There are many things that you have to think through before you hire an online marketing agency. First and foremost you should do a lot of thinking on your own vision; once that’s done you need to, for the sake of your own business, extensively look into what different marketing agencies are offering. Once you start your research you will find many of them, each one promising great success and online outreach. The huge number of options may confuse you which is why it is important to be able to find the right online marketing agency. To help you in this regard, given below s a guide that will help you pick the best online marketing agency.
Remember that not every marketing agency can offer you a great looking website that is easy to use and can maximise your conversion rate. Technically speaking, your website is your foremost tool to reach the world and that is why most companies are willing to spend on online marketing, as it offers a high ROI.. When you spend the extra money on the marketing you definitely deserve an impressive return as well.
We have compiled a list of essential tests that you should check off whenever you are going to hire an online marketing agency.
Make Sure You Have A Clear Vision For Your Business
As we mentioned before, the first thing you need to do is have a clear vision for your business. If you walk into a meeting with a marketing agency without a vision then they will be deciding things for you. And it is extremely crucial to have control over your company’s marketing strategies.
It is your business so you know exactly what it is about and what sort of customers will it attract. Marketing agencies have several clients and it would be easy money for them if they take on a client without a vision. If you have a plan then you can explain your business in a better way to them. This will assist the marketing agency to have a focused marketing strategy.
Tell them you want to improve your online sales or that you want to have a dominating social media presence. If you want your brand to become a famous household name then you should demand it from the marketing agency and ask them how will they achieve this task.
If you already had a meeting with a marketing agency without a vision and they were willing to take you on then we can tell you with a hundred percent certainty that they would have just wasted your money. A serious marketing agency that cared about your product would have said ‘no’.
Walk into the meeting with a strong Vision and once you present it listen to what they have to say. And do ask them the following questions:
- How will your digital marketing strategy help me achieve my business objectives?
- Can you tell me alternative strategies?
- Which strategy do you prefer and why is that?
- What should I expect after a period of 1, 2 and 3 months?
After all this your business vision and your online marketing agency’s vision should be perfectly synchronized.
Make Sure The Agency Understands Your ROI Success Expectations
Most agencies talk about big plans and strategies, promising the sky while neglecting to discuss about the numbers. Make sure your company informs you about every single expense, specifically cost of generating a lead and sale.
Here are a few important elements related to ROI that you need to discuss with your agency beforehand:
- The cost of generating lead from a specific traffic source
- Traffic sources that have the lowest conversion cost
- Landing pages that have the highest conversion rate
Often companies try to boast about how many hits they can get you but these numbers are not good enough if they are unable to inform you about how much ROI you are getting. You need to sit down with them and discuss this issue, or else you’ll be sitting reading a bunch of statistics about the number of visitors but without any significant increase in sales. At the end of the day, a business earns profit by selling services or products, and not merely by attraction visitors.
Note: Businesses not offering products or services may only be interested in number of visitors. However, you should still see the demographic you are attracting and if it is of any use to you.
Make Sure The Agency Has A Results-Oriented Approach
Another thing you need to know before shaking hands with an online marketing firm is that if they have yielded results in the past or not. Your website exists on the Internet to convert leads into paying customers and that’s why you are hiring the marketing agency, to accelerate and increase conversion rate.
You can always check the previous results of the marketing agency by doing the following things:
- Reading their blogs, if it has a huge clientele it would probably have a blog section on its main website. You can go through that to see examine their work with other clients.
- You should always contact the references they give, have a detailed conversation and clarify your confusions
- Their case studies will let you know how their system works. Go through them. These are usually detailed and will give you a better idea of how things work.
You can always have a dedicated meeting regarding their approach. Discuss with them about their past achievements and inquire about their procedures. Ask them the following questions if you can:
- How successful is your lead generation mechanism?
- How much increase was noted in lead generation after your mechanism was applied?
- How many of your leads were converted to sales, can you give a percentage on that?
Google analytics is a free for all website reporting tool, so do inquire whether they just use this free tool (which you can too, so why bother) or whether they have a proper system. Do inquire about the following as well:
- If they integrate CRM tools
- Software list that they use to monitor web results
- What Key Performance Indicators do they track
- Demand Sample Report and ask how often does the agency send it
Make Sure The Agency Gives An Overall Direction
So you are about to hire a marketing agency after doing extensive research on everything about them. But there is one small problem that you completely overlooked, it is that marketing only works if it is well connected with all the other branches of your business. So merely looking into the marketing achievements of the company isn’t enough, you need to discuss this issue too.
As mentioned above marketing strategy affects every single aspect of your business, so you have to make sure that the agency is willing to get in touch with all your departments. It is necessary to do that because their marketing strategy must be synced with all the functioning parts of the organization so that optimum result is achieved.
Not only that they should be willing to go the extra mile to explain everyone in your company what their part is in the strategy. Your sales staff needs to be told on how to handle incoming leads and your IT team should be told on all the website changes. However, in some cases online marketing companies may offer other services (website development, social media handling etc.) as well.
Best way is to make a list of all the people and departments that will be in touch with the agency, and present it upfront to them. That way you can see their reaction about the workload and determine how serious they are in getting involved with your business.
Make Sure They Are Willing Keep A Transparent Relationship
This goes without saying that it is important that they keep a transparent relationship with you. You must be wondering how can that be figured out before you hire them, we believe it can be judged in the first impression. See how upfront they are about answering your questions, if you feel a slight hint of cloak and dagger in their answers then that’s your cue to part ways.
We have told you to ask several questions in this article, here are a few that you can use to test if they are transparent enough or not:
- Ask about their process, each phase of the strategy and how they handle their clients
- Names and qualifications (experience) of the people in the agency that will be in touch with you
- If they freelance some of the work and if so what vendors they do hire
- What is the billing process and how much is the per hour charge, if charged hourly. Also ask if there may be any extra charges.
You can see these questions are like peeking into their organization, a friendly marketing agency that believes in building relationships with the clients would give you straightforward answers to all of them. You can judge the agency yourself after this interrogation session about how comfortable you are with them, Often marketing firms burry their clients in technical jargons. This is their technique of keeping things from you. A good transparent organization will always explain each and everything no matter how complex the matter is.
Make Sure You The Agency Is Clear About Spending And Results
Coca-Cola spends $565 million on advertising in the U.S. alone, so that should give you an idea on how much companies are willing to invest in marketing. The bigger the budget, the bigger the marketing outreach. The marketing agency you are going to hire needs to be direct with you on this matter.
This is actually the part where you also analyze their abilities. A good and innovative marketing agency will spend the marketing budget smartly instead of asking more funds. This is a difficult process, hearing the truth about how much money needs to be invested in the very start is going to be a shocker but if the agency assures you that slow influx of money in the marketing budget is okay and they can work with it you will feel that the weight of the world has been lifted from your shoulders.
Sales and leads needs to be generated from various platforms such as social media, email, search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, Google Adwords and display ads. Commonly speaking you should just dive in to the Internet from all fronts, but it is not cheap to do that. Your spending ability, even if it’s low, is still a major player in the overall marketing results.
Now that you have been given a huge dose of reality, you know exactly what to expect once you walk into a marketing agency. But this can work to your advantage to weed out the pretending agencies. If a company is offering you all these things and more in a very small budget then that is another cue for you to part your ways. Because as we just mentioned, your financial capacity plays a huge role in marketing.
Be On a Safe Side
Make sure you talk about guarantees regarding results. SEO can be an expensive job and there is no point in investing in it if you do not get good results. Many companies advertise their services with tall claims like ‘rank 1st on Google in three months’. Any company promoting such a thing is most probably a hoax and you should stay away from it.
Firstly, there is a time lag and results take months before they appear. Secondly, it is a continuous process. You cannot order a package and rank well on Google within a few months. You need to update your content on a monthly basis and post on social media regularly. Plus, other things like link building etc., should also be taken into consideration.
This is why it is important to ask about the available packages (what they offer, the charge etc.) and the monthly billing amount. This is very important specially if you are in the service niche. For example, a dentist in Texas will be competing with thousands of other dentists in Texas, even if he ends up ranking 1st on Google, he will lose the rank within a short span of time if he does not continue to do what he’s doing. After all, other dentists would be vying for the top spot as well.
So discuss this with your agency and also ask about the money back guarantees. While not every company will offer such guarantees, still some kind of promise will help.
Make Sure They Follow A Timeline
All of the above means nothing if the agency slacks in timing. A clear timeline needs to be given to you before you sign on anything so that you can hold the marketing agency accountable if they skip a deadline or fail to meet a goal. Marketing is all about timing and placement, and you can be sure about the agency by asking the following things:
- A marketing plan timeline in writing
- Their ability to handle last minute changes and unforeseen delays
Make Sure The Agency Has A Substantial Online Presence
Don’t forget to check the agency’s own social media page after they gave you a huge boasting presentation on how they’ll be milking social media for leads. If you see an unimpressive social media presence, for example they haven’t updated their page in weeks or months or tweeted anything organic the past year, then that means they are incapable of fulfilling their promises.
A proper stalking session needs to be done here, and here is how you can do that:
- Facebook content, do they upload anything organic regularly?
- Have they been active on Instagram, Twitter or other social networks?
- Is their website up to date?
- Do they have a blogging habit?
- Their list of accolades and are they being boasted on their website?
- Their knowledge of current trends and are they being reflected on the website and social media?
By doing all this you can even evaluate their marketing methods on the spot. This also shows if they have an open mind to new ideas as well. Marketing agency requires marketing for themselves too and their methods will tell you a lot about how they’ll be marketing your company.
If you have any more questions or if you are looking for a company that fits all these pointers, please get in touch with AOK Marketing today.
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