Guide To Finding The Best Digital Marketing Agency For Your Business

Selling your product isn’t the only reason to look for a digital marketing company. You’ll also want to hire one to gather leads and increase awareness of your business, which primarily happens on your website. While selecting a digital marketing company would usually involve looking at the costs of their services, location, availability, and their process, there are many strong digital marketing companies out there with similar options that seem to match your general needs.

As such, you need to be entirely sure of what each agency does and be able to tell if they excel in what they do. Here are some questions to ask to identify the best company for you.

What Should You Look Out For?

Each company has its own strengths and weaknesses in their services. Some may specialize in on-page and technical SEO but do not provide much help in brand strategy. Others may provide a whole wide range of services but only specialize in a particular area.

Before you start to check what each company is doing, ask yourself which aspect of digital marketing you are intending to outsource. This can range from content creation and social media management to email marketing and Google paid search advertisements. Once you’ve narrowed down the agencies that specialize in what you truly need, you can start to ask deeper questions to ensure you’re paying for quality services. And according to Sortlist, buyers of such services can take complete control over what kind of agency their business really needs.

1. How Up-to-Date Are Their Methods?

Digital marketing is ever-changing in today’s age and updates to features and algorithms in platforms such as Google can heavily affect how to successfully market your goods and services. When you’re meeting the digital marketing company, ask them about their current methodologies and their awareness of any updates on the platforms you are working on.

That’s why it is important to keep yourself up to date with digital marketing news to keep yourself familiarised. There’s no need for you to have a deep understanding of everything as you will be outsourcing your work to the digital marketing companies, but this familiarity will enable you to ask the right questions to pick a good one. You can have a greater awareness by subscribing to newsletters from Search Engine Journal to learn about SEO and PPC or Later Media to be updated on methodologies related to Instagram.

2. How Comfortable Are They With Talking About What They Do?

Of course, there’s no need to ask them directly about this but keep a lookout for red flags if the marketer can’t break down an aspect of their niche to you in plain language. While it may also be social awkwardness, another reason for this could be that they’ve memorized the definition and actually don’t really understand how it works. Look out for marketers that are comfortable talking to you about their strategy and performance. This way you’ll be able to easily understand what they are doing and their rationale for it, leaving you feeling more satisfied and smarter.

3. How Holistic Are They?

Even if you’re looking for very specific services, you’ll still want a company that is well-versed in all aspects of digital marketing. This means that they should have a general understanding of all services as many areas of digital marketing are interlinked. For example, link building is an important part of SEO and is usually connected to content marketing. Many channels also drive your leads to a specific landing page on your website. You should always find agencies that can provide data to support whatever they are recommending.

4. Do They Have Any Receipts?

When you’re hiring a marketing company, it’s really important to see some form of proof of their work. Many major businesses require their digital marketing partners to sign NDA agreements, preventing them from sharing small details about which campaigns they ran and how effective they were. In that case, many of these agencies simply share which companies they actually worked with.

Agencies that work with smaller businesses can show broad results such as improvements in engagement by a percentage amount instead of exact figures in the actual Google Analytics reports. In that case, you can ask questions about their work. While they may be bound by some form of agreement, they can at least share with you what their works involved and how they approached it.

Each company can sell itself the best they can, but it’s a lot more trustworthy to hear from their past clients. Look out or ask around for reviews and testimonials online. If the former clients are keen, try to ask them for a follow up in case you are unclear about their reviews.

5. Do They Practice What They Preach?

If an agency is going to be handling your digital marketing, their site should also execute the kind of services they provide for their customers. Here are some key points that you can look out for:

• Their website is optimized and ranked for relevant words
• They have minimally one active social media channel
• Any advertisements or marketing content should reflect the same brand image

Have some fun analyzing their company by searching them on Google to see if they optimize titles and meta descriptions in all of their pages, and check out their social media to see what kind of content they produce for themselves, how often they do their postings and use hashtags.

6. What Do They Promise?

Lastly, be wary of scams in the industry. Some companies make false promises and you shouldn’t be disappointed to find that these goals aren’t met if they are unrealistic. Some unrealistic claims include reaching specific numbers in social media metrics and getting quick and immediate results. Nevertheless, there are promises that companies can keep such as honoring a contract and meeting deadlines. Remember that most recommendations also require time for it to be effective as they need minor adjusting and constant testings.

Finding The Right Company For You

While these are guidelines you should definitely follow, keep an open mind, and continue to ask questions to see the different responses from the various companies you reach out to. There’s a possibility that someone with less experience may exceed your expectations and provide you with creative and effective digital marketing services that are better suited for your company.

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