If you want to expand your brand’s reach, then one of the best decisions you can make is hiring an online agency as long as you find the right agency.
Having the right agency means that, just as with any relationship you have to establish full confidence and trust for it to work and have a successful outcome.
With so many so called agencies out there, you need to take various important considerations before you start the search.
Ensure you have clearly defined goals in place
You know your business and customers better than anyone else. So make sure you have identified your specific goals before you start looking for an online marketing agency.
Asking an agency “I want to hire you to improve my business” won’t be enough. Some agencies will take your money without a clear goal or plan, but it’ll never work out as expected and cost you a lot more.
If you know exactly what you want to achieve, this will help an agency map out an achievable plan to reach your goals. So you have to ask yourself:
• Do you wish to increase online sales?
• Are you looking to enhance your social media audience, so you have a healthy captive following to market to on a consistent basis?
• Do you want to operate a branding campaign to help give your brand a household name?
You need to know what you want to accomplish before you start looking. Any agency willing to take you on when you can’t define your goal is after your money and couldn’t care less about your brand’s success.
Make sure the agency understands how to measure ROI and overall campaign success.
The agency you chose must be able to demonstrate how much it costs to generate every lead and sale. Otherwise, your campaign will be a failure.
Once the campaign is running, the agency should be able to answer the following questions any point in time:
• How much does it cost to generate a lead from each traffic source?
• Which traffic sources are producing the lowest conversion cost?
• Which of your landing pages are converting at the highest rate?
You also need to understand which metrics are completely insignificant. If an agency is claiming that a piece of content received 250,000 impressions but can’t tell you what kind of return that actually translated to, what use is that?
A quarter of a million sets of eyes on content branded with your company name sounds great, but if it doesn’t transform into revenue, it’s a completely useless metric.
So the best agency you can work with should be focused on the one metric that really matters which is ROI.
Recognise that your spending ability will greatly impact your results.
Each business will have a different budget that they can work with. It is true that a larger budget will allow for a more aggressive and profitable campaign, but a smaller budget can still make good progress and bring a good return.
A good agency will be honest before hand and tell you exactly how it is. If a start-up comes to us with a small budget, we will discuss their goals and work out the best plan of attack for the budget they propose to work with. Sometimes the truth isn’t what you want to hear, but its always best to understand the limitations and that it may be a slower building process.
The best way to produce faster results is to have a diverse marketing strategy, generating website traffic leads and sales from multiple channels using social media, email, pay-per-click and display ads together. This is something not every brand has the budget for to start with so a plan is essential.
Understanding that your spending ability directly impacts your campaign results means that you will be in a better position when an agency promises the world for a few hundred pounds a month. Getting a consumer’s attention online is a valuable commodity, and it is getting invariably more competitive and costly.
Realise that this is a long-term relationship, so trust is important.
Don’t assume your sales and revenue to shoot through the roof immediately after you hire an agency. Look for an agency who will be completely honest with you and explain the time frame you should expect before seeing obvious results.
Don’t forget that you are hiring an online agency to handle your online growth, and that’s their speciality they are not simply there to tell you what you want to hear. Make sure you partner with an agency that you feel 100 percent comfortable with as its going to be a long-term relationship.
We make sure that we speak to all our clients carefully before we onboard them, particularly to discuss our long-term relationship strategy. If someone is expecting to hire us for only a couple of months and then part ways, then that’s a client we’ll pass on every time.
You should make sure you do the same and trust that your agency has your brand’s best interest in mind. That way you will get the best results.
