how to choose a marketing agency in Bangkok
what should you not pay your marketing agency for?
Short answer: pay your agency for really knowing your audience, for big ideas and storytelling, for design thinking, and for teams that work together. Not for performance marketing or social media in isolation, and not for dashboards.
performance marketing? not in isolation.
More and more channels get automated, e.g. Performance Max on Google, Advantage+ campaigns and automatic placements on Meta, Smart+ campaigns on TikTok.
The overall value of media planning and performance marketing in isolation is diminishing.
Good luck running ads with bad content. Even in Southeast Asia, where banner blindness took a while to get going, it's too competitive to move the needle without good design and storytelling.
Attribution is not what it used to be. You don't get that perfect click and buy; the customer's path is messy, and you can no longer easily and accurately attribute one order to Facebook, one order to Google, and so on.
data and dashboards? no.
The value of dashboards is diminishing. Currently there's data overload: too many metrics to keep track of, and it's not clear which metrics are actually important.
Soon you can simply prompt AI to digest any insights for you, so you can make the key decisions, or even let it make a lot of them itself.
so what should you pay them for?
Really knowing and understanding not just your brand but your audience, perhaps even better than you know them. The art of doing focus groups and asking why consumers or buyers like what they like, and applying this to your messaging and your content, is still the most valuable activity. Doing double-digit sales and slapping a discount on a banner is great, but it's not what builds a long-term brand.
Good creative, big ideas and storytelling. You want your agency to tell your story to your customers, and build community. If you have a good product or service, all that's left is branding and communicating this value to your audience.
Design thinking; continuous improvement. You want your agency to be able to identify winners from losers, reverse engineer why something worked, and improve from there.
Cross-functional collaboration. Being consistent at every touch point of the customer experience. You want the teams in your agency to work like a well-oiled machine and not work in isolation; it shows if your performance team doesn't know what creative is doing, and vice versa.
So, more and more: back to basics, back to advertising!
If your agency is considering each touch point and thinking about your customer's experience at every ad, every caption and every creative, all the while being very user-centric throughout: congrats, you're working with a golden team.
Bonus point if you eliminate all and any red tape and empower them, e.g. with access to your tools and backend, and approval systems that let them test and try something more experimental.
If I were to hire an agency myself, this is what I would look for. Not a fancy pitch deck, or a nice media plan, or the promise of 10x ROAS before even starting to work together.
questions to ask before you sign
how will you get to know our customers?
You want to hear focus groups, interviews, reading reviews and DMs, asking buyers why they bought. If the answer is just "we'll look at the data", that's half an answer.
can you show us an idea that wasn't a discount?
A sale gets you a good month. Ask for a campaign that made people remember the brand, and ask them to tell you the story behind it.
how do you decide an ad won, and why it won?
Any agency can show you a winner. The good ones can tell you what they learned from it, and what they made next because of it.
who from creative and who from performance will be in our meetings?
If the two teams don't talk, it shows in the work. You want both in the room, thinking about every touch point together.
what do you need from us?
A good agency asks you for things: access, quick approvals, room to test something new. If they don't ask for anything, they're not planning to try much.
red flags
- A fancy pitch deck that's mostly about them.
- A beautiful media plan before they've met your customers.
- The promise of 10x ROAS before you've even started working together.
- Reports full of metrics, and nobody can tell you which one actually matters.
who we're not for
If all you want is someone to push buttons in your ad account, schedule posts or send you a dashboard every month, we're probably not the right fit.
Comparing agencies? Ask every one of them for their prices and their track record. Here are ours: see pricing >> see the track record >>
want an agency that works this way?
have a chat >>
managing your social media? no.
At least not in isolation.