How to Choose The Best Digital Marketing Agency for Your Business
How to Choose The Best Digital Marketing Agency for Your Business
When done right, Internet marketing can take you one step closer to your marketing goals and eventually help you leverage your business.
With social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat, companies can market their products and services to their target audiences easier than ever before. But it is not as easy as it seems.
Marketers come up with new marketing strategies every day, making it challenging for entrepreneurs to keep up with the latest trends and the best ways to market themselves on different social platforms on the Internet.
Due to the rapid changes of Internet and technology, it is not easy to become a savvy digital marketer overnight. Even Internet marketing experts have to adapt to ongoing changes and continue improving their marketing skills from time to time.
If you are not an online advertising expert, we highly encourage you to hire a digital marketing agency to help you with your marketing needs. You might think that you can do it yourself and polish up your online marketing skills along the way, but it may take years of practice -- and the learning process never ends.
We’re not saying that you shouldn’t give it a try. Learning new skills is wonderful and you should be proud of yourself for wanting to learn more about digital marketing. But don’t you think you have other things to worry about, too?
Instead of spending a lot of time on something you are not familiar with, why not focus on other areas of your business and do whatever you do best and leave the rest to the experts?
Even if you already have an in-house digital marketing expert, do you think your staff could do everything for you? When it comes to digital marketing, the stress can get overwhelming as the workload increases. Also, if you are thinking of hiring another marketer to do the job, the hiring and training process is going to eat up a lot of your time and slow you down. So why not just get an agency of online marketing experts to help you out instead?
Before deciding on which digital marketing agencies you should hire, first you need to have an at least basic understanding on how they operate and ultimately, what they do in order to help you scale your business, and how their strategies are going to be benefiting to you in the long run.
In this article, we will be discussing about digital marketing agencies and how to hire the right one for your business.
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Understanding Digital Marketing Agency Business Model
Marketing agencies have a laborious business model. They increase head counts and marketing specialists in order to meet their clients’ demands. When you have a new marketing client, that also means you have an increasing workload and management activity.
So what can digital marketing agencies do for your business?
Marketing agencies exist so they can help businesses like yours gain more sales by simply leveraging various marketing strategies to attract your target customers. They can provide you with services like Google AdWords, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Facebook Ads, video advertising, mobile advertising and more.
Exploring Different Digital Marketing Services
There are various kinds of services that digital marketing agencies offer. Most customers would choose Facebook Ads and Google AdWords to promote their products and promotions.
When they need to improve their visibility on search engines, they opt for SEO. If they have a cool video to share, they use video advertising to gain views, likes and shares. And if they want to encourage app installs, they use mobile advertising to do the job.
All these marketing tactics are highly effective when used for the right industry and campaign type. A digital marketing agency will be able to advise you on that.
Now let’s explore these digital marketing strategies together.
Google AdWords
This method is used to capture Google users who are seeking for solutions to their problems. When they search for the solutions to their problems using keywords related to your business, your ads will pop up to them. When that happens, all you have to do is wait for them to click on your ads.
SEO
Having good ranking on Google is important to help you spread brand awareness and gain more page views. When your page ranks high, you will be able to connect with potential clients who may need you to provide solutions to their problems.
Facebook Ads
Facebook is still going strong regardless of what some people say about it and how it is no longer relevant today. The key to success when using Facebook Ads is targeting the right audience. You can target people by gender, income, location, interests, education level and so on. Still think that Facebook Ads is dated?
Video Advertising
Whether you are targeting young or old people, videos are an excellent medium for delivering your advertising message across. YouTube is an amazing place to show your video ads. Imagine all the people who will watch your content. You can target them by demographic, location, interests and more.
Mobile Marketing
If you have an app to promote, this is an excellent strategy for you. Digital marketing agencies use mobile YouTube ads, in-app ads and campaigns to help you gain mobile app installs. In case you didn’t know, more than 50% of mobile searches turn into conversions.
Email Marketing
Who says email marketing is dead? Many businesses are still running successful digital marketing campaigns using email marketing. Any marketer in the world would give you a special discount just to have your email! That proves how relevant email marketing still is today. This marketing strategy involves list building, newsletters, segmentation, limited-time only discounts and more.
Content Marketing
If you do not know the power of content marketing, you might take article writing, copywriting or blogging for granted. The truth is content marketing has been proven to be responsible for the success of many multi-million dollar businesses. Indeed, content is king. Content marketing includes services like blogging, SEO writing, infographic creation and social media management.
Hiring the Right Digital Marketing Agency
There’s a lot happening when you’re running an ecommerce business. In the end, your main goal is to get customers flooding into your website and grab your offers.
But before that can happen you have to make sure that your website is appealing and easy to use, and you are using the right strategies to get your customers hooked to you and have them motivated to get others to do the same. You need to collect all the data you get and use it with other digital marketing strategies.
There is a lot to do, so you will want to get help from agencies that specialise in digital marketing. Of course, you will need to ask yourself and your potential agencies a few questions before you can pick the right candidate to team up with you.
When evaluating a digital marketing agency, ask them this:
How many staff will be working on my marketing campaign -- such as Facebook Ads, Google Adwords or SEO?
By simply asking questions you will be able to get an idea on how they run their agency.
Ask yourself:
Is the agency delivering customised or productised service?
Bear in mind that online marketing campaigns such as Facebook Ads, Adwords and SEO are very customised marketing services. Marketing agencies typically charge high rates for such services as there will be a lot of customised work to be done. Furthermore, services like these are more complex than other marketing strategies, hence their slightly more expensive prices.
However, rates will be cheaper if the digital service is being productised as client will get a complete marketing system that is being put in place based on what works well for the particular industry. The services will be cheaper and more effective, which has been proven in a case study.
Figure out what you need for your ad campaign. What is it that you need -- web design, email marketing or SEO, or all of the three?
If you already have a staff doing digital marketing for you in the office, ask yourself which areas can the digital marketing agency assist you. You have to discuss about this beforehand so that you can have the agency help you with the tasks that your in-house team is not able to handle.
Specialists or Generalists?
It is extremely important that you know well enough with whom you are going to work. Is the agency a team of well-rounded digital marketing specialists focusing on all areas or a digital marketing agency that merely focuses on Facebook Ads or Adwords?
This is something crucial for you to know because there are lot of digital marketing agencies out there that are focusing their work on a wide range of industries rather than focusing on just one specialised area.
These experts may be able to get you decent results, but to help scale your business and take it to the next level is rather vague. You need a marketing agency that focuses and specialises in your business industry.
Ask the agency what exactly do they focus on.
If you’re looking for a digital agency to help you with blog management, ask them how they’re managing theirs. If you’re looking to get help with social media promotion, ask the agency how they’re handling their social media accounts. Or if you’re seeking for help with SEO, ask them to show you how they’re ranking for terms in their industry. Sounds fair?
If they do not practise what they preach, then you should move on to the next agency that might just practise what they preach instead.
What are Retainer Fees? How Do They scale?
Do you get charged with retainer fees? If yes, what else is provided within the fees? Some digital agencies have much higher retainer fees than others, but this usually occurs when they offer extra marketing services that they specialise in.
Stay away from digital marketing agencies with much more lower retainer fees and with a promise that they will be able to do everything. From a business point of view, that is a red flag.
Usually, you can judge an agency based on the prices they offer. If their prices are really cheap, it’s likely that they are not going to deliver the results you’re looking for. Logically speaking, if an agency offers prices that are too low, then the amount of efforts they put into your campaign is going to be minimal. It’s very likely that they’re not going the extra mile for your business because there’s not much there is for them to profit from, anyway.
What Are Their KPIs?
At the end of the day, you want new customers and more sales. An excellent digital marketing agency will not only bring in more engagements and post likes for you, but also more sales. What is the point of having a lot of likes on every of your posts if in the end the number of sales remain stagnant?
Vanity metrics numbers are what most businesses track although the numbers do not actually have genuine correlation to generating revenue. For example, post or page “likes” are a vanity metric because they do not always equate to sales.
You don’t want to hire an agency that only bring in likes and shares, but not sales. Ask them if they’re going to provide you with important metrics in digital marketing such as:
Number of unique visitors -- A boost in traffic usually leads to conversions.
Time spent on site -- How much time a user spends on your site is correlated to how relevant your content is to the user.
Traffic source numbers -- The sources where your customers found you.
Hiring the right agency takes time, but once you have found the right one, all that effort will be worth it. Looking for an Adwords agency, eCommerce Agency or Shopify developer? Check out our offers today to find the right services for you.