Selecting a Digital Marketing Agency: What to Look For
If you’ve decided that your company could benefit from the advice and expertise of a professional digital marketing firm, what do you do first?
It can save you a lot of time and effort to think about your goals and to ask yourself “What are the near- and long-term results I want to achieve?
That seems very basic (and it is), so let’s drill down.
What are your goals? Every journey starts with a destination in mind. And proceeds with a good map to point the way toward that destination.
As a company leader, you probably have in mind some general goals: increase sales, reduce expenses, achieve efficiency, boost productivity.
But jotting down some specific goals or metrics will help you focus on which outside agency can best achieve them. Maybe you want your website to be redesigned to present an updated, more modern look for your company. Maybe your website is fine, but you want to generate more visits from customers. Maybe you want a better user experience. Maybe you want to produce better content marketing or run a pay-per-click or paid advertising campaign.
These are all things that digital marketing agencies do, but some do some of these things better than others. By outlining your corporate goals, you can begin to concentrate on finding the best specialist for your particular needs.
What is your budget? Again, this seems to be self-evident, but it will be beneficial and efficient if you can produce a reasonable budget figure for your digital marketing program. Not even the best digital marketing agency can achieve good results if it doesn’t have the resources it requires. Budgets are always subject to negotiation and adjustment, but any kind of effective marketing requires adequate resources.How to determine what is the proper budget? It should be a combination of your own experience in the past, the recommendations of the agency and perhaps a survey of other companies’ experiences.
What do you need? Each company requires different aspects of a complete digital marketing campaign. Some need it all, others just need to focus on individual aspects.
Web Design vs User Experience. Some agencies specialize in artistic, modern, responsive web design. Others focus on user experience (UX) design, striving to create functional, user-centered designs, backed by user research, heatmap data and even Artificial Intelligence. Decide which is more important to your company, and make a selection accordingly.
In or Out. Some agencies offer internal tech teams that can construct complex websites or apps, maintain them and track the metrics in their results. Other agencies rely on outside technology or apps, modifying or customizing those technologies to work for your company and goals. Both ways can be effective, while the custom-designed sites vs. the off-the-shelf approach can be more expensive.
SEO. This aspect of your digital marketing campaign is very important. Your website must contain high quality content that matches the intent of your customers and people searching your site. Your content must have both a keyword strategy and an “intent” strategy, which means your agency must understand your company, its customers and its intent.
Content marketing. Your content should ideally generate leads and is usually connected to email marketing. If this is important to your company, you should choose a digital agency with the experience in this area.
PPC and Paid Advertising. To be successful in this segment, a company’s agency must have the expertise to align ad copy, creative and landing page messaging and layout, with a value proposition to tie it together. And there is a technician expertise required to run and optimize the ad campaigns.
Those are just a few of the elements to think about when considering hiring a digital marketing agency. Fuel Media is a full-service digital agency with experience and expertise in all of these areas. We pride ourselves on understanding each client’s goals and developing a workable, affordable and effective marketing program to meet those goals.
If we can answer any of your questions about digital marketing, please feel free to contact us.
