1. Results – The primary objective in choosing any digital marketing agency is the best cost per lead or cost per sale. Ultimately you want to know that you’re getting your best bang for your buck by investing as little as possible and earning as much as possible. In the vetting process you should be asking questions around cost per lead and how the agency will drive this down in the short, medium and long term. The actual lead also needs to be defined whether it is a phone call, form submission, online sale or a combination of all. Furthermore it’s important to consider branded keywords from a search perspective because these are not earned leads. Your digital marketing agency should be driving as many unbranded leads to you as possible at the lowest possible cost. From there, they should be giving you data around what opportunity there is to scale up to maximum possible lead volume without jeapordising the cost per lead.
2. Transparency – Unfortunately some digital marketing agencies have masked the true media spend for advertising like Google ads and Facebook Ads. They do this by not allowing you any access to the Google or Facebook publisher thereby not allowing you to see the raw media spend. Then, by reporting from their own software, they are able to keep a ‘margin’ from your media spend when in fact you believe that your total media spend has made its way to the publisher. From an SEO perspective you also want to be understanding what links they are creating, what work is being done, what errors are being cleared etc
3. Account access and ownership – Similar to the transparency point above, it is important when engaging a digital marketing agency to ensure you have admin access to the marketing they are running for you. This means that if and when you stop running the marketing with them you still have complete access to that information and you don’t have to start from scratch again. With machine learning and conversion data points making up so much of the success of digital marketing these days, it’s important to maintain all available momentum by controlling the publishers you work with by having full admin access.
4. Scalability and breadth – It’s important to know that you have the ability to scale up and scale out your products in due course. For example if you start with Google Ads you may wish to start Facebook Ads and SEO later so you need to ensure that the agency you choose are experts in all of these fields. Therefore when choosing your digital marketing agency you should not only think about the products for now but also the products for the future.
5. Relationship – When choosing your digital marketing agency make sure you understand the relationship and frequency of contact on the account. Some agencies unfortunately adopt the ‘set and forget’ method where they build the campaign and then offer automated reporting afterwards and very little customer contact. It’s important to have scheduled meetings with your digital marketing agency to understand trends of your campaign and also feedback changes in your business such that the marketing can be pivoted to take advantage of that.
Here at search rescue we address all the above so if you want a digital marketing agency that truly care and can deliver then give us a call today!
