If you’ve hired or are considering hiring a digital marketing agency to guide your messaging, strategy or implementation, there is considerable value to be gained. Yet, it’s important to truly understand what you’re getting for your money to ensure there is sufficient return on your investment.
What Do You Need from a Digital Marketing Agency?
To increase your understanding of what an agency is offering, it’s important to start with evaluating your own data. Only when you know your current results and what you’re hoping to achieve can you begin to determine what you need from an agency. You’re probably already very aware of the tremendous volume of data that digital marketing solutions produce. In fact, this is often the impetus for marketing professionals to throw their hands up and offload certain responsibilities to an agency. Not so fast! Only with at least a broad overview of your data can you begin to assess what’s important for your organization.
A good place to start is signing into a data measurement tool like Google Analytics to review key statistics about your website traffic. Check out a report on traffic by source and see how many people are visiting your website via referrals, direct, organic search and advertising. With this information, you can begin to refine what you may actually need from an agency. For example, these stats may indicate that you are getting healthy numbers of visitors from a PPC campaign you launched. Yet, you’re lacking in traffic from organic search. Thus, you may need help with optimizing your content on your website to place better in search results.
What’s Your Goal?
Once you have at least a basic understanding of your current digital marketing results, you can set some goals for improvement. Do you want to increase traffic, leads or sales? There are many solutions and techniques to consider depending on your goals. For example, search engine optimization may drive more traffic and leads. Conducting A/B testing can help you refine strategies for increasing sales. Begin thinking about what may help you achieve these goals and have these ideas ready when you begin to talk with agencies.
Where Should You Turn?
With so many facets of digital marketing, it can be next to impossible to do it all yourself. It’s unlikely you have the time to become an expert in social media, website design, online advertising, search engine optimization and content writing. Your job is to choose the right team to implement strategies and achieve set goals.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of agencies that are more focused on getting your business than enabling your success. Stay away from anyone who can’t describe in detail the specific techniques and steps they use. If you can’t understand what they’re offering, move on quickly!
Your best bet will always be an agency that offers services that you’ve already identified you need. They may have new, innovative ways for accomplishing your goals, but they should be closely aligned with what you need to fill the gaps in what you and your team can’t accomplish in-house.
The key is being able to work with an agency that partners with and deeply understands what they’re doing and what you hope to achieve. With this level of collaboration, you can take your organization to new heights of success.
