Guide for digital marketing agencies
Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve summarised the most important things to know about e-commerce and lead generation campaigns. Now we’ll help you find your way around the world of digital marketing agencies.
- How do you decide whether to outsource your digital marketing?
- How to choose an agency?
- How to choose the right digital marketing agency?
- What access should you get?
- What can you expect from your digital marketing agency?
Step zero in digital marketing – outsource or keep it in-house?
A question that often arises from our clients is what is worth keeping in-house and what is worth outsourcing in online marketing activities, as this is a very complex and multifaceted field with a lot of tasks, and without the right expertise and digital marketing strategy, we are just burning our money. What are the most important steps to take?
- Define your goals.
- Define the tools you want to use.
- See what competences you have in-house.
- Look at the financial resources available to you.
These 4 seemingly simple steps will in fact determine the success of the whole process, and will therefore be of particular importance for its ultimate success. For further help in deciding question zero, see this article.
Once the need to launch online marketing campaigns or to optimise their online presence has been raised in the minds of business and marketing managers, the first step is always to find a suitable partner.
How do I brief the agency?
There is a lot that needs to be done to ensure that the digital marketing agency you choose can effectively support you in achieving your goals. We’ve often said that one of the basic measurements of a good agency is to ask questions. Of course, you should have ready answers to these questions. For example:
- You need to know your main objectives
- It’s good to have a marketing strategy or at least an idea of what you want to do and how you want to do it
- You need to define your ROI/ROAS targets
- You need to know what product/service you want to promote with what messages
- You need to define what performance indicators you want to use to measure success
- You need to say what timeframe you are thinking about
What can the agency promise in return for the answers? A responsible digital marketing or performance marketing agency can only promise honesty, partnership and maximum professional attention to your campaign. It cannot guarantee a specific result for a number of reasons. We also provide further tips in our article tailored to the specific needs of online shops.
How to choose a digital marketing agency?
The number of hits on Google for the search terms digital marketing agency / best digital marketing agency / professional digital marketing agency is endless. From freelancers to large agencies that can provide complex solutions, everyone is represented and everyone wants you. They offer better and better deals and instant solutions, but it’s not always worth falling for these enticing terms. Here’s what to look out for in a nutshell.
1. Decide if you want to work with professionals?
Keep your goals in mind and compare them with your budget. It may not be the cheapest solution that works best for you.
2. Look around the market.
Compare which agencies have what experience, how similar their thinking is to yours, how they plan to work with you.
3. Make sure the agency meets all your professional standards.
A professional digital agency has a team of professionals who can see, interpret and solve complex tasks and then justify the results of their work at the end of the day with accurate numbers.
4. When you ask questions, do you get a fair answer to everything?
You will have a lot of questions, especially at the beginning of the cooperation. If you already feel at this early stage that you have not received the right quality and quantity of information for everything, you should consider working together in this light, as you will be investing a lot of time and money in this.
The process of choosing the right digital marketing agency partner is a long and difficult one. For more help on the above, read this article.
What access should you get?
A recurring problem is that our new customers are often unaware of their rights when working with an online agency, i.e. what access, access levels and rights/responsibilities they should have from the service provider. We have summarised these in this section.
- Access to all managed accounts, such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google My Business, Google Search Console.
- Access levels can vary, so make sure you always have the right level of permissions.
- Responsibilities: the professional responsibility for the joint work lies with the agency, so they should always have the highest level of authorisation to ensure effective campaign management. However, once the work has been completed, it must hand over this right/ownership to the client.
These points seem quite clear, but only until a controversial issue arises. If, for example, Contractor believes that he has fulfilled his contractual obligations, but Client does not accept this, does not acknowledge performance and therefore does not settle the contractor’s fee, then as Client you may be scratching your head as to what you should do?
What can you expect from your digital marketing agency?
You don’t need to be an expert with decades of experience to realise that conflicts and misunderstandings are mostly due to one single reason: digital marketing, and especially PPC campaign management, is still a kind of “black box”. No one really knows what level of service they can realistically expect for how much money when they hire a PPC expert or PPC agency to manage their online ads. We will now try to outline this briefly, in bullet points.
“Low-cost” PPC can also be a good solution
This category also has minimum requirements: drive the right traffic to your website and measure the results. But don’t expect agency proactivity.
Premium agency service
While there are many levels between the low-cost and premium categories, it’s enough to look at the difference between premium and low-cost to get a good idea of the difference. The service provided by a premium PPC agency differs from a low-cost solution mainly in the depth of the service level. At work:
- you should get a lot of questions;
- and then an advertising concept and descriptions based on your answers;
- while you measure the results with pinpoint accuracy and finally.
- Analyse the effectiveness of your work together in regular, detailed campaign reports.
Strategic agency service
If we choose this level of collaboration, the digital marketing agency will help us to set up our overall online growth strategy and complex digital marketing solutions across digital marketing channels and tools.
You can find out more about the right choice for you here.
FAQ
Customers may have additional questions depending on whether they are running an online shop or a lead-generating website. We have produced a number of summaries on these topics that are well worth reading.
In summary
The series of decisions related to digital marketing are all critical. If you make a mistake at any point in the project, it will have a huge impact on its success and by the time you realise it, a lot of your time, energy and money will have been wasted.
However, if you follow the points above, you can minimise the chances of missing the mark at any stage. Remember, trust, common ground, a shared mindset and that much-vaunted chemistry are essential to a really good client-agency relationship.
To help you make the right decisions and choices, you should work with an agency that Google ranks among the best. The Google Premier Partner Agency badge is only awarded to 3% of agencies, as it is not easy to meet the requirements (professional, performance and financial). We’re proud that the WebMa team has been awarded this accolade again in 2023, giving us a number of business and professional advantages over our competitors that will ensure you’ll want to come to us with your digital marketing problems.