Choosing the right digital marketing agency is critical for any business. But with so many different types of agencies out there, how do you know which one to choose?
Many factors are involved in assessing and selecting the right agency for your business. Businesses are living, breathing entities of their own, and as they grow, they change. This is particularly true for young companies because any young business will change quite a lot as it matures and fulfils its market niche.
For large corporations, agency selection is an entirely different process. Large corporations have large marketing departments that combine specialist agencies’ needs to create one unified force. Essentially having a range of specialist agencies at your fingertips as part of an ongoing roster of suppliers is a potent tool. Still, if it comes at the expense of those specialist arms working together, it’s a false economy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a large corporation or a small company just starting; in digital marketing, your website, social channels and search engine marketing initiatives should all work together to drive sales.
Large-scale marketing departments operating within enterprise-level firms spend most of their time doing this and getting all their specialists to work together.
Smaller companies, however, don’t have the scale of larger ones. So the in-house marketing resources they can tap into are much smaller. That is if they have them at all.
Start-ups and small to medium-sized businesses need to consider this when selecting an agency. Because they need someone that is more comprehensive and offers a well-rounded set of capabilities; after all, web, search, and social should all work together.
Apart from this consideration, there is one other essential element. And that is the implementation of these digital marketing efforts. There are many, many service providers out there who can build you a website or set up a Google Ad campaign. But there are much fewer who will actively help you build your bottom line. All these marketing tactics (like running a campaign on Facebook) is precisely that. They are a tactic deployed to achieve a business goal. Finding an agency that actively stays focussed on you achieving that business goal is the one particular thing to look for above all other considerations and factors.
Any agency that sticks its hand up and says, “I’ll help you build your business”, is the type of agency worth considering. Because this type of agency takes the time to understand your business and gets to know your customers, they learn and share your vision.
Staying focussed on tangible outcomes is essential in digital marketing if you connect the activity you’ve delivered in-market with sales results. So many individual and specialist agencies lack this key ingredient. They’re all too happy to ‘stay in their lane’ and just trade time for tasks. What those tasks are and who takes responsibility if they don’t impact your bottom line is something they are happy to keep ‘out’ of their agency business.
Growth agencies (as we’ve described above) have this powerful combination. Not only are they great at strategy and execution of any particular digital marketing field, but they also understand how those disciplines connect and come together to deliver a proper business result.
This is the particular factor that any start-up or SME should look for when they choose a digital marketing agency. Do they know web, search and social? Have they been able to show real-world case studies on how these work together to unlock value? And do they have the experience and business acumen required to call themselves a Growth Agency?
That is the perspective you should take into this critical decision-making process. If you look for those qualities, you and your business will shine.
