5 Things You Must Know Before Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency
Are you thinking of bringing in a digital marketing agency to handle your online marketing efforts? Or perhaps you’re scratching your head in confusion due to the plethora of marketing agencies out there, and you’re wondering how to choose the best fit for your company?
The truth is, hiring an agency could be quite intimidating, and it becomes doubly confusing if you’re not knowledgeable about the solutions and processes these potential partners are proposing, so to ease your task here are five facts about digital marketing agencies you need to know before ever stepping out to hire any of them.
Know what you want to accomplish
Isn’t this common-sense? It still amazes me when we have an initial meeting with new clients, and it becomes pretty clear they don’t have an idea of what they want with their online marketing efforts.
So, the first thing is doing your work, writing out a plan, and clarifying what you intend to achieve with your online marketing. Do you want more leads? Do you intend building brand awareness and raving communities? Or do you intend creating a new website? Having a clear goal makes the job easy for all parties involved.
Learn about all the services they provide
Researching on the prospective partners primarily on the services they offer provides you with information to determine whether they’re the best fit for your firm. For instance, would you prefer a one-stop marketing firm or specialist agency?
Depending on your needs and what you intend accomplishing going for specialized agencies would make sense if your goal is to run some pay-per-click or Search Engine Optimization campaigns. And other times, hiring a one-stop marketing agency to handle a slew of services like email marketing, lead generation, landing page optimization and so on is Ok since each skillset feeds off the others.
Hence, learning about their services and contrasting them with your needs help you narrow down the list of firms to hire.
Do they have experience in your niche?
Make things easier both for you and the digital marketing agency by first figuring out whether they have experience in your industry.
The advantage of hiring a marketing firm with experience working with businesses of your size and in the same niche is that the phase between research and implementation is shorter, meaning you’d be seeing results much quicker.
How do they measure success?
Though this depends on your business goals, still it doesn’t hurt to know how the marketing agency tracks and reports metrics. It’s essential to ask upfront what you’d be expecting regarding reporting and how frequent.
Also, knowing what technology and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) the agency will be tracking helps you determine whether they’re achieving your business goals and while at it, don’t accept vanity metrics.
Most agencies have different reporting models like weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. so, it’s best to choose the option that suits how you do business.
Talk to their previous clients
Seek out the marketing agency former clients and ask them few questions about their experience working with the agency. You’d be surprised at the amount of useful information you will get.
To do this, take a look at the marketing agency’s ‘client or portfolio’ page get the contacts of their clients and call them or better still visit Yelp, LinkedIn, Google and other review sites to read what their past clients are saying about them.
Wrapping up
Hiring a good marketing firm is the first step in taking your online marketing efforts to the next level. However, cutting through the clutters is a daunting task, so we believe keeping these points in mind will go a long way in helping you hire the agency that’s the best fit for your business.