How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency in 2023
The Glorious Company Team
What Is a Digital Marketing Agency
How Do You Choose a Digital Marketing Agency for Your Business?
How Do You Know if a Digital Marketing Agency Brings Value to You?
Price as a Factor for the Project
What Are the Benefits of Choosing an Agency vs an In-house Team?
If you want to increase brand awareness and successfully put your products and services in front of paying customers, you should definitely implement a digital marketing strategy. The reach and impact of marketing your brand on the Internet—with its numerous channels—is simply too effective and affordable to pass up. Chances are you’ll want to hire a digital marketing agency to run your campaigns, especially if you’re new to the game.
Before you go with just any agency, though, beware. Choosing the right digital partner is absolutely crucial to your bottom line. The wrong one can quickly drain your budget and negatively impact your branding. So where does that leave you?
In our in-depth tutorial, learn how to choose a digital marketing agency that will provide expert implementation of your campaigns, whether that’s SEO (search engine optimization), content marketing, email marketing, PPC (pay per click), or anything else.
What Is a Digital Marketing Agency?
A digital marketing agency is a firm that specializes in using the Internet and social media to raise a business’ brand awareness by promoting its products and services with persuasive communication and messaging. An agency puts your brand’s products and services in front of your leads and customers wherever they spend their time online, connecting with them across numerous touchpoints on the web. They meticulously track the results of each campaign, so you can determine if you’re getting good return on investment (ROI) from your efforts.
Digital marketing is big business. Recent data from eMarketer reveals that digital ad spending will reach $626.86 billion in 2023. By 2026, digital ad spending will reach a tremendous $835.82 billion. These numbers represent a rising trend in the popularity of digital marketing, which has been on an upward swing for the last 15 years.
This data indicates that many businesses, including yours, are finding value in online marketing and are willing to spend big bucks to gain its benefits. There are numerous specialties that fall under this modern form of advertising, including:
Content marketing
SEO
Content strategy
Social media marketing
PPC
How Do You Choose a Digital Marketing Agency for Your Business?
Choosing the right digital marketing agency isn’t the easiest task in the world. There are many agencies out there that will tell you they’re the best, which is not always the case. To get the most value in your selection, apply the following criteria in your search for the agency that you’ll work with.
Step 1: Establish Clear-Cut Goals Immediately
First things first: Think about precisely what your needs are in an agency. Ask yourself the following questions, to start:
What are my marketing objectives?
Do I have specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that I want to reach?
What is my budget?
How much do I want the agency to do for me or my team?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a better idea of what agency you’ll want to work with.
For instance, if you said you want more organic traffic coming to your website, you’ll likely want to start a blog and create regular content that will rank for your industry-specific organic keywords. In this case, you may want to look for an agency with SEO and blog-curation experience. If you want more information on blogging for driving traffic and revenue, read our guide on how to start a blog.
On the other hand, if your budget is small—let’s say $1000 per month or so—then perhaps you’ll want to work with a boutique agency instead of a larger firm.
Step 2. Conduct Research to Compare Agencies
When choosing a digital marketing agency, there are several important factors to consider. Assess your business goals and needs. What specific areas of digital marketing do you require assistance with?
A good place to start is Clutch, a marketplace for finding business services. Their list of top digital marketing agencies features almost 80,000.
Look for agencies with relevant industry experience. It's important that they understand your target audience and have knowledge of your niche. Check their client list and references or testimonials to gauge their success rate.
Consider their range of services. Do you need assistance with social media marketing, content creation, SEO, or email marketing? Ensure the agency offers services that align with your goals.
Evaluate the agency's own online presence. Are they active on social networks? Do they have a strong and engaging website? An agency should practice what they preach.
Communication is a must. Ensure that the agency has effective communication tools in place, whether it's regular meetings, phone calls, or reporting systems. Clear communication will allow you to stay updated on the progress of your digital marketing campaigns.
Choosing the right digital marketing agency is crucial for the success of your online marketing efforts. Take the time to research and ask relevant questions. By considering these aspects, you'll be able to find a digital marketing agency that can help you achieve your business goals.
Step 3: View Their Project Portfolio and Results From Previous Clients
Before making a commitment to hiring an agency, it’s vital that you get a sense of what they’ve accomplished. Specifically, you need to have insight into what they achieved for their past clients.
Head on over to the agency’s website to have a look at their portfolio. Some digital marketing agencies put this in a “Works” section on their website, where you ought to be able to see how they performed for past clients.
Another point of interest to check on their website is a client list or some case study testimonials from happy clients. If they don’t display this, ask the agency to share with you some examples of work they’ve done with former or current clients. Any reputable agency will be more than happy to provide this.
Another good place online to determine their trustworthiness and competence is by checking their Google My Business profile for reviews from past clients. If you see an agency with more than one or two negative, one-star reviews, that should be a red flag.
Essentially, you want to filter out as many agencies as possible that don’t have a track record of success, so you can up your chances of getting the best possible digital marketing services.
Step 4: Ensure the Agency Keeps Up to Date With Marketing Knowhow
Does the digital agency you’re considering working with for your marketing goals understand the most modern and current marketing tactics along with using the latest technology to get you results? Ensuring that they keep up with the latest developments in marketing and technology is another way you can screen out questionable agencies.
The reason for this is that online marketing is an ever-changing field. Marketers need to adapt to new strategies and technology that’s always becoming available in the marketplace. A content marketing agency that’s high-quality will stay on the cusp of what’s new, so they can bring the best performance and results to their client in the campaigns they run.
Step 5: Beware of an Agency That Sounds Too Good to Be True
When it comes to choosing a digital marketing agency, it's important to be cautious of those who claim they can do everything. While it may be tempting to go for an agency that promises to cover all aspects of marketing, it can be a risky move for several reasons.
An agency that claims it can do everything often lacks specialization. Effective digital marketing strategies require expertise in different areas such as SEO, social media marketing, content creation, and more. An agency that offers a one-size-fits-all approach may not have the depth of knowledge or experience needed to excel in each area.
A comprehensive marketing strategy requires a team with diverse skill sets. An agency that claims to do it all may not have the necessary specialists on their team or may rely heavily on outsourcing, which can lead to inconsistencies and lower quality work.
Since each business, including yours, is unique and has its own goals and target audience, a cookie-cutter approach won't provide the personalized attention and tailored strategies needed for success. It's important to work with an agency that takes the time to understand your specific needs and can provide customized solutions.
Remember: If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Go with specialized agencies instead of those that claim they can do everything and cast too broad a net.
If you’re searching for an agency, look no farther than us. The Glorious Company is a specialized digital marketing agency that tailors performance-based campaigns to the unique needs of your business and goals. Reach out to us today to tell us how we can help you blow past your marketing goals.
How Do You Know if a Digital Marketing Agency Brings Value to You?
As a business owner, you want to get the most bang for your buck when you hire an agency. It can be hard to determine what your ROI will look like before you start working with an agency. However, there are signs you can look for ahead of time to increase the chances that who you’re working with actually brings you value. Here’s how.
Partner With a Specialized Team
Digital marketing is a highly specialized niche within marketing. In other words, not everyone can do it! One way to tell if the agency can bring you good value is by looking at their team composition. Some agencies have an “About” or “Our Team” page on their websites. Check this out.
Legitimate agencies have skilled and experienced specialists on their teams. Just some of these can include:
SEO specialists
Content writing specialists
Content strategists
Digital ad spend experts
When partnering with different experts in their respective marketing niches, you’ll get better results than working with a generalized agency.
Don't Burn Through Your Company Resources
In today’s economy, being wise with your budget is crucial for your business success. This doesn’t mean that you should have a small or limited budget; it simply means that it again goes back to getting the best value you can.
You likely don’t have the funds to individually hire an SEO specialist, a great content writer, a videographer, and a content strategist. That’ll likely force you to blow through your budget faster than you can handle.
Instead, by choosing a digital marketing agency with these specialists already under one roof, you’ll save money and get great results.
Consistency in Working With You
Another massive benefit of working with an agency is their reliability. You can count on their teams more than you can count on bigger, in-house teams in bigger companies. This means the process stays consistent from start to finish.
Let’s look at an example. With an in-house team, high turnover among staff is common. As a result, in-house marketers stay in their departments for typically just a few years. When they leave due to burnout or in search of other opportunities, everything stops (including marketing campaigns) as their bosses have to look for a replacement. If you’re working with an in-house team, your marketing campaign will be negatively affected.
You don’t have this worry with a digital marketing agency, where folks stay committed to their teams for longer tenures. Therefore, the marketing cadence continues on a monthly basis.
Have a Meeting With the Agency and Ask Its Team Members Questions
You need to get a sense of whom you’re going to be working with. Having a one-on-one meeting with the principals of the agency is recommended. This gives you an opportunity to see how they answer your questions and if they are authentic (or if they seem like they’re not sure of what they’re saying).
Before going into a meeting with the agency’s team members, list down some questions for them and prepare.
Progress Reports
Progress reports are fundamental in online marketing. They help you understand certain milestones and expectations along the way of a campaign. Ask the members of the agency how they plan to show you progress as their content strategy rolls out. Are they going to give you PDF reports or spreadsheets with metrics? Are they going to show you analytics from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or third-party tools like Semrush or Ahrefs?
Be on the lookout for team members who dismiss accountability to you. This is a lack of transparency that could mean that they’re not confident in producing results to show you.
What’s in Your Contract?
Never sign with an agency, electronically or in print, before you have a 100% understanding of what you’re committing yourself to. Always clarify with the agency what you’re getting before you sign any contract. Ask them specifically what services they’re including as part of the package you’re buying from them.
If you’re hiring them for SEO to increase your organic traffic, are they going to include a keyword-gap analysis?
If you’re hiring them for content writing, are they going to offer unlimited review/revision rounds until you’re happy with the product?
If you’re hiring them for case studies, will they also include interviewing people?
Make sure you understand pricing, too. Are they going to bill you hourly, monthly, based on performance, or in one lump sum?
The Marketing Specialists Working on the Project
Familiarize yourself with who’s actually working on your account and campaign at the digital marketing agency you choose. After all, you are working with this team, so it should be a partnership where your opinions and questions are heard, even though they’re the ones spearheading the project.
Having the agency become accountable to you should be your primary goal since you’re footing the bill for this project. To ensure this happens, build relationships with the team members tackling your business’ campaigns. The more you have a frequent relationship of communicating back and forth—with you voicing your opinions and comments and them addressing your feedback—the more the specialists working on your project realize what your goals are and become receptive to them.
The Agency’s Flexibility and Scaling of Your Campaigns
The ability of agencies to turn on a dime is one of the many reasons they’re such an attractive marketing solution. If the performance of their campaigns is going well, you likely will increase your budget and work with them over a longer period of time. Conversely, if things slow down for you, you’ll consider reducing their engagement, even if you still work with them over the months.
This flexibility and potential scaling of your campaigns is a must because it empowers you to adjust your marketing to meet real-time issues and opportunities.
Always first meet with the agency you’re considering to assess all these vital factors.
Price as a Factor for the Project
While price may not be the most important factor, it’s still one that deserves scrutiny. Coming to terms with both the agency’s fees and your budget will help you greatly to fund your campaigns long enough for you to see measurable success.
Your Budget
Figure out your financial constraints and align them with the services you require. A digital marketing agency can offer a wide range of services, from social media marketing to search engine optimization. Each service comes with its own cost.
Determine your business goals and the results you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts. This will help you understand the level of investment required to reach those goals.
Research different digital marketing agencies and compare their pricing structures. Some agencies may offer package deals or customized plans, while others may have separate pricing for each service. Consider the value and ROI you can expect from each agency.
It's also necessary to keep in mind that a higher price tag doesn't always guarantee better results. Look for a firm that offers transparent pricing and a track record of success.
Choosing a digital marketing agency should be a balance between budget and the agency's capabilities. By considering your financial constraints and evaluating the potential ROI, you can find the right agency that fits your budget and helps you achieve your business goals.
Results Timelines and Expectations
Timelines have a bearing on price considerations as well as your impression of the competence of the agency’s team members. As well, different content marketing services come with various timelines that the agency needs to be upfront about from the get-go.
For instance, since SEO is a long game, results to get your webpages ranked for certain organic keywords can take months, along with increased organic traffic, but those gains are usually long-lasting. On the other hand, PPC is quick, so you should see results from increased traffic a short time after you run paid ads. Of course, those results will diminish once you stop funding paid ads.
What Are the Benefits of Choosing an Agency vs an In-house Team?
When it comes to digital marketing, businesses have two options: hiring an agency or relying on an in-house marketing team at a bigger company. Both have their pros and cons, but agencies offer several benefits.
Agencies bring expertise and experience to the table. They stay up to date with the latest digital marketing strategies and trends, ensuring that your business stays ahead of the competition. An agency will have a team of specialists who excel in different aspects of marketing, such as SEO consulting services, social media, content creation, and more.
Agencies provide a fresh perspective. Being an external entity, they can offer an unbiased view of your business and identify areas of improvement. They can also bring in fresh ideas and creative solutions that an in-house team may overlook.
Scalability is another strength of agencies. As your business grows, an agency can easily adapt and expand their services to meet your changing needs. On the other hand, a company would have to build an entire in-house team to match an agency’s talents. This can be time-consuming and expensive, especially since new staff needs to be trained as marketing efforts expand.
Lastly, agencies provide access to a wide range of tools and resources. They have established partnerships with various digital platforms and have the knowledge and experience to utilize these tools effectively, saving you time and money.
While having an in-house team can have its advantages, working with a digital marketing agency offers flexibility, expertise, scalability, and access to resources.
Services You Need to Have When Working With an Agency
Some services are non-negotiable when you choose a digital marketing agency. See that an agency is specialized enough in its expertise to offer you the following.
Market Research
Any skilled agency worth your time and money needs to perform market research. This is essential to crafting a content strategy that understands the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, along with what your target audience’s behaviors and preferences are.
The results of market research—which can be anything from researching online to holding dedicated focus groups—help you communicate with your target audience where they spend their time online, using messaging that resonates with them. Market research also empowers the agency to segment your customers, build buyer personas, and create marketing strategies designed for each of them.
Long-Term Marketing Strategy
A good marketing strategy should include several key aspects.
An agency should walk you through how they design a long-term marketing plan to successfully connect with and persuade your leads and customers. A seasoned agency will spare you lots of hard lessons and failures in experimenting with this on your own.
Content creation is crucial in any marketing strategy. A good agency should be skilled in creating engaging and valuable content that resonates with your ideal customer profile. This includes social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and video marketing. Any comprehensive marketing strategy should provide professional SEO services to improve your website's visibility on search engines. This will drive organic traffic to your site and increase your engagement and conversions.
By choosing the right agency, you can achieve your marketing goals and boost your business's growth.
Performance-Based and Data-Driven Use of Analytics
Running a content marketing campaign without analytics is a pray and spray approach to marketing: You simply create a lot of content or run a lot of ads and hope that it’s all effective. It doesn’t work. You require an agency that drills deep into the data to verify if their approach is working or not.
The agency you pick needs to be committed to analyzing data in Semrush, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics and adjust and optimize campaigns based on this. The biggest benefit of using technology to review data is that it empowers you to improve methods that aren’t working and optimize strategies that are working, but that could be strengthened further. Doing all this will:
Save you money
Increase your revenue
Raise your ROI
High-quality, accurate analytics that your agency relies on is key to successful campaigns. If the agency you’re evaluating has no use for measuring performance based on data, pick someone else.
Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns
When choosing a digital marketing agency, it is crucial to find one that understands the power of an omnichannel marketing strategy. An omnichannel approach involves creating a seamless and consistent experience for your ideal customer profile across multiple channels.
To effectively execute an omnichannel marketing strategy, use various channels like:
Social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook)
Email marketing
Content creation (Blog posts, case studies, articles, lists, guides, ebooks, white papers)
SEO
Video marketing (Explainer videos, short videos)
Each channel plays a unique role in reaching and engaging with your customers.
Social media platforms offer a way to interact and build relationships with your audience, while email marketing allows personalized communication. Content creation and search engine optimization are essential for improving your online brand awareness. Video marketing helps capture attention and powerfully convey your messages.
By utilizing these channels, a digital marketing agency can create a comprehensive and integrated approach to marketing.
Selecting the Right Agency Is a Skill
The evaluation process for choosing a digital marketing agency takes time and patience because much is at stake here. If you choose a competent one, your brand awareness will skyrocket, along with your revenue, over time. If you make a bad pick, your business won’t gain traction online and may even suffer brand damage.
When choosing an agency, look for one with industry experience, a strong client list, and positive client testimonials. A reputable agency will have a team that understands the latest digital marketing trends and can leverage the right channels to drive your business forward.
Work with the online marketing specialists at The Glorious Company Contact to increase your organic traffic, get more leads, and generate more revenue. Contact us today to set up a short discovery meeting!
Have any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below!
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