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1. Do the services offered by the digital marketing agency align with your goals?
Sit down and ask the prospective digital marketing company how they plan to meet your specific goals. If they don’t address specific plans to meet these particular goals, be wary that they are trying to sell you a cookie-cutter solution or aren’t understanding your unique business challenges.. A good digital marketing agency should offer you a customized specific approach to reaching the marketing goals you’ve set forth for your business whether that’s driving brand awareness, traffics, leads, or sales. Also, be wary of firms that are singularly focused on a particular service offering such as paid search only, or email only. A comprehensive digital approach usually means multiple digital channels working together to achieve your goals.
2. Which digital marketing tools does the agency use, and how well do they know them?
A good agency should be ready to describe exactly what’s in their tool belt. Some of the tools are paid tools and others are free tools that any agency worth their salt will be aware of and using. The tools will vary by service offering so here are some examples of the types of tools (and a few specific ones) you should inquire about, categorized by service:SEO
- Keyword ranking tools
- Backlink targeting/tracking tools
- Link building tools (but beware not to use a digital marketing agency that does automated link building!)
- Google’s Search Console
PPC
- Google’s Keyword Planner
- Competitive spend analysis tool
Digital Media Planning and Buying
- Competitive media research tools
- Publisher research tools
- Ad server
Social Media
- Social media listening
- Content planning and publishing
- Campaign/contest management tools
- Experience with all of the major social media analytics tools (e.g. Facebook Insights)
[br] 3. Does the business have case studies they can share with you to demonstrate their success?
Case studies are the industry standard to professionally demonstrate proof of what the digital marketing agency is capable of from past examples with other clients. Additionally, you should see reviews or testimonials from their clients about their services.[br] 4. How will the agency consistently focus and report on results?
Request a definitive timeline of when to anticipate reports and campaign updates. They should be able to schedule regular, ongoing meetings with you if they’re well organized and truly on top of their game. The digital agency also needs to be able to define the “KPIs,” or key performance indicators, that they’ll use to determine whether their efforts are tracking towards achieving your overall goals. For example, if your goal is to increase sales from your email database then some of the KPIs your agency should be tracking and reporting on to you include deliverability rate, open rate, and click through rate. Any reputable agency will be more than willing to pull out a sample report showing the list of business metrics they use to measure results in any given channel. A sophisticated one may also be able to offer you a real-time dashboard in the cloud that you can access any time.
Other considerations!
There are a slew of other considerations when choosing a digital marketing agency including fees, terms, and the team of course. More to come in a future post!
