So you’ve decided that you need to hire a digital marketing agency. Now what? Do you know what metrics you’re looking to improve and how to quantify marketing success?
This article discusses the effect digital marketing has on your business’s bottom line and how to choose the best digital marketing agencies to continue expanding your brand and reach wider target audiences. Continue reading to learn how to choose your next digital marketing agency.
Why Work With an Ad Agency
Succeeding in today’s marketing world takes multilayered approaches. For example, if you want to market to company executives, you should consider using LinkedIn. If you’re trying to reach a younger audience, consider Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok. Facebook, with its 2.27 billion users, represents an excellent opportunity to shotgun advertise.
However, the reason you want to consider outsourcing your marketing is that it’s a full-scale investment to stay on top of how quickly it changes. The latest trends take tact and dedication to master. As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you already have enough on your plate.
What Marketing Agencies Do
Marketing agencies make it easier for you to leverage various marketing platforms. Marketing agencies tend to offer multiple services to scale at your disclosure, but the primary services consist of the following platforms.
Google Adwords
Google Adwords is an excellent choice to start capturing the attention of your market. It gets you facetime with your market demographics. You want to progress to attracting organic traffic, and Adwords is an excellent vehicle for doing so.
SEO
Digital marketing is about more than Adwords. Don’t let agencies tell you otherwise. You need to adhere to sound SEO principles. Implementing practical SEO principles helps Google rank your page and direct traffic to your website. It also ensures that your website keeps people on your website.
SEO isn’t only about keywords and page speed. It’s also about design and content relevance. If you accomplish searchers’ tasks, Google will favor your website.
Video Marketing
Creating compelling video content ensures that you reach customers on Youtube, Instagram, and Tik Tok. Video advertising targets a comprehensive demographic set. Video marketing comes more 10-49-year-olds than the top 10 primetime television series.
Content Marketing
Believe it or not, optimized content marketing is responsible for many multi-million dollar businesses. Content marketing is much more than creating a few blogs per week and throwing them up on your website, hoping something sticks.
The best digital marketing agencies understand proper content marketing is about more than that. Content marketing agencies realize that content marketing should include infographics, SEO-rich blog posts, content analysis, and social media promotion.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still the most effective direct marketing tool for digital marketing agencies, even with all social media outlets. It’s simple. When you email someone, it reaches them personally and talks directly to their needs. Any other mediums have an air of separation about them.
Agencies can also utilize list building, segmentation, and autoresponder sequence optimization to improve their email marketing repertoire.
Asking the Right Questions
Choosing the right digital marketing agency comes down to asking the right questions. Asking the following questions will help you determine the best marketing company for you.
What Marketing Channels Does Your Company Need?
The only way to pick the right marketing company is to examine your needs first. Many companies choose a marketing company before understanding which channels to use to reach their customers.
Does your company need a website redesign? A PPC campaign? Social media marketing? What tasks can your team complete in-house? What marketing tasks can you outsource?
How Does the Marketing Agency Run Their Business?
After you decide what’s missing from your marketing campaign, it’s time to look for a company that can fulfill your needs. If companies can generate marketing results for themselves, they are more likely to produce marketing for your business.
If you’re thinking about hiring a content team for blogs, ask yourself how the agency runs its blogs. If you’re looking to use social media agency, look at the agency’s social media outlets.
If the marketing company isn’t using the tactics they preach, chances are, they aren’t the best option for your company.
What Are the Agency’s KPIs?
Most marketing companies are more interested in vanity metrics than numbers that have definite correlations to their performance. You don’t need vanity metrics such as the number of likes you get on Facebook. Those can be deceiving. You need metrics that predict your ROI.
Number of Unique Visitors
The number of unique visitors measures the impression and interactions happening on your website.
Time Spent On-Site
The amount of time your visitors spend interacting with your site is an excellent indicator of your content’s effectiveness. If your content is relevant to your searcher’s task, they will spend more time looking through it because it’s answering their inquiry. This metric reveals how valuable your content is to internet users.
What Results Does the Company Promise?
Marketing has a low barrier to entry, meaning companies will overpromise and underdeliver. One proven way to determine whether the company you’re considering can deliver is by looking at their staff. If they have a full-dedicated team, they likely have the resources to deliver results to your company.
In the worst cases, companies charge monthly subscriptions, touting that results take money when they have no idea whether they can deliver results. Agencies should also not promise immediate results. Companies have different factors that determine each company’s marketing strategy and marketing ROIs. Marketing agencies, then, shouldn’t over or underpromise.
Conclusion- How To Choose a Digital Marketing Agency
Choosing a marketing agency comes down to your business’s specific needs. Do you need someone to perform simple tasks such as PPC ad campaigns, or do you need a full-scale web design? Would your company benefit from a full-fledged marketing campaign, or do you need fractionated tasks?
After you decide your company’s needs, you can vet the prospective companies by gauging how they measure success. You can also vet digital marketing agencies by tracking their marketing campaign success.
