should at least secure your brand name on every social channel, even if you’re not actively using it. Should you choose to in the future, you don’t want some weird hyphen after your name. @ Nike_2 just doesn’t sound as official. In most cases, you can keep these as unpublished until you decide to post content.

Questions to ask:

• Based on my audience and competitors, what channels should I be on?

• For my business, what are the unique use cases for each channel?

Benefit of increasing Followers

Years ago, growing your followers was a no-brainer for any brand. The goal was to post on your feed so followers could see relevant updates. Unfortunately, the number of followers that see these updates - known as Reach - has been drastically reduced, especially on Facebook. As a result, you could easily spend time and effort growing a following that never sees your content. I’m not saying you shouldn’t grow your followers, but you should have a clear understanding of why you’re doing it. In many cases, you’ll need to pay to reach them, so you may be better off running ads in the first place. However, there can be an indirect benefit of having followers. I might be less inclined to visit a Dentist who only has 13 followers. Beyond that, some partners and investors still regard this as proof of concept. If your goal is to create an engaged community, you may be better off creating a group. If your main focus is connecting with your audience, a Chatbot could be an alternative as well.

Questions to ask:

• What percent followers will see my content in their feed?

• Are there alternatives for growing an engaged audience?

• Is this the efficient way to connect with our audience?

Content Strategy

To be successful, you’ll need to provide valuable content for your audience. Remember, you’re dealing with a passive audience. Meaning, they aren’t actively looking for your content at that time. You’ll need to focus on providing value if you want them to stop scrolling and pay attention. The perceived value of your content is completely dependent on your audience, but the chart below provides some guidance. Your content should touch on 2-3 of these areas to have a stronger impact.

The most common way to mess this up is by talking about yourself the whole time. At least 80% of your content should provide value, 20% can be promotional.

You’ll measure success by the following:

• Reach - How many people see your content?

• Engagement - How many comments, likes, shares, clicks, conversions, etc.

Check out my Content Development Webinar for tips on creating relevant content.

Questions to ask:

• What is your recommended Content Strategy?

• How would you measure impact?

Posting Frequency and Performance

How often should I post? That’s a question I get quite often. The answer is based on your goals and resources.

What are you hoping to accomplish with this content? Clicks? Comments? No matter the use case, set a benchmark for the percent of people who see your content and perform that action, this is known as engagement rate.

This is how you’ll evaluate performance:

● Engagement/Reach= Engagement Rate

● If 100 people see your content and 4 engage, your Engagement Rate is 4%.

● If this is your benchmark, and you post content with less than 4% engagement, the content missed its mark.

Find your average Engagement Rate over the past 90 days, use that as a benchmark. Don’t have any data? Google “average engagement rate by social channel”. Review some of the results, and find the ones that are most relevant to your industry. Next, who’s going to make this content? If you’re handling this in-house, you may not have the resources to post multiple times per week. If this is being handled externally, you’ll need to establish an editorial review process. Lastly, it’s important to create a content calendar. Are there relevant events in your industry coming up? Plan in advance. Determine who owns this calendar and use it to track performance.

Questions to ask:

● How often should we posts?

● How are we gauging performance?

● How do we know if its working?

Paid Social

These days, Social is almost entirely a pay to play platform. To make the most of your budget, you’ll need partner with an expert in both strategy and campaign optimization.

Campaign Strategy

This should somewhat covered by the overall Digital Marketing strategy, but it’s important to note some nuances with Paid Social. Remarketing Campaigns - showing ads to people based on previous activity - are a common strategy, so you’ll want to make sure you’re set up for success. For example, let’s say you’re selling a Fitbit during the summer. You could start with an ad that references the top ways to exercise while on vacation. This would be targeted to people who show an interest in general exercise. You could then retarget anyone who clicks with an ad for Fitbit and explain how it can help you keep track of your activities, even while you’re on vacation.

Questions to ask:

● What’s your campaign strategy?

● What content do we need to support it?

Audience Targeting

There are various targeting options available such as demographics, behaviors and interests. For example, people have an interest in Fitbit devices. You should select options that are directly aligned with your company and the content of the ads being displayed. If I’m selling the value of a Fitbit, and my content features someone jogging, it would be beneficial to target people who have an interest in Fitbit and Jogging. This is known as conjunction targeting. You’ll also want to think more about the lifestyle of the audience you’re targeting. Someone with an interest in Fitbit may have a general interest in Internet of Things devices. Targeting a larger audience may help you create awareness among people who aren’t actively considering your product.

Questions to ask:

● What audiences should we target?

● How does this align with our content strategy? Custom and Lookalike Audiences The targeting mentioned above is great when you’re first starting out. Once you get some data coming in, you’ll want to start using

Custom and Lookalike audiences.

A custom targeting audience is created using your own data. For example, people who have been to your website or are on your email list. These people are typically more responsive to your ads, and can increase the overall efficiency of your campaigns. Serving ads to someone who has already added an item to cart will almost certainly be more effective than serving ads to someone who has never heard of your brand. Once you get prospects to convert, you’ll want to start using Lookalike Audiences for additional prospecting campaigns. Lookalike Audiences are a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your existing customers. If Custom and Lookalike audiences aren’t mentioned when you ask about audiences, run.

Questions to ask:

● What are your suggestions for Custom and Lookalike Audiences?

● What additional tracking would we need to use these audiences?

Monitoring and Management and Reporting

Since you’re serving ads to a passive audience, as opposed to one that searched for your content, you’ll want to make sure you’re reaching the right people with the right message. Account Management is the process of maintaining your campaign efficiency, based on your established KPIs. Even if you are reaching the right audience, you want to avoid annoying them by showing the same ads over and over again. Ad Frequency is the number of times - on average - your audience has seen the same content. You can avoid audience fatigue by targeting a larger audience - that’s where Lookalikes come in handy - or rotating your ad creative. There are several campaign management platforms that help automate the process of campaign management. Examples include Adobe, Marin and Kenshoo. These tools are a must for larger advertisers and budgets.

Questions to ask:

● What’s your optimization strategy?

● Are you using any campaign management software?

● How do you manage audience fatigue?

● What format do you use for reporting and optimization?

● Who will be handling my account on a day to day basis?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. This can be achieved by creating valuable content that answers a users query. Keywords that are commonly used in these queries must be emphasized on your site.

Keyword Relevancy

Is your audience searching for these terms, and is it relevant to your business? Your audience could be searching for ice cream but if you sell car insurance, you shouldn’t waste your time trying to rank for it. Pay careful attention to this part. Some SEO companies may try to rank for less relevant keywords just because they’re easier to rank for.

Questions to ask:

● Are these keywords relevant for my audience?

● How will we gauge impact?

Keyword Volume

In many cases, the most relevant keywords may have a very low volume associated with them. As a result, even if you do rank very high for them, you may not get much traffic coming to your site. You want to get a good understanding of the keyword search volume and consider optimizing for several relevant but low-volume keywords. The sum of these searches can pay off in the end.

Questions to ask:

● How many people are looking for these terms?

● What are some alternatives?

Keyword Difficulty

The amount of competition and level of effort associated with ranking for specific keywords is often referred to as Keyword Difficulty. Based on the degree of difficulty, it could take months or even years to rank for some keywords. This would also involve creating a fair amount of content that is relevant to these keywords. You’ll need this content to get backlinks for your website, more on this shortly.

For example, let’s say you do sell ice cream.

“buy ice cream” gets more searches, but it’s also difficult to rank for. You may be better off optimizing for several other terms that are easier to rank for.

Questions to ask:

● How difficult will it be to rank for these terms?

● How long do you think it will take for us to see any movement?

● What are some alternatives?

Backlink Strategy

When another site links to you, Google sees this as a vote for the quality of your content. These links, known as backlinks, are the strongest signal for Google when it comes to SEO. Links that come from popular and reputable site - ex. Techcrunch - carry more weight than links from smaller, less popular sites. Your SEO company needs to have a solid network of publishers in order to get these high quality links to your site.

Questions to ask:

● What is your backlink strategy?

● How will you report on the backlinks you’ve secured for me?

● Can you provide examples of links you’ve secured for other clients?

● How are you measuring the quality of these links?

Content Strategy

You’re not going to get any links unless you have good content. It’s important to understand who’s going to make this content, and how consistently it will be produced. Although you may already have content on your site, it needs to be tailored for SEO in order to be effective.

Questions to ask:

● What is your content strategy?

● Do you have resources to create this content?

● Can you provide examples of content you’ve created for other clients?

Site Structure

Small, but significant, changes in your site structure can have an impact on SEO. Just having the words you want to be found for within your domain name or page URLs can help your ranking. Some of the more important aspects are site speed, sitemaps and mobile friendliness. Your SEO company will need to make you aware of any necessary changes. This will almost certainly involve your developer as well, get them in the conversation as early as possible.

Questions to ask:

● What structural changes should we make to improve our ranking?

● Should I loop my developer in?

Meta Tags

This is the easiest one, which is why some companies lead with it. Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content. For example, Meta titles appear in the browser tab. You’d also see them on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). These tags help Google better understand the content on specific pages and help you identify the most important keywords. Meta descriptions also appear on the SERP, and may encourage viewers to click. While the influence on search rankings has been decreasing, you’ll still want to get these set up properly.

Questions to ask:

● What Meta Tags should we include?

● In addition to Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Headers; what other Meta tags would you suggest?

Paid Search

Similar to SEO, Paid Search Marketing involves identifying keywords your audience may be searching for. In this case, as the name suggest, you pay for your ad to show up on the SERP.

Just like SEO, you’ll also want to inquire about the associated keyword volume.

Keyword Match Types

When you bid for clicks on a certain keyword, you can also indicate how similar the user’s search needs to be in order for your ad to show up. For example, if someone searches for mens pants do you also want to show up for mens slacks. Your desired level of similarity is known as Match Type.

Broad Match keywords will have more reach, but they could easily be less relevant. Typically, you’ll use a mix of available Match Types. Although Broad Match may lead to less conversions, they can also help you discover keywords you may not be bidding by analyzing the Search Term report. This report allows you to see how your ads performed when triggered by actual searches. You may discover some searches are performing well, even if you’re not bidding on them directly. In which case, you would consider adding them to your account.

However, you may find some irrelevant keywords are also triggering your ad to appear. In which case, you’d want to add these as Negative Keywords. Adding Negative Keywords will prevent your ad from appearing if they’re included in the user’s query.

Account Structure

Your account will include several Campaigns. Each campaign should have a specific theme. For example, Pants. All campaigns will have associated Ad groups, which are subsets of campaigns. The Pants campaign may have a Womens Ad group as well as a Mens Ad group. Every Ad group will have Ads and Keywords associated with them.

● Campaign 1: Pants

● Ad Group 1a: Men’s Pants

● Ad A: We sell the Best Men’s Pants

● Keywords: mens pants, pants for men, buy mens pants

This structure will be directly aligned with your product or service, as well as any promotions you may be running.

As a best practice:

● Ad groups should be segmented by Match type

● You should have two Ads running in each Ad group (this allows for A/B testing)

● You should have 5-20 keywords in each Ad group Questions to ask:

● What’s your recommended account structure?

● How will budget be allocated?

Monitoring and Management and Reporting

Google Ads require constant pruning and updates, especially within the first 60 days of launching a new campaign. It’s imperative to identify what keywords, match types and ads are performing within your desired level of efficiency. This should be done at least once per week. You’ll want a clear understanding of their approach, frequency and how long it takes to implement any changes. Beyond that, it’s important to understand if they’re doing this manually or using a third party management platform. These platforms, such as WordStream, are an absolute must for maintaining large accounts or large budgets. Additionally, decide on how your results will be presented to you. This should be largely focused on your goals and KPIs. More importantly, they should reference the changes they’ll be making as a result of their data analysis.

Questions to ask:

● What’s your optimization strategy?

● Are you using any bid management software?

● What format do you use for reporting and optimization?

Google Partner or Google Ad Certification

Google’s Partner Program helps companies connect with agencies that have passed Google AdWords product certification exams and are up to date with the latest product knowledge. Google has two levels of partners – standard and premier – and partners can specialize in a variety of product areas. Individuals can also obtain a Google Ad Certification. They would need to pass the same exams as a Google Partner, but there isn’t a standard or premier level.

Questions to ask:

● Are you Google Certified?

● Can you provide a link to your Certification?

● Who will be handling my account on a day to day basis?

To wrap things up...

You don’t have to be an expert in all these areas. However, asking the right questions is the key to making sure you’re aligning with the right business partner.