When Should a Business Hire a B2B Performance Marketing Agency?

 A B2B Performance Marketing Agency isn't just another agency jumping on current trends and copying your competitors. It's about knowing when is the right timing, what your specific goals are, and that your internal teams can no longer support your company's marketing needs. Many B2Bs tend to wait until they've spent too much money trying to do disconnected things before they realize they're not getting the results they wanted and blame their marketing teams for it. A B2B Performance Marketing Agency can help you identify when you need to get the agency involved and what problems you would like the agency to solve.

What Is a B2B Performance Marketing Agency?

A B2B Performance Marketing Agency is all about tracking measurable results rather than just tracking the brands, impressions, or website visits that may look great on paper. Ultimately, the goal is to create qualified leads, generate pipeline growth, and generate revenue.

A B2B Performance Marketing Agency typically offers:

·       Paid Media (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads)

·       Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Strategy

·       Conversion Rate Optimization

·       Analytics and Lead Tracking

·       Demand Generation Campaigns

A good B2B Performance Marketing Agency will help connect all of your marketing efforts to your business results.

1. Your Leads Are Not Qualified

If your sales team continues to say, "These leads are irrelevant," "They are too small," or "They do not understand the product/service," then that is a significant sign that the quality of your leads is unacceptable to your sales team.

A B2B Performance Marketing Agency's mission is to create a marketing strategy that focuses on lead quality, rather than lead quantity. The Agency's mission is to develop effective marketing strategies through Target and Message alignment with the right types of buyers. This will allow your sales team to focus on the types of buyers they want to sell to, instead of just any buyer. A B2B Performance Marketing Agency is very different than just generating volume leads.

A B2B SEO Company also supports the efforts of the B2B Performance Marketing Agency by providing inbound high-intent search traffic from buyers that are interested in purchasing from your company.

2. Many B2B companies have a lot going on

·       Posting To LinkedIn

·       Running ads

·       Writing blogs

·       Attending events

The challenge is that their revenue has not changed much at all.

This is typically an indication that the activities that they are performing are not working together. Performance Marketing Agency brings together all of these activities and provides a framework for them; Performance Marketing Agency will establish for you:

·       Clearly Defined Goals

·       Clearly Defined KPIs (metrics)

·       Clearly Defined Buyer Journey

Rather than just doing everything that is currently happening, your Performance Marketing Agency will focus on the actual activities that will help move deals through the sales funnel.

3. Sales Cycle is Long & Complex

In the B2B world, purchasing does not occur overnight; it is a slow process of investigation, research, comparing and engaging multiple decision-makers. If you are experiencing a lengthy sales cycle, there is no way that you will see any results from unconnected marketing activities.

The Performance Marketing Agency builds systems to accomplish the following:

Educate buyers over time.

Be present during the lengthy consideration period.

Provide sales teams with material that is relevant and helps them to assist the buyer in making an informed decision.

This is where Performance Marketing and SEO align with each other; Performance Marketing helps ensure that your brand is positioned to be visible in the research phase, not just at the end of the buying cycle.

4. If you're spending money on Advertising and can’t accurately report

·       The number of leads resulting from it

·       The Campaigns that generated deals

·       The cost of each qualified lead

Then you're guessing and not marketing.

A performance-based agency will establish the appropriate tracking, attribution, and reporting protocols in order to illustrate the Marketing that works and does not work, while identifying areas in which you’re wasting money. This level of clarity, alone, will often justify a performance-based agency’s fee.

5. The typical in-house team is small and/or overburdened one individual may have to manage the following:

·       Paid Ads

·       Search Engine Optimization

·       Content Creation

·       Reporting

When someone is performing all of those tasks, they will merely be surviving, not strategizing.

6. By using a B2B Performance Marketing Agency, you gain access to

·       Specialists instead of generalists

·       Tried-and-true processes

·       An unbiased, external viewpoint

By working with an agency, you can free up the time of your in-house Marketing team to focus on your business needs instead of trying to do everything and doing it poorly.

Many companies create blogs and target keywords, but don’t see any appreciable business effect. They increase their traffic; their lead flow does not.

7. A B2B SEO agency with a performance-driven mindset approaches SEO with the following objectives:

·       Focused on buyer intent keywords

·       Publishing pages that support sales

·       Providing content that answers real business problems

If SEO feels as if it’s slow, random, or disconnected

8. Predictable growth is more valuable than a single successful campaign.

B2B companies that utilize Performance Marketing Agencies tend to follow a systematic approach for creating predictable and repeatable results, such as:

·       regular timeframes for creating leads in one or many different markets

·       scalable campaigns, which can start with the first lead and build from there

·       a constant cycle of improvement through continuous optimisation.

If you’ve got big plans for your future growth (e.g., entering new markets, building larger sales teams, or growing your average deal value), having established systems will allow you to quickly and efficiently grow your company, without the growing pains that typically come with unstructured or poorly-executed growth plans.

Leadership requires clear numbers, clear milestones, and clear accountability.

Performance Marketing Companies fit well in this scenario because they only report what is measured. Performance Marketing Companies, like other businesses, require their clients to make data-driven decisions based on what they see and experience. If you want to achieve predictable growth, you need to work closely with your leadership, sales and marketing teams.

While we love working with B2B companies, there are scenarios in which we tell our clients not to hire a Performance Marketing Agency.

You should not hire an agency if:

·       You have not yet identified your product-market fit

·       You cannot make a commitment to invest in your business consistently

·       You want quick wins without a strategy

·       You expect your agency to “fix everything” by themselves.

·       When your leadership, marketing and sales are aligned, you can achieve the best results from a Performance Marketing Agency.

Here’s how to tell if you're ready to work with a B2B Performance Marketing Agency:

·       You're familiar with who your ideal customer is.

·       You understand your sales process inside and out.

·       You know that you want measurable results based on the revenue you generate.

·       You're willing to invest in longer-term results, as opposed to quick fixes.

If SEO fits into your overall growth strategy, you should consider partnering with a B2B Search Engine Optimization Agency that focuses on performance.

Final Thoughts:

Hiring a B2B Performance Marketing Agency is not an indication that your internal marketing team has failed. It signifies growth. Your business has moved past activity being important, and now looks for results.

A qualified agency will be able to utilize their knowledge base to eliminate any guesswork, waste excess ad spend, and allow you to develop a marketing engine to drive true business development. When you select the right timing for bringing on an agency, the results will not only be visible but measurable.