Looking to hire a digital marketing agency to help you grow your business? Trying to find the best agency for your business can be difficult because of the sheer number of choices you have available to you. It’s also difficult to distinguish one agency from another as many of them make similar promises and claims. The reality is that you need to spend a good amount of time on research before you make a commitment to work with an agency. Here are some of the things you will need to do to find the right agency for your business.
1. Look for an Agency that Meets Your Needs
It’s always good to have an idea where you want to go with your business. Do you plan on growing through SEO? Are you looking for help with your social media marketing? Once you figure out what you want help with, it’ll make it easy to boil down the prospective agencies you should be working with. A company that’s looking to drive business through paid search advertising and SEO will benefit more from hiring a SEO focused agency than a company that focuses on social media and email marketing.
2. Ensure that the Agency Provides Full Transparency
It’s important that the agency you plan on working with will provide full transparency. That means they can give you a complete presentation of their plan and how they’re going to execute it. The agency should also deliver analytics data and campaign metrics to you on a regular basis to give you an idea of what’s working and what’s not. And if your campaign is focused on paid advertising, make sure you get a break down of how your budget was spent.
3. Conduct a Background Check
Most agencies will have a list of satisfied clients that they’ve worked with on their website. You want to make sure these are real testimonials and projects. Start by checking to see if the testimonials have pictures and references to real companies. Then ask the digital marketing agency if they can give you a list of clients that you can contact for additional reference. If you are provided a list, try to get an idea of the kind of experience and results clients have gotten from working with the agency.
4. Look for an Agency that Can Take Care of All Your Needs
Some companies will need help with more than just their digital marketing. For example, you may need an agency that can manage your web content, configure web hosting for new websites, help with technical tasks like installing new scripts to your web hosting server, and even manage a freelancing team for you. So if you need help with other projects and tasks that are involved with your online presence, try to work with a full service agency. It will make it easier than working with multiple freelancers and service providers.
5. See If the Agency Has Industry Experience
An agency not having much experience in your industry doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll do a bad job. However, it is definitely advantageous to work with an agency that already has knowledge about and experience with your industry. The reason why is because they’ll already know what works with your target audience, how to use the available marketing channels to reach this audience, what kind of competition you’ll be up against, and how to best utilize your budget. All this industry experience will translate to efficient marketing plans, more effective campaigns, and less of your budget wasted.
6. Make Sure the Agency Will Work with Your Team
If you already have an inhouse team, you want to make sure the agency is willing to work and coordinate with your them. At the end of the day, your inhouse team understands your business and goals better than anyone else. They can help steer the agency in the right direction, give the agency a better understand of what your challenges are, and align the goals of both groups. Working with an agency that only relies on a few meetings can result in campaigns going in the wrong direction, your company values being ignored, and the wrong goals being met.
7. Go with an Agency that Can Meet Your Needs on a Budget
It’s always important to set a specific budget when shopping for agencies. Many agencies will try to get you upgrade to the more expensive plan on the premise that it will return a higher ROI. What you want to do is stick to a reasonable budget and see if the agency can meet your needs on that budget. You can always upgrade to the more expensive plan after you’ve worked with the agency for a couple of months and confirmed that the agency actually delivers on their promises.
These seven points will help you increase the chance of finding the best agency for your business. There’s no denying that this is a lengthy process that can take several weeks. However, it will be well worth the time and effort. There are many businesses that waste thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars working with agencies that don’t do enough to get them to where they want to be.