3 Good Questions To Ask Your Marketing Agency by 'Leye Makanjuola | Intense Digital

[0:00]Think about the last marketing report that you reviewed and ask yourself one simple question. Did you really understand the impact of marketing on your business? If budgets were approved and money was spent and campaigns were run, but you still walked out of the meeting room unsure about the impact of marketing on your business, something is clearly wrong. It might not be in the capability of your agency, but it might be in their communication. A lot of times, your company leadership is asking the wrong questions. Activity is being discussed rather than outcomes. And marketing performance is being reported without being translated into business value. So teams keep executing and reports keep circulating, but leadership is really confused about what's really driving growth. In this video, I'm going to be breaking down the questions that executive leaders should be asking about digital or growth marketing. Why those questions matter and how asking better question will turn marketing into a real growth engine for your business. For many business executives or leadership, digital or growth marketing is usually very noisy. There's a lot of reports, there's a lot of charts, metrics, KPI's, but what's really unclear is the impact of these activities and these reports on the business. Leadership struggle to understand whether marketing is growing the business. It's not necessarily a failure of marketing teams or agencies, but it's usually a reflection of how leadership interfaces with agencies or marketing teams. The questions executives ask shape the way agencies prioritize, execute and report on their work. If you're asking the wrong questions, even the best marketing can feel very vague and directionless. The reality is that most executive conversations around digital marketing revolve around things like how many followers did the campaign drive, how much reach did we get, how many impressions did we drive. There's nothing really wrong with these questions. But they are not complete. These questions are incomplete because they do not demand from the marketing teams or the agencies, the impact of these metrics on actual business outcomes. When leadership rewards activity over results, agencies will naturally optimize for attention, rather than optimizing for growth. That's why many marketing campaigns, even when well executed, fail to produce meaningful business results. Here are three good questions to ask your marketing agency. One, what business problem is marketing solving right now? The first question that leadership should ask is what business outcome marketing is driving at any given moment. Is it brand awareness or education? Or is the campaign driving demand generation? It could even be customer retention, or improving lead quality. When leadership is clear about the problems that marketing is meant to solve, it changes everything. From how budgets are allocated to the type of campaigns that are approved, and even to how teams prioritize their work. Two, how do we know what's working? The second question is closely tied to the first question, which is really, how do we know which campaigns, channels, or audiences are contributing to business growth? This is where data and tracking become critical. Executive leaders should always insist on measurable results and data that can be tied closely to the growth of the business. A lot of times marketing does not directly close or drive sales for the business, but you need to be able to track how it enables or influences growth. This is usually the difference between reporting that shows activity and reporting that drives decision-making for the business. Three. What is the business learning, and how are we adapting to these learnings? The third question is about iteration. Marketing is uniquely powerful because of how fast you can learn and adapt. Leaders should be asking, what did we learn from our campaign last quarter, and what changes did we make as a result? If nothing is changing, it means nothing is being learned, and if nothing is being learned, it essentially means marketing budgets are being wasted. The ability to adapt quickly is one of the main advantages of marketing, especially digital. And leadership plays a critical role in ensuring that marketing agencies and teams embrace this learning mindset. When leadership asks the right questions, data-driven agencies respond with valid assumptions, measurable outcomes, and actionable insights. The objective is not for perfection, but to gain clarity on what's really working. Leadership should be able to understand what's working, what's not working, and why. This is so that the organization can make informed decisions rather than relying on hope. At Intense, we like to begin our work at the leadership level, ensuring that the right questions are asked, because when executives ask better questions, marketing performs better. Marketing should never be a source of confusion for leadership, instead, it should be a tool for empowerment. When the right questions are asked, and data and tracking are done right, marketing stops being an expense, and starts being a growth driver for your business.