10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Hiring a Mobile App Marketing Agency

In this blog, we are covering a few crucial questions that you can ask yourself while hiring a mobile app marketing agency to understand your requirements better.

Every mobile app developer sooner or later faces the necessity of scaling their product. At some point, they find that they have already embraced next to every available user in their market. That’s how they realize they are ready to enter new markets. At that very moment, an important choice should be made: either to strengthen the existing in-house team or to delegate this mission to an agency. In this column, a mobile performance marketing agency AdQuantum focuses on the second option, which is when you decide to hire dedicated developers or an external app marketing team to boost your app across new markets.

Fairly often, even those product teams that seemingly have everything settled, in the end, do have certain issues which might become a serious obstacle to smooth cooperation. Therefore, as a part of leading app marketing practices, I have prepared a list of questions that a mobile app team should ask themselves before initiating the process of hiring an app marketing agency. 

What to ask before you hire a mobile app marketing agency?

Well, before you hire a mobile app marketing agency, you should know that plenty of app development agencies are offering marketing services as well. But whatever options you are going with, these questions can help you in understanding your priorities better before you partner with an external marketing agency.

So, without further ado, let’s proceed to the list of questions to ask yourself while looking for an app marketing agency -

1. Do I understand what a performance marketing agency is? 

First and foremost, make sure that you understand the difference between an agency and an affiliate network before you plan to hire an app marketing agency. Quite a lot of clients think that basically, it is the same thing. This results in certain misunderstandings throughout further stages of cooperation.

So, what’s the difference between them? Simply put, performance marketing agencies work directly with ad sources, have their own creative productions, and are aimed at the quality of traffic. In contrast, affiliate networks are more focused on the number of users. Thus, they drive traffic from all possible ad channels and usually do not filter fraud. Hence, the models that performance marketers and affiliates work with are also different: affiliate networks usually stick to the CPI-based model, whereas agencies prefer to go deeper into analytics and mostly work with the commission-based model with clear performance-aimed KPIs. 

2. What is my main goal in working with an agency?

Before you hire an app marketing agency, it is crucial to set clear and achievable goals for them. Otherwise, the results may not be as good as expected. Whether it’s a soft launch of your app, new source exploration, or even ad creative production, you’ll have to formulate a certain goal that you will have to convey to the top mobile app marketing agencies you are partnering with. 

While preparing your mobile app marketing questionnaire, properly estimate your current capabilities, calculate budgets you’re ready to allocate for paid UA or creative production, outline target KPIs, and only then move on to the next step. You need to be 100% sure that the product in its present state is ready for paid UA. Imagine it as pitching your project to the investors: before you’ll be granted any investments and accelerate your growth, you have to show them your MVP. 

That means you need to have a product that works well already without any significant internal adjustments. It only requires financing, time, and some effort to start generating profit. If that’s not the case, then be ready to hear that you can not fix your product shortcomings with paid UA. 

3. Do I have the marketing budget for a test with an agency? 

Let’s imagine that you have a viable product with a stable marketing funnel and good metrics showing that your app is basically ready for scaling. But before you hire a mobile app marketing agency, make sure you have enough financial resources to outsource support on that matter. It is important to note that limited budgets can cause critical obstacles to successful user acquisition and the price of mistakes can be very high. 

This is especially problematic with products where the average check is $500-$1,000 and you as an app owner are only willing to take the test on a budget equal to 10-20 payer cost. Basically, all tests consume a fair amount of money and there would be less space for further work on a project.

4. Am I ready to trust the agency's expertise? 

You might be surprised but quite often exceeding control from the client side might become a real reason for stopping cooperation. Even those clients for which we at AdQuantum have already discussed the importance of mutual trust at a very early stage of negotiations could put a lot of effort into controlling every step of the agency's work after signing a contract. By doing so, they put spokes in the wheel of potentially successful cooperation. 

Indeed, there is nothing criminal in being involved in all the processes and sharing insights that could benefit the final result. However, excessive control only harms the outcome. Remember that an agency is your partner and not just a service provider. And you need to be ready for a certain credibility towards your partner to seize all the potential growth points within your partnership. If you feel uncertain about sharing some information, then sign an NDA, discuss all the pitfalls, and share all your concerns in advance. Do not hesitate to ask questions, but let the team do their job which you basically have decided to pay for and the outcome will not make you wait.

5. Do I know what my unit economics and KPIs are? 

Understanding unit economics is essential for every business. It helps you forecast profit, optimize your product, and assess your app’s market sustainability. No need to say that it’s crucial for effective marketing implementation. Therefore, it is principal to understand what kind of metrics you want to focus on and what to pay special attention to before granting marketing direction to the hands of an agency. 

For example, if you already cooperate with an agency and suddenly realize that the product will not become profitable with the current customer acquisition cost and thus you’ll have to change the KPIs, then such cooperation is under a big question mark as neither you nor the agency will benefit from it. Moreover, the agency would not be able to reveal and properly apply its expertise. 

For that reason, it is better to keep an eye on the following things in advance: 

• Clear target KPIs that you are ready to share with an agency (one main metric: for instance, cost per action for a paying user)
• Positive product economics. It works according to closed user cohort data
• The ideal KPI is given in accordance with a certain traffic source choice taking into account the payback of a specific country or pool of countries.

6. Do I know my competitors? 

Adding this question to your list of digital marketing questions to ask yourself while hiring a marketing company will help you in a thorough competitor analysis, especially in such overloaded app verticals as Health & Fitness or Games. Additionally, the mobile app marketing questionnaire will help you to be one step ahead, get rid of your app’s flaws, and point out your advantages to the target audience. It will also help you and your partner agency to build a digital marketing strategy that excludes common mistakes and implements relevant, creative approaches and event optimizations. Thus, it helps to reach that audience segment that has not been covered by your competitors yet. 

7. Do I have an accurate analytics system implemented? 

This is the third most important question that you should add to your list of questions to ask yourself while looking for a marketing agency. In order to properly attribute traffic and evaluate the results of a user acquisition campaign, you need to integrate a mobile measurement partner (MMP) as well as accurately adjust the internal business intelligence platform (BI). Good analytics allow you to keep all the data, track traffic activities, estimate marketing investments payback, and much more. 

The presence of flaws in the analytics system and discrepancies between the tracker, advertising cabinet, analytics platform, and BI will be a strong hindrance to achieving quality results while working with an agency. Moreover, keep in mind that battle-tested and proven predictive analytics will be a great contribution to the agency's work (as well as to the work of your in-house marketing team). It will give you more space and allow you to scale your app quicker due to a broader picture of the traffic coming in and out. 

 8. Do I have all the assets necessary for creative production?

A good ad creative is half the battle for success. Therefore, be ready to provide a list of assets for creative production at the agency's request. Please, note that the more assets you are ready to share, the easier and quicker the whole production process will be. 

It is also important to give your agency all the necessary additional information such as creative guidelines, restrictions, and limitations in order to avoid certain mistakes, decrease the number of adjustments and simplify creative approval.  

9. Am I ready for long-term cooperation and keeping patient? 

Some clients consider the agency as a magic pill that can potentially give an excessive revenue increase within 2 weeks of the start. However, marketing strategy development, user acquisition, and creative production imply complex and hard work that requires significant effort. You basically need to be ready for long-term cooperation and keep patient, as:

• Haste definitely will not lead to good results

Any decisions on user acquisition and campaign optimizations must be meaningful and within a realistic timeline. You have every right to expect quick feedback and operational decision-making. However, you should not expect to obtain great results achieved over just a week. 

• Finding a key creative takes time 

Even a search for one performing ad creative can require more than 50 iterations which is very time-consuming. 

• Technical issues and bugs happen, and fixing them also takes time

No one is insured from force majeure and ad sources can sometimes present very unpleasant surprises like ad account bans or other quite specific issues. Solving them even with the help of a personal ad manager takes time.   

 10. Am I ready to share honest feedback even if I am not satisfied with the results? 

Give as detailed feedback as possible on the results you have obtained, and point out what was good and what you personally found frustrating. It may be the ad's creative quality, the work of the team assigned to your project, business processes, or something else. Everything is solvable as long as we realize the problem. 

As said above, working with an agency is a partnership. And if you want a certain improvement to be implemented, make sure that you are completely honest with your partner. 

If you are looking for that exact kind of partner that you can build solid relationships with and boost your app’s performance, then hire a  top marketing agency like AdQuantum!

Wrapping Up

Lastly, we hope that this blog helps you in finding answers to all crucial questions that can be helpful for you in filtering out an ideal top mobile app marketing agency. Now, apart from hiring app marketers, you can also explore MobileAppDaily to find more relevant guides for businesses such as how to hire an app developer. Guides such as these answer crucial questions that are helpful in finding the perfect tech partners whether you are looking for a marketer or a developer.