There are bountiful benefits to hiring a digital marketing agency. When business is static, if you’re just starting out, if your internal marketing team have become complacent; a creative digital agency is just the ticket to shaking things up and inspiring new sales and enquiries. It isn’t quite like sending your child off to some faraway boarding school, but outsourcing your digital marketing can feel, initially, like you are giving away control of something you have plugged a lot of time, money, and love into. That’s why when you’re looking to hire a digital marketing agency it is essential that you find the right fit by asking the right questions. In this week’s blog we take a look at the 6 key questions to ask a digital marketing agency before hiring them.
What Digital Marketing Services Can Your Agency Provide?
If you want to maintain your sanity, this is a crucial question. When you hire a digital marketing agency, it is certainly preferable that they offer a full marketing service rather than you finding one for social media marketing, another for search and optimisation, and a third one to look after your content. As a digital marketing agency, we know the importance of brand consistency in building trust with your audience and increasing your brand awareness. This is far more effective when hiring just the one marketing company.
Is Your Digital Marketing Done In-House?
This follows on nicely from the question above. You ask what services the digital agency provide, they say, everything. But it isn’t time to shake hands yet. When hiring a marketing agency, you should find out whether their full services are done in-house. Some digital agency will offer a full marketing package but actually outsource some of the work since they don’t have the expertise within their team. *Insert something about flags and the colour red*.
Who Will Execute My Digital Marketing Strategy?
So you’ve established that your digital marketing will be handled in-house – yay! Now you want to learn about who will be in charge of it all. We don’t mean ask about their upbringing, the name of their first pet, and the last festival they went to, but when hiring a digital marketing agency, you will want to know that your marketing strategies are being handled by experts in the field. This is a particularly significant question if you are looking to hire a large digital marketing agency – and you can learn why, and about the benefits of working with a smaller agency, here.
Are There Any Additional Monthly Costs?
Usually you will pay for your outsourced digital marketing with a monthly retainer and the services included within this fee can be agreed upon before hiring a digital agency. This shouldn’t come as any surprise. However the surprise you don’t want is payments down the line for small changes to your strategy, billed meetings, and a cut of the agency’s coffee supply receipt. Note that services such as PPC or pay per click advertising and paid social media will have an additional advertising cost (this is a charge from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.), but the budget and time period per campaign suggested by your digital marketing agency should be explained to you.
How Do You Communicate with Clients?
Solid communication is at the core of everything we do – or something similar is the answer you want to hear to this one. Digital marketing strategies must be responsive and proactive, as should your digital marketing agency. There are few things worse that an unanswered email marked urgent, an emergency meeting that takes a week to schedule, and a telephone system with hold music that causes clenched jaws and hair loss. When you hire a digital marketing agency, ensure that you are a priority, any updates can be passed quickly and effectively between you, and concerns are addressed urgently, via email, phone, or in person.
How Will You Monitor the Success of the Digital Marketing Campaigns?
This is where things can get a little technical, but the tell of a great digital agency is the way they can explain complex analytics in plain English. Systems such as Google Ads, Google Analytics, and social media insights across the various channels should be used to monitor your digital campaigns. These will monitor click-through rates, where the traffic to your website is coming from, and how the traffic responds to your website – do people stay on the page, click elsewhere on your website, or click off entirely? When hiring a digital marketing agency, you need to know that from monitoring the success of your campaigns, they will make focused improvements to the campaign to really ramp up your conversion rates.
Hiring a digital marketing agency can feel stressful, daunting, and unnatural – we get it. Finding a marketing agency who will work as an extension of your business is key to growing your company and getting a good night’s sleep. We hope that by taking these questions to your next prospective agency meeting, you will have your Cinderella-slipper moment. If you are looking to hire a digital marketing agency, why not get in touch with the team at Christian Michaels today?
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