How To Choose A Digital Marketing Company Or Agency

Businesses across all industries have one thing in common. The need to market themselves and the product or service they provide. Be it a trendy startup or a traditional local store, every business seeks to increase their sales and raise their brand awareness. A great marketing campaign offers both of it. But marketing is not a one glove fits all solution. You have to work on breaking down your end goals into segments and target each marketing campaign with one or a couple of aspects of your final goal. While this is on one hand, not putting in effort to market your business can not just stagnate your progress but also digress it, no matter how great your product or service is.

And with the world shifting its needs online, marketing has vastly digitized its playfield too. Gone are the days you had to advertise on billboards and prime time television, options completely monopolised by big brands. Social media marketing, pop-ups, and blogs are the way to consumers’ hearts.

Do you need to hire an agency?

With digital platforms democratizing advertising field, the competition has increased multifold. It’s important that you study your target customers and work towards them. With new marketing tactics sprouting up every other day, it can get overwhelming for business owners to study customer behaviour online and master every aspect of digital marketing.

Here’s where hiring a digital marketing agency will help your business.

With a team of experts managing the technical, cultural, and marketing aspects of content published on your brand’s behalf, and creating detailed and customised marketing strategies, you can focus on building your business and expanding its horizons.

How do you figure out who to hire?

The first step while hiring a marketing agency is to understand your marketing requirements. There are multiple ways you could market digitally. For example, if you’re targeting business professionals, you can focus majorly on running ads on LinkedIn and completely omit casual social media platforms. Everything from website design, regular social media copies, email marketing, SEO, Google ads comes under digital marketing. Research your ask and then look for agencies who can provide them efficiently.

In case you have an in-house marketing team, discuss with your team as to which marketing strategies would you need additional help for? What campaigns do they think would work best for your business but do not have the skills or manpower to execute.

Be sure of what set of metrics are your immediate needs and what needs to be achieved in the long run. Though vanity metrics might look attractive, and even bug brands going behind them, they do not directly impact your ROI.
Though this goes without saying, make sure the marketing agency you hire fits your budget. Agencies can deliver regular posts that might not translate quantitatively on your profits. question yourself how does success measure to you.

Build a long lasting relationship:

Once an agency gets to know your ways of working, it would be easy to create stellar marketing campaigns given the rapport built overtime. So, make sure you see yourself being able to work with the agency for a long time rather than just trying out multiple agencies.

Are they diverse?

There are agencies who focus on delivering great services for social media. Their area of expertise might not go beyond them. This works in benefit to a lot of brands, who might not need other aspects of digital marketing. As said before, make sure you are definitive of your needs and the agency you choose will be able to offer you marketing in every digital space of your requirement.

Know who will service your account

It is always advisable to ask your agency about who will be working on your marketing campaigns and digital strategies. Make sure the person is equipped with relevant knowledge on your needs and the digital ecosystem as they’ll be able to explore the possible avenues for your brand.

Know their technical stand
The agency you choose must also have a strong stand on the technical understanding. This would boost strategic branding and bring in holistic digital marketing with qualitative outputs such as increased traffic, unique visitors, bounce rates, Click through rate etc.,

Versatility:

Though we’ve mentioned above that you can choose agencies that specialise in a specific field, if that suits you, going for an overall expertise agency would be fruitful in the long run. The digital eco system is widespread and has scope to only grow even vaster in the future. So, if an agency is giving a variety of services to offer, you can choose to add on a new service when needed while the agency would also have familiarity with your brand and its requirements rather than having to choose another agency altogether. A typical multi faceted agency must at-least offer the following services:
A full on service digital marketing agency typically offers:

• • Search engine optimisation and marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Social media optimisation
  • Social media marketing
  • Running Ads
  • Web design and development
  • Mobile App Design & Development
  • Content Strategy & Marketing
  • Mobile marketing
  • Social Media Analytics
  • Web Analytics

What results do they promise?

Ask the agency a plan of action on what they are planning to do to meet your requirements. Though not every single number can be forecasted to the T, an insightful agency would be able to realistically guess what outcome would come for the strategies and also reason out the why’s. Also, with digital marketing, there’s no solid promis on bottom of the funnel results, given there are a lot of external factors that play into the causation.

Summing it up:

Now that you know the basics of what’s needed to look in while hiring a digital marketing agency, get started with your marketing expedition.