To get the most out of online advertising, businesses turn to digital marketing agencies for their expertise. However, choosing the best-fit digital marketing agency for your business requires some effort, but it’s no rocket science.
A digital marketing agency can handle all of your digital marketing needs from Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Website Optimization, Hyperlocal Marketing, SEO, PPC to Creative design, Website and Mobile App Development.
While Agencies can help you achieve all these and many more, the onus is in finding the best fit Agency for your business.
There are thousands of digital marketing agencies out there, so how do you decide which one is perfect for your business?
To help you find the best digital marketing agency, you want to follow the 12 key steps we will unveil in this article.
We’ll discuss:
Why you should embrace Digital Marketing
Why you need a Digital Marketing Agency.
Choosing a Best Fit Digital Marketing Agency for your business
How to get maximum ROI from an Agency
Hiring a Digital Marketing agency is an investment, and like any significant investment, you need to make the right choices to earn the right returns.
It starts with doing your due diligence, and that is exactly what you are doing by reading this post. Choosing the wrong agency can have grave consequences not just on your finances but on your business outlook.
One wrong communication could change your marketing objective from sales to reputation repair, which is why you can’t afford to make a mistake.
Why You Should Embrace Digital Marketing
Before we help you get the best-fit digital marketing agency for your business, let’s first understand why you should actually embrace digital marketing.
There are a plethora of reasons why your business should embrace Digital marketing, but the five below are tangible enough to make a strong case:
More than half of the world population is online
You can target your ideal customer.
You can adapt and make changes quickly.
You can create or leverage communities using social media.
You can track and measure the ROI of your online marketing.
More than half of the world population is online
According to Statista, as of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide – 59.5 percent of the global population. Of this total, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices.
Between cell phones, tablets, laptops, and other smart devices, the amount of time people spend online continues to grow.
Nearly half of those are online several times throughout the day and a quarter report being online almost constantly.
Of all the marketing channels out there, people spend more time online than with any other medium except for television.
You can target your ideal customer.
With traditional media like TV, radio and billboards, you can reach mass audiences but you cannot really decide who is watching the TV or passing by the billboard. Digital marketing on the other hand, allows you to reach only people you have selected in your targeting.
With Digital marketing, you can practice hyperlocal marketing by micro-targeting the exact customer profile for your product or service.
Although you may be reaching fewer people than mass media, it targets the right customers which can mean a smaller overall expense and less waste in your marketing budget.
Adapt and make changes quickly.
Let’s look at marketing traditionally. Once you publish an ad on TV, create a marketing brochure, put up a billboard on that busy fancy road, or send out marketing flyers, making changes will take time and add to your expenses.
Reverse is the case in the online space, you can change your campaign message or modify your offers almost immediately.
With digital marketing, you can publish a campaign at the shortest time possible and evolve as needed.
You can create or leverage communities using social media.
There are lots of communities online that you can leverage on to promote your business. Some communities are highly niched which makes it ideal for your product.
You can build your own community off these digital platforms like social media. Building a community online helps you to aggregate people who have similar interests and build a loyal community of people who will serve as your brand evangelists.
You can provide support for your products or services or use the platform to build thought leadership in your industry which will in turn translate into more business for you directly or indirectly.
You can track and measure the ROI of your online marketing.
Another major reason why you should embrace digital marketing is the transparency and measurability.
While you cannot count how many eyeballs actually saw your billboard, you can see how many people watched your video for more than 3 seconds online.
Unlike traditional 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.
Digital marketing is all about reaching the right people on the right platform, in the best way. Lets take for example;
If you want to reach business executives, then you might want to get seen on LinkedIn.
If your audience are millennials, then Snapchat and Instagram are the places to be.
And with Facebook’s 2.27 billion monthly active users who are spending an average of 41 minutes each day on the site, virtually every business can see ROI through Facebook ads.
When you eventually decide on the platform of choice, there are a plethora of media types and copy strategies that work in these different channels, and they keep changing.
Because there are new marketing tactics popping up every day, it can be tough for busy entrepreneurs to stay on top of the latest trends.
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.
Consider these additional four statistics:
61% of all web traffic starts from a search engine.
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.
Google has changed its algorithms some 600 times.
Do you really have the skill and time craft content to maximize your return across 200 ranking factors and through 600 algorithm changes?
Doing SEM and SEO correctly are critical to winning at search and online marketing.
These are just a fraction of reasons why you need a digital marketing agency whose team are at the top of their game and immersed in the best digital marketing practices every day
Choosing the best-fit Digital Marketing Agency for your business in 12 steps
We know you are all fired up by the digital buzz and you can’t wait to ship off your marketing needs to an agency and expect results in a couple of days.
Nothing tangible is that simple, and hiring a digital marketing agency that will be entrusted with your business growth shouldn’t be taken that lightly too.
Before you roll out your cheque and sign them on, do these 12 things in order to ensure that the agency is best fit for you.
Define your goal
You shouldn’t engage agency when you do not have a goal in mind. What do you want to achieve with online marketing? What role will the agency play in realizing that goal? Do you want more traffic to your website? Do you want more awareness of your brand or product? Or are you interested in Leads? Whatever the goal is, you need to have it properly identified and documented before you approach an agency.
Not only do you need to identify these goals, you also need to set KPIs to track performance. Without specific KPIs, you would never know whether the Agency’s efforts paid off. The clearer your goals are, the better an agency can deliver specific solutions.
Know your Budget
The next step is to set a budget for the marketing activities. You want to keep three things in mind when developing the marketing budget: What you can afford to spend based on your business standpoint, what kind of ROI is acceptable, and what goals you are trying to achieve based on step one. It starts with examining your overall budget and deciding what you are comfortable spending. Keep an open mind at this stage, however.
You may not have a firm grasp on what things cost, so you need to look at it more from the angle of the ROI you are expecting rather website than the amount you will be spending.
Consider Your Work Structure
Are you comfortable handing over everything to the digital marketing agency while you focus on the core of your business or would you like to manage the agency on a shared responsibility basis? How much time can you and your team afford to spend with the agency?
Do you prefer to work with a large agency that can provide a broad range of services or a niche agency that specializes in a specific type of marketing with deep expertise?
There are pros and cons for each approach. Ultimately, it’s about how you want to manage the relationship.
Assess Their 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 mission. Too many companies will pull a generic marketing strategy off the shelf and apply it to multiple businesses. This is another area that stands EEZA Digital out in rendering marketing services to businesses all over the world. Every business situation is unique and deserves a unique solution.
How Does The Agency Run Their Own Business?
If an agency can generate marketing results for themselves, that’s a good sign they’ll be able to help you do the same.
So if you’re thinking about hiring an agency for blog management, how do they run their own blog? If you’re thinking about hiring them for social media promotion, how do they handle their own social media accounts? If you want to hire them for SEO, how do they rank in search for terms in their industry?
Get To Know Who Will Work On Your Account.
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 account and what experience they have.
You don’t want to hire an agency that puts shiny pitch makers forward but have inexperienced people for execution. During your meetings, ask for who will actually be working on your accounts, know their experience level and some personal successes they have recorded.
How Do They Measure Success?
Most businesses track vanity metric – numbers that might seem like they matter but have no real correlation to generating revenue for the business. For example, the number of “likes†you get on a post can be considered a vanity metric because it doesn’t always translate directly to sales.
The last thing you want is for an agency to charge you premium rates every month and only deliver more likes on your posts, but no boost in sales. How will they measure your success? Are they picking the metrics that actually show ROI?
Check Their Portfolio
Just like you’d check references before you hire an employee, do the same with any digital marketing agency you interview. Ask to look at case studies and get referrals to current and past clients. Then, follow up with their clients 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 clients 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 particular type of digital marketing strategy, examine their work in that area. For example, if you want someone to manage your social media, take a look at what gets posted on their client’s social pages – and not just what the agency wants to show you.
Know Their 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 understand 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 USP’s (Unique Selling Proposition).
Deepen: Understand the business core and immerse themselves in your brand.
Define: Develop specific 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.
What Are Their Fees?
Yes, you have a budget in mind from step one, but remember to keep in mind that you should look at the budget in terms of the ROI you will get rather than how much you will spend.
Don’t fall for digital marketing agencies whose selling point is low fees, it’s a sign for you to run. You can easily filter out low-quality agencies through price. Many businesses want to save money, so price is usually the first thing they ask about. However, if you find an agency that charges low prices, then chances are they deliver low-quality results, too.
Think about it from their perspective: if an agency prices itself too low, then they make lower margins on their services. Because of that, they’re less likely to go the extra mile for your business because there’s not much incentive. Agencies that charge higher prices tend to treat their clients with more generosity because they can afford to do so. Don’t cut corners when finding the right agency for the job.
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Demand Transparency.
When it comes to pricing and delivering KPIs, digital marketing can vary significantly depending on the products and services used and how they are deployed.
Demand transparency in everything. You need a clear explanation of what you are getting, the deliverables the agency will provide, and what you will pay for each item.
If the agency uses third-party companies to deliver some products, ask them to explain their pricing models. For example, if the agency has to buy keywords for PPC (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 buy.
Also, ask them if you will be given access to the backend where you see the budget utilization and actually campaign metrics from the dashboard.
Although you might eventually not have the time to go into these dashboards yourself, an agency that would withhold the right to that information from you is definitely not telling you the whole truth, they are not transparent.
Establish Reporting And Communication.
Make sure you and the agency are in agreement about communication in online marketing.
You will want to discuss who will be the point(s) of contact, how often you will see reports or have reviews, and at what point you will be able to assess effectiveness.
Many client-agency relationships from boutique digital marketing agencies have gone awry because of different expectations from one of the parties.
Bottom line:
Finding a digital marketing agency that will serve as a perfect extension of your marketing team is not a walk in the park. With so many agencies springing up daily, it is hard to filter out the real ones from the ones who have neither the expertise nor intention to deliver any tangible result for your business.
However, by following the 12 steps we have discussed above, you will find that it is an interesting and a revealing process.
There are a few things to think about when deciding which type of marketer to hire in order to grow your business.
First you have to define what specifically your marketing requirements are. Are you looking for SEO? SEM? Facebook ad traffic? Conversion rate optimization? This is the first step in figuring out the right option for you.
If you need help narrowing down on what aspect of digital marketing you can focus on right now, we can work with you to discover where you are currently as well as where you need to be, then create a custom strategy that will implement the relevant digital marketing techniques.