One of the most important decisions you make as a business owner will be choosing a digital marketing agency. The right agency can impact the lead your business can take on the competition. When deciding, reflect on the cost of your time and money spent if the agency isn’t the right fit. It is essential to take the time to research each digital marketing agency you’re considering and leverage the nine tips below to find the perfect fit for your business to grow online.
What Do Digital Agencies Do?
Digital agencies focus on helping your business succeed online. This could include ensuring you have a top-notch website, excellent website content, your search engine optimization (SEO) is properly in place, your social media channels are reaching the right audience, and your email marketing is targeting the right customers. This list touches on a few of the many ways a digital agency will help your business grow in the digital landscape.
Read More: What Makes Up a Digital Marketing Campaign?
How Do I Find a Good Marketing Agency?
As a business owner, you have to do your diligence to ask questions, learn a bit about digital marketing, and stand your ground when demanding results to find a good marketing agency. With the tips below from Sympler, you’ll be prepared to find the right agency to work with to get the results your business needs to thrive.
Remember if finding a good marketing agency was easy, we genuinely believe more businesses would find success online. Unfortunately, many agencies are quick to take a client’s money with little efforts to show for their investments. By the time the business realizes it, it’s too late. They’ve potentially wasted thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars.
Tips for Choosing a Digital Marketing Agency
Define Your Goals
Before you start shopping around for a digital marketing agency, you need to have an idea of what you want to do online. Try not to over think this, it can be as simple as you want to beat competitors x, y, and z online, or that you’d like to get back in sales what you spend on digital marketing each month. Simple goals will help you express what you want the agency to do for you.
Focus on Value, Not the Lowest Price
One of the biggest struggles you’ll face is trying to figure out how much you should spend on your digital marketing efforts. When it comes to picking an agency, your decision should lead with adding value to your business. Don’t limit yourself budget-wise with your digital efforts. Doing so can leave you in the dust of your competition, resulting in them driving around you in circles with what they are spending on their marketing efforts.
Do Your Research, Then Do More
Research the companies you’re looking to go with thoroughly. Check out their websites. Read their reviews. Browse their social media channels. Are they active online? Do they have recent testimonials from clients or reviews on Google My Business? Make sure that the marketing companies you’re looking into are marketing themselves the best way possible. After all, if they can’t sell themselves, will you have confidence they can market your business?
Ask Questions (and Get Answers)
Ask questions about the agency. About the people that work there. About successful campaigns. Ask questions you have no matter how big or small. If an agency can’t answer your questions or tells you that what they do is proprietary, run the other direction. Any agency worth its salt will have no issues walking you through their process, who they are, what makes them different, and why they do what they do. If they seem to be hiding something, they probably are.
Strategy vs. Execution
Depending on how involved you want to be in your digital marketing efforts, discuss your digital strategy and how it will be executed while exploring different agencies. For example, if you have a web developer on staff that maintains your website, will the agency provide the strategy to you of what you need to do to optimize your website for SEO? Or do they want to do it themselves? If you don’t have time to manage some of your efforts, let the agency do it – but if they don’t have a solid plan for translating strategy to execution, this may be a red flag that they don’t know as much as they say.
How Communication Works
Communication is key! Knowing what’s going on and how impactful your digital marketing campaign is essential to track your return on investment (ROI.) Ask how the digital agency will communicate with you once you sign on the dotted line. Watch how and what they communicate from the beginning, if they go radio silent or aren’t answering your questions promptly, this may be a sign of what to expect if you choose them as your agency.
Always Meet Face to Face At Least Once
Before you make your digital agency choice, meet face to face with the agency. Meet the team and visit the office. This meet and greet will give you insight into how they operate, if they’re truthful about how big their company is, and whether you’ll build rapport and trust with their team. This can also tell you if they’re doing work in-house or outsourcing it overseas or to another agency, which can delay progress on certain aspects of your digital marketing campaign. This is a crucial part of choosing an agency, because if you don’t trust the people working on your account, why would you choose them to begin with?
Request References
You’re about to spend a significant amount of money on digital marketing. You need to consider if others have had success with that particular agency you’re now looking at for your digital solutions. Ask the marketing agency for references. They should be willing to provide these immediately for you to follow up with, ask questions, and get a general feel for what you can expect when working with them. Any agency can send reports or take snapshots from marketing dashboards. If you’re not seeing this data in real time, how do you know it’s accurate or truthful? Request references and talk to other business owners to see how the agency has helped their business grow. If they hesitate to give references to you, don’t waste any more time on them.
Get Multiple Proposals
Don’t make the mistake of just talking to just one digital marketing agency. Identify two to three local agencies that you can meet with in person, speak with during business hours, and who seem to have a feel for what they’re doing. Get proposals from each so that you can compare against your goals for growth and your annual marketing budget. You may find that one agency is better than the other or even offering more bang for your buck than another. You can also leverage these proposals to get the best value for what your business needs to succeed online.
Choosing a digital marketing agency will change the way you do business and how quickly your company grows. Keep in mind where your potential customers spend their time online, you need to be there, too – front and center ahead of your competition. The way people find what they need online continues to evolve. Make sure they can find you by choosing a digital marketing agency that will be you every step of the way. Choosing Sympler for your digital needs will make it easy for your prospective customers to find you every step of the way.
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