A Digital Marketing Agency can handle all of your digital marketing campaign needs from inbound marketing (such as Web Design, SMMA, Search Engine Marketing, Website Optimization, Hyperlocal Marketing and SEO) to outbound marketing (such as Old Marketing, Email marketing and Search).
To help you get the best digital marketing agency, you need to understand the 12 keys steps to make sure you get the right fit.
First, let’s talk about why you should be marketing online. There are 4 key reasons that make digital marketing a must in today’s world:
Nearly everybody is online.
You can reach your target client.
You can adapt and change quickly.
You can create communities using SMMA.
You can track the ROI.
Nearly everybody is online.
Nearly 1/2 of those are online several times throughout the day and a 1/4 report being online almost constantly.
People spend more time online than with any other medium except for television.
Reach Your Target Customer.
While traditional media can reach mass audiences, digital marketing allows you to practice hyperlocal marketing by micro-targeting the exact customer profile for your product or service. While reaching fewer people than mass media, it targets the right customers which can mean a smaller overall expense and less waste in your viral marketing.
Adapt and Change Quickly.
Once you create a marketing brochure, or print piece, making changes will take time and add to your expenses. Online, you can change pay-per-click advertising or offers almost immediately. Marketing can happen almost instantly and evolve as needed.
Track The ROI.
Unlike other media, you can draw a direct line from what people did online and measure conversions. You can enhance your ROI by using data to optimize your efforts. Machine learning can automate the process of testing to determine which approaches consistently yield the best results.
Why You Need A Digital Marketing Agency.
Your nephew may be a whiz at Facebook or know how to build a website, but managing the complexities of digital marketing is not for amateurs. It’s your business and you can’t afford to make mistakes.
Just consider these four statistics:
61% of all web traffic starts from a SEO,
90% of all internet searches take place on Google.
Google’s algorithm takes more than 200 ranking factors into consideration for each search to serve the best results.
Now, ask yourself this Do you really think your relative knows how to best craft content to maximize your return across 200 ranking factors and through 600 algorithm changes? Doing SEM (SEO Marketing) through Search Engine Optimization correctly is critical to winning at search.
That’s just one small example of why you need expert digital marketers who are at the top and immersed in the best digital marketing practices daily.
Choosing A Digital Marketing Agency That Fits You.
Before you start talking with agencies about a digital marketing strategy for your business, there are things you should do first.
Step 1 : Know Your Expenses.
Developing your marketing budget needs to take into account 3 things :
What you can afford to spend, what kind of ROI is acceptable, and what goals you are trying to achieve. It starts with examining your overall budget and deciding how much you want to spend…
Step 2 : Define Your Dreams.
Are you looking for online sales, offline sales, clicks to your website or landing page, increased brand awareness, or something else? Not only do you need to identify the end goal, you need to think about the Key Performance Indicators that will be used to judge success. The clearer your goals are, the better an agency can deliver specific solutions.
Step 3 : Think About How You Want To Do It.
Do you want to hand off the efforts to a third-party and have them handle everything, so you can focus on your core business? Do you want a digital marketing firm to be an extension of your marketing team? How much time can your team afford to spend working with a digital marketing agency? Do you prefer to work with a big agency that can provide a broad range of services or a niche agency that specializes in a specific type of marketing with deep understanding?
There are professional and cons for each approach. Ultimately, it’s about how you want to manage the project.
Step 4: Check their online presence
Now that you have completed the first 3 steps, it’s time to start looking at specific digital Advertising agencies. You can get a feel for how an agency thinks from looking at their online presence and marketing materials. If there are bad designs on their own materials, you might rightly question how they will treat your project. You can also get a sense of what they value by what they feature.
Step 5: Assess Company Culture.
It is important to look at a company’s culture and approach. You want to work with a team that will invest the time to truly understand your project. Too many agencies will pull a generic marketing strategy off the shelf and apply it to multiple businesses. Every business situation is different and deserves a unique solution.
Step 6: Ask Who Will Work On Your Project.
Often the people doing the pitch for your business will not be the people doing the work. You want to ask who will actually be working on your project and what experience they have. In big agencies, your work may be handed down to less experienced or begginers team members.
Step 7: Check Their Credentials.
Before you hire an agency, you check references. Do the same with any digital marketing company you interview. Ask to look at case studies and get referrals to current and past costumers. Then, follow up with their costumers to see if they deliver what they told you they did. If they exaggerate their results, they might be over promising what they can do for you.
If they list current or past costumers on their website, it’s a good idea to pick a couple at random and call to gauge their experience.
If you are looking for a specific type of digital marketing campaign, examine their work in that area. For example, if you want someone to manage your SM accounts, take a look at what gets posted on their client’s social pages – and not just what the agency wants you to see.
Step 8: Understand The Process.
No two agencies will work quite the same way, but the process they use will have some similarities. You want to make sure you familiar with the way they work with clients and the process they go through to deliver results. Look for an agency that follows a process similar to this:
Discover: Research and understand products, services, and Unique Selling Proposition.
Deepen: Understand the business core and immerse themselves in your brand.
Define: Develop unique strategies to deliver on KPI’s.
Deliver: Launch, track, and manage projects to meet goals.
Detect: Test, adjust, and optimize work to maximize impact and ROI.
Step 9: Gauge The Agency Passion.
You want people working on your marketing team that love what they do and will take it personally. The combination of professionalism, experience, and passion can create an amazing work.
Step 10: Demand Transparency In Everything.
When it comes to pricing, digital marketing can vary significantly depending on the products and services used and how they are deployed. You want transparency in everything you do. You need a clear explanation of what you are getting, the deliverables the agency will provide, and what you will pay for each thing.
If the agency uses third party businesses to deliver some products, ask them to explain their pricing models. For example, if the agency has to buy keywords for Pay Per Click on a search engine, or display ad networks, ask them to detail what management fees they charge over and above the actual purchase.
