As more businesses rely on digital marketing with the current times, getting onboard a good digital marketing agency has become one of the most critical factors to achieve marketing success. Here are some tips which you can use before hiring them.
Aesthetics in designing and presenting
- Check their past work – It says a lot about their style. See if you resonate with that style.
- Their communication style – Do check the copy/content of the posts and not only the graphic – It says a lot about the agency and how seriously they take every aspect of their work.
- Some examples of their work on various channels – Evaluate the way they have been posting, the patterns they follow.
How do they manage performance marketing
- What is the kind of cost per lead they have been working on? Something specific to your own industry will be great
- What is the average ROAS (Return on Ad spend) in your desired industry they expect? To start with and in later stages? (Anywhere between 3 to 4 dollar per 1 dollar spent is a good ROAS)
- Live References – We should see live examples of the websites where they are making the sales. (Please refer to the reports section below to see what kind of reports do we need)
- Have they worked on a campaign strategy for the goal you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts. Some examples will be great.
References
Apart from the names of the companies they have given as references, we would like to speak to the companies directly for the kind of impact they have created. The references given should ideally have got done the kind of work which we are planning to do
The teams we will be working with
We must know who we will be working with. Many companies have different reporting managers for the following. Usually, a single reporting manager is a bottleneck but it depends from team to team. Here are the kind of teams we may work with
- Overall strategy
- Designing and communication
- Performance marketing (Paid social, paid google and any other paid marketing on e-commerce channels)
- Content Manager
Reporting Pattern
This is a very critical step and we need to know how will they report
- The frequency of reporting
- Anybody can get us the report from the ad manager, but what we are looking at is an analysis of the performance and what steps should be calibrated in Digital Marketing after that.
Reports and KPIs you should expect from Digital marketing agencies:
Here are some of the reports which you should expect from your agency once they are engaged. Periodic assessment of these reports can replay play a vital in your growth strategy.
- Social Media Marketing – Can include organic and paid marketing. Here we should look at the following parameters
- Likes and followers
- Number of Impressions & total reach
- Engagement
- Top Performing Posts
- Pay per click, Google Adwords, Facebook and instagram ads and any other – Here we should look at the following parameters
- Number of clicks received
- Total cost spent
- Conversion
- Click through rate (CTR)
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Impressions
- E-commerce – While evaluating reports for E-commerce, have a look at the following parameters
- Paid advertising perspective
- Return on ad spent (ROAS)
- Clicks
- Cost per transaction
- SEO Perspective
- Number of organic sessions
- Revenue from organic sessions
- Conversion rate
- Paid advertising perspective
There are many more steps required for making sure the marketing plans of a company achieve success and getting the right people on board is the first one of them. Identifying a good digital marketing agency is critical as a bigger porting of our strategy has moved digital in current times.
At Go4Growth Consulting, we help organisations get the most out of their marketing efforts and help them differentiate their business so they can achieve marketing success.
Gagan Kapoor, Marketing Consultant
