Growing your business online is no longer an option but a priority for most business owners, regardless of the products or services they offer. Though setting up your business online seems like a great way to grow your business, it might be daunting if you don’t have any related experience. There are many aspects to consider from SEO, PPC to email marketing. Figuring out the best online marketing strategy for your business can be challenging. Not every business has the time, resources or know how to execute on growing a business online.
A marketing agency can help support you with bringing your business online and help achieve your business goals by helping you enhance your brand visibility, and help drive more traffic and customers to your ecommerce site.
Figuring out which marketing agency might be right for you can be tricky. It will depend on things such as your business niche, goals and targets. If you want to know more about choosing the best marketing agency for you, this article is for you.
What is a Marketing Agency?
A marketing agency is a company that focuses on helping businesses grow through the different marketing services they offer. These services can include market research, advertising, branding, PR, and event planning. The main goal of enlisting a marketing agency will be to achieve targets such as help improve online visibility and reach, generate leads and boost sales for your business.
Typically, a marketing agency has a team of experts who specialize in different areas in marketing. The team works together to help create marketing campaigns for the clients who enlist their services. These experts use different tools, skills, and techniques to help different businesses achieve their individual goals and stand out from their competitors. Promise Media, we are leading marketing agency in Brisbane and providing tailored digital marketing and web design solutions to our clients.
What To Expect from a Marketing Agency?
There are many aspects you might want to consider when selecting a marketing agency from all the agencies. Taking time to research different agencies online will help you choose the best agency for your business.
Some things to think about include:
Understanding your goals and objectives
When getting started, you must have a clear picture of what your marketing goals might be. Having a clear idea of your goals and objectives will allow you to measure the success of marketing efforts and make sound decisions about future campaigns.
To understand these, you need to take the overall objectives into account of your business and what you would like to achieve. Common business goals include boosting brand awareness, gaining more website traffic, generating leads, and boosting sales.
After you gain a clear idea about your business goals, you can create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound) objectives. Your objectives should be clear, succinct and comprehensible. Having SMART objectives can boost traffic by 30% within half an year’s time span.
Conducting Your Independent Research
When you begin your research, the first step and the most important step is to try and identify agencies with experience in your business niche. This will help the agency have a clear grasp of your target audience and their pain points.
The best and easiest way to go about this is to conduct an online search. What does the agency website appear to be? Does the agency rank high on Google and appear at the top of the search results? Answering these questions will help you understand how good they are at marketing. You could also request recommendations from different businesses in your niche or participate in events where you can meet different agencies.
If the agency has case studies and testimonials published on their website, these might offer you deeper insights into their performance. Check and do some research on their socials and see how their posts are performing.
Find out the Size and Services Provided
When you are trying to choose the right agency from all the agencies that are available and might seem to be attractive options, it might be helpful to understand their size. Bigger agencies will tend to have more experience and resources, meanwhile smaller audiences might be able to offer you a more customized and personalized service.
Try to understand the range of services offered by your top list of agencies, since not all agencies offer a wide range of services.
Make sure to check out their portfolios and request for examples of how they might have assisted other brands in your industries to achieve their KPIs. It’s also best if you ask how the agency of your choice plans to measure the level of success of their work and what metrics they will be tracking to do so.
Ask the Agency of Your Choice to Explain its Process
When you are approaching a marketing agency to help you out, it is important to take time to understand how the target agency you have in mind is planning to offer their services. Experienced marketing strategists have a process put in place to help them succeed with their marketing activities, which needs to be relatively consistent and straightforward.
A creative marketing agency with a proven track record of great results should have no problem helping you out on your quest towards expanding and growing your business. It is important not to hesitate to ask the agency questions that you might have to clarify your doubts.
Have Some Idea on Types of Services You Wish For
Marketing is a broad feel with a diverse range of potential services. Despite this the services of different businesses vary depending on things like what stages a business might be in, such as if your business is a well-established brand. When deciding what agency to choose you might want to figure out what services are right for your business, which will also depend on your specific niche.
- Below are how some services can help your business:
- Website marketing to boost your website traffic
- Web design or rebranding to ensure that your business has a good website
- Local SEO to rank higher on search engines like Google
- Help with content such as copywriting, content writing, graphic design and video editing services.
- PPC or Pay Per Click or ad management
- Email marketing to get sales and promote products
- Social Media Marketing to build brand awareness
- Analytics and reporting to see what strategies work in the overall digital marketing strategy.
Having a rough idea about what kind of service your business requires will help boost your business and grow and expand. Knowing what services you will most likely require will help you pick the right marketing agency that matches your business needs best.
Explore the Culture and Communication
The culture of an agency is important as it can have a direct influence on the quality of the work they do. An agency with a great company culture nurtures creativity, collaboration and dedication.
One key question you might want to ask yourself is if the personality of the agency of your choice matches with you. Would you be comfortable collaborating and communicating? These are some things you need to consider.
It is important to get an idea of their communication style. You might want to ask how the agency you are looking to invest in communicates with clients. It’s important to create open lines of communication so that you will be kept in the loop of the progress of your projects and address any problems that might arise fast.
Organizing regular meetings, calls as well as email updates will help you stay on top of what is going on so that you are able to offer your feedback and see the project to its end without having to deal with many roadblocks.
Consider Your Budget and Costs
If you are deciding to invest in an agency, it is important to have a clear idea about how much you are willing to spend for their services. It is best to be very transparent from the start to avoid any hassle along the way.
While the budget you choose is up to you, it is important to know that some dedicate a big budget, while others allocate a smaller budget.
Consider building a RFP
Once you have figured out your business needs, it might be useful to jot them down. This will help you create a brief or request for proposal (or RFP) which you can submit to agencies you selected. A RFP will help provide agencies with the necessary background details, identify relevant insights and d
Selecting a marketing agency might feel like a challenging thing, but if you take the time and effort to do some research, you will find an agency that will help take your business to the next level. Using the tips given above you will be able to select the most suitable agency and avoid common pitfalls most businesses make when opting to work with a digital marketing agency.
Consider their Creative Approach
If you are on the lookout for a creative marketing agency and have several of them shortlisted, then you might want to make sure that they fit your budget. If you figure out that they all do, you might face a dilemma as to how you are going to choose the best marketing agency.
It most likely will boil down to creativity. You might want to consider if the agency you are about to choose can bring an innovative solution to your marketing needs. Some questions you might want to ask include, ‘Can this agency think in fresh ways that will make my business stand apart?’
Creativity is a key ingredient that helps great marketing agencies to leave their mark in the marketing world. This isn’t just limited to branding and advertising agencies, but when it comes to aspects like selecting a SEO agency for keywords rankings too.
Try to Give Priority to Marketing Agencies that are Vertically Integrated
It is important to note that a marketing campaign spans the entire buyer’s journey. It takes the expertise of digital strategists, developers, content creators, social media marketers, SEO specialists to name a few. These experts and their knowledge and experience is needed to drive marketing campaigns forward towards success.
It’s best to go for a marketing agency that offers more services in their package. This can help you cut costs and save money. A marketing agency that offers a range of services can help you manage your time effectively as you will only have to communicate and collaborate with one agency for all your marketing needs. Vertically integrated marketing agencies offer businesses efficiency and siml;icty that will help drive the growth of your business forward.
