As a marketing representative for any business, the task of choosing the proper digital marketing agency to help your brand can be a seemingly daunting task. Hiring an agency is a hefty chunk of change to be spent and the beginning of what is likely to be a long-term partnership between your business and an outside organization. You will certainly want to carefully analyze your options when it comes to choosing the right digital agency with which to form a working relationship. Be sure to consider the necessary factors when comparing agencies in order to determine which is the right fit to get the task at hand completed and completed well.
Survey the agency’s website and overall online presence.
Does the agency market itself well? If it is unable to market itself well as a business others should hire, it probably will not be able to help improve the marketing efforts of your business as its client. Check out whether the agency’s website is informative and designed well, and if it includes calls to action and its areas of expertise. See whether it utilizes social media channels to engage the community and if anyone is talking about it online. The best agencies will use their online presences to display their brand identity and to interact with others on the web. Plus, if they are able to do that well, they will be able to better help you as a client to do that, too.
Get references and read client reviews/testimonials.
Review actual real-life results. Do not simply settle for hearing a representative of the agency say how great a job they did revamping the digital media of a client. See what they did and how it really helped that client and its brand. Does the agency make its work samples and results achieved for clients readily available for prospective clients to see? It should! The agency should be proud of the work it has done if it has done good work. Also, is the agency realistic in what they say they can accomplish for its clients? Know that an agency promising to put you at the top of all search engine results pages in a month probably is not being completely honest. It is one thing for an agency to promise to boost the SEO for your business, but big, sweeping promises are another.
Utilize the Better Business Bureau as a resource in determining whether an agency is credible and produces quality work as well. It can be a helpful tool in verifying that an agency is legitimate in what it does and has been ethical and hardworking with the clients it has had.
Check out options for plan customization.
You do not want to hire an agency to work with your business that only offers pre-set plans. There is no one-size-fits-all plan to help each and every business in its digital marketing efforts, and any solid digital marketing agency will know this to be true. Make sure any agency your business hires offers customized plans tailored to perfectly suit the needs of your business.
Look for creativity and experience .
Your business definitely wants any agency it hires to be creative in how it develops content and designs digital media. The marketing put forth by your business should help it attract attention and stand out from its competitors. However, more than just creativity, a digital marketing agency should have experience relevant to what your business needs from it. Does the agency have experience with your niche of the market? Does it specialize in the task you most need it to do for your agency, be it developing content for social media, or building up SEO or CRO? Look at what the agency has done and its particular style to ensure it has the creativity you want it to have, but also to know its level of experience.
Learn how interactions with the agency throughout your relationship would happen.
Know how the relationship between your business and an agency would go in terms of how the agency would communicate with you and how any timelines would unfold. Ask if your business would be assigned a designated account manager to be the liaison between it and the agency. You will not want to deal with the hassle of speaking with a different person from the agency every time, or worse, a call center. Also, see how your business would receive updates along the way from the agency and how often. Will the agency provide you weekly updates of how they are progressing with its work for your business? Will it provide you with monthly reports of how what it is publishing for your business is performing online?
Think about whether the people from an agency are people with whom you can withstand a long-term relationship. Not only should an agency be a service provider to your business, but it should also be a lasting helper with the shared goal of digitally marketing your business well.
Weigh the cost of the agency’s services with the value they will add to the marketing of your business.
Of course your business has a budget and wants to avoid handing over an exorbitant amount of money to a marketing agency each month. When it comes to marketing your business though, you need the job to be done well and for that job to be done well, it is not going to come cheap. You do not necessarily need to choose the most expensive agency of the options you have, but you should probably immediately disregard the cheapest on your list. A low price is commonly associated with low quality.
Remember that the reason your business is looking to hire a digital marketing agency in the first place is to have it add value to your marketing and as a result, to the business overall. Try to find that sweet spot where you are paying what you can afford while also getting the most in return from the agency’s work.
Choosing the just-right digital marketing agency to work with your business can be tricky with all the choices that are out there. You must put in the time and research to learn more about your options and be able to choose the perfect fit for you. Look for experience and creativity, how the agency presents itself, and its past achievements to know which could best improve the marketing of your business and be a partner that has the best interest of your business in mind.
