Marketing is critical to any business that targets aggressive growth. There are many marketers within an organization who are often confused about finding the right marketing agency, so you are not alone. Even the seasoned ones are quite skeptical and prefer to create their own checklists before choosing a good and compatible digital marketing agency. No digital marketing company is the same and this is because there are no set rules in the digital marketing space apart from generating the right results. Having said that, marketing is a mix of too many spices and not everyone knows the right mix to bring out the exact flavor. There are a lot many factors that need to be considered before choosing one.
With more and more people looking digital before they buy a product or a service, it has become critical that your business is omnipresent at the right places to catch the customer’s eye. Again digital marketing is not only about sales, but it is also about branding and creating the right image in the eyes of the visitor. So, having a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy is very important to the success of your overall digital marketing efforts.
This article will tell you why you should be choosing certain digital platforms [and why you should not, for others] and how you are going to depend on them to maximize results.
Honestly, there are too many digital marketing agencies out there and they have mushroomed due to the ever-increasing internet coverage and usage of devices to research and buy products or services online. The more the merrier, however, choosing the right one is the biggest challenge for marketers within an organization. Now let us look at a few pointers about the process of going about choosing the right digital marketing agency.
Expectations: As a marketer fishing for the right digital marketing agency, you need to make a clear list of expectations that you would want from the agency along with a process of how they should execute it. You can actually create that with the help of your internal marketing team and figure out what you can do in-house and what you need outsourced. Now that you know what to outsource, the task becomes easier. Of course, proper coordination of tasks should be planned beforehand with timelines and a proper schedule.
Operational list: A digital marketing agency should be vertically aligned and should be able to do the following tasks with relative expertise:
Web development and design.
Email marketing in detail with all things like segmentation included.
Search engine optimization – the mother of all digital marketing practices, they should understand on-page as well as off-page factors including the technology that you use for your website.
Search engine marketing including online advertising (AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads and other forms of PPC).
Of the above, what are the agency’s strengths and do they match your requirements is an important question to ask, It is for you to choose which of the above are required for your marketing practices and which are not. So, evaluating a digital marketing agency on what you need and also what you don’t need is important since they need to understand those synergies that exist between all these processes.
Objectives: All the processes, in-house or outsourced should have a singular focus of attracting relevant and quality traffic, improve brand awareness, giving out the same message relating to the mission and vision of your organization and bring in leads that can convert them into customers. Last but not least, they should also target existing customers for up-sell, cross-sell or re-sell.
Long term: While choosing the right digital marketing agency, look for a long term relationship, even if they have often made mistakes or failed since changing agencies will affect your marketing adversely and you will have to start at the beginning again. That would be a loss of resources as well as traction built, however small it could be. This means, you as a marketer has to choose wisely and with caution.
Lead time: Always remember that creating a relationship and an understanding of requirements takes time, do give the digital marketing agency you choose a little time, probably a few weeks to get things working smoothly. And, when you choose wisely, the agency will give its best and that will be to your advantage. Passion and hard work are the hallmarks of any good agency and you should always look for those before anything else. Skills and technology can be acquired in a short time, but passion and hard work cannot be.
Research: Once you shortlist a list of digital marketing agencies say 10 of them, always do or let someone do a background search on the internet for them. Many will come with fantastic reviews, some with bad reviews and some with a mixed bag. There is a huge challenge here. Most reviews you find on the internet may be wrong or misleading. It is important to use some genius to figure out the best ones, by adding 2+2 or by checking how the reviewer is related to the agency and so on. This can be a very tedious process and it is worth spending time on. Google reviews, on the other hand, are normally quite transparent and dependable. Again, a word of caution, not everyone wins the battle every time, so an agency with a bad review need not be bad as it is made out to be. Research and find out why they acquired that one, in particular. There are many ways to check these out.
Past Work: It is also important to check the kind of work that the digital marketing agency has done in the past, so most of them would have a portfolio section on their website. Please check those as well as case studies if available. This is the best way to assess the capabilities of the agency related to your needs.
Spy and try: Last, but not the least, try and find out agencies that your competitors are using and the results they are getting. I would not recommend using the same agency but you will get a fair idea of the kind of digital marketing agency you should use.
Now is the time to ask your chosen agencies for an RFP (Request for Purpose). This will give you more details of the agency you have chosen including their company background, ways of working, pricing, and any portfolios you may have missed. This should also come with target audiences, success rates, timelines and many other details including terms and conditions they work with, contract and these will help you assess the agency better.
The above cover concisely the elements involved in selecting the right digital marketing agency. In case you have questions, please feel to ask away on the comments below.
First, I am up to my neck reading listicles daily – 5 points to remember, 7tips to success, 10 things to decide upon and so on…. I know they create a titular interest for readers but most of them come with no or unimportant content most times…. I am sure that those serious readers who are really really interested in a topic would read the content anyway, listicle or not if it contains some great content. Listicles have been a part of everyone’s digital marketing strategy for too long now, and I have really stopped reading those, for me, they are a waste of time, 90% of the time.
So, I am not going to arrange this post as a list
but will try and weave it logically so that it makes sensible sense and adds
value to my fellow marketers.
Before I dive in, I think we need to understand
that a digital marketing strategy is different for every business and depends
on many factors despite being in the same domain. For example, the Coca-Cola
company may have an objective of introducing 3 other flavored drinks in the
market this year, while Pepsi-Cola could be looking at launching in 5 other
countries. So, the marketing strategy would definitely be different for both
businesses, although the objective of enhancing sales and making more money
lies at the heart of any business, always.
Sadly, most marketers have the same blueprint of digital marketing strategy for all businesses across domains. Create content, distribute, create more links, create limited AdWords campaigns and do scheduled social media posts, all with good intentions and with hardly any result to show. Businesses, today have become wary of outsourcing their marketing needs for the very same reason.
As a marketer, I will first try and understand the client’s business, the vision, mission, and short and long term objectives before even thinking of marketing it. I would like to understand more about their products and services and how they differ from their competitors and what their USPs are. Only then, yes only then I will analyze the competition and then get into the history of what has been done and achieved in terms of marketing until now, either by their own team or through external agencies.
Getting into the groove, I will first create a
realistic marketing framework:
Marketing Framework
Before I do anything, I will check which of the
competitors are doing the best and why so! They must be doing something good to
get better results. There are many tools to achieve that and most of them are
reliable. Call it spying or intruding, but then the best best way to succeed is
to follow success and better it.
Once I close this analysis, I would map my client
KPI’s and objectives and compare to the competition. The next step is to tweak
them to achieve what needs to be achieved. Remember, once these are frozen and
set in stone [which can’t be, but for now, yes], there is a lot more thought I
would give to understand:
How a frozen KPI is related to the goals to be
achieved?
What are the metrics that need to be measured?
UX is of paramount importance – are the
measurements catering to UX in any manner? If yes, how and how much?
What and how many metrics needs monitoring and how
those variances contribute to the goals included in my marketing plan?
Now is the time when I would delve into the details
– timelines, content mapping, editorial calendars, AdWords creative and social
media tones. There are too many tools out there to help us marketers do that…
choosing the right ones is a different story.
Once I have the metrics nailed down to a
“T” and link them to my KPI’s [so that I am on track with my goals],
it is time for execution testing for a few weeks.
Ask a few KPI based question during
testing
Have I set the right metrics for goal measurement?
What are the metrics I need to focus more and which ones can I ignore for some
time…? I will try and analyze results weekly, probably daily too during this
time and figure out which goals I have achieved and which I haven’t. For those
that I achieved, which metrics got them across the line and for those that I
didn’t, which metrics did I ignore? This tells me what I should improve upon
and which should I ignore.
The digital marketing strategy can get tricky. It is not only about results and data but also about the human element and experience, the gut feeling as I call it. For me, traffic is not only about numbers but also about visitors/humans and each of them is different. The data I glean from here tells me more about the UX and visitor behavior which will be a great help to improve upon at a later stage. End of the day, UX and user behavior are the ones that will define the ROI, domain agnostically, every time.
Time to build an effective digital marketing strategy for better sales funnels
The step-wise customer journey right from being a
visitor to a customer is what a marketing and sales funnel is. Though that
sounds simple, it is much more complicated due to data analysis and deep
learning structures that AI is honing presently. The break-down, simply put can be:
The outreach: Website, landing pages, social media
outreach, advertising, video marketing, content marketing, social media posts,
and infographics – mostly attractive and useful content, like this one.
The conversion: Visitors taking action, what the
intent could be – to just leave their emails, read eBooks or even take part in
contests or make a purchase.
The closure: Feedback, support systems, reviews and
so on.
Customer retention: revisits, offers, email
marketing, surveys, and many other outreach tools.
We call them funnels because the widest part of the
entire marketing exercise is right at the outreach point where brand awareness
is maxed out along with customer engagement. Of course, the numbers dwindle and
the funnel begins to narrow down, irrespective of how artistic it looks, it is,
after all, a numbers game. The funnel begins with relationship building and
ends with a sale and then when we get to retention, it holds its shape.
The better a marketer is or the better the digital marketing strategy, the funnel will lose its shape slowly and of course, it comes with great tools, expertise, and experience. I don’t panic, I just give it some time and the funnel elongates slowly while I keep tweaking the marketing strategy through measurement, analysis, and experience.
Content is the basis of marketing,
what works?
Content marketing is much more than writing wonderful blogs and tweets. Content marketing is meant to brand you as an expert in your field and to that end, learning new technologies and tricks to enhance your content is very important, each piece that you produce should inform the reader about something new and happening, not in a nerdy way but in a way that he/she understands. Personally, I keep it very simple and straight, obvious no one wants to waste time reading 10 pages and finding out that he/she is no wiser for it. Creativity and information are what gets you readership, not long content as Google recommends, sorry, that was not intended to be criticism.
Your services could be complicated or your product
or technology, but, it is important to tell a story, a story that keeps the
reader engrossed, so value and quality are the hallmarks of content marketing
and not volumes as many many marketers still like to believe, no offense to
anyone, everyone to themselves.
Content with information of value to a reader,
interspersed with proper CTA’s is what I would like to produce in the form of a
story. I always keep a repository of content produced well in advance, so that
I never fall short. However, the repository is always at the top of the mark,
since I keep revisiting and editing that stuff, forever.
Content marketing depends on a few more factors
Another issue with content is its importance to SEO, keyword usage, density, and yadda-yadda. I believe in it, but that is not as important as user centricity for me. If I can distribute my content to the right areas where my audience hangs out as an interesting read, search engines will waste no time in indexing it. That of course, is entirely my belief and people who cannot produce the right kind of written word would actually focus on the SEO part. Finally, I track the readership and ensure that it is read by most people and possibly go viral, while I keep my fingers crossed. No, I am not talking luck here; I am talking about my doing everything right. And, if that doesn’t work, I go back to my drawing board and learn all over again until I get it right.
Flexible planning
Any marketing strategy or plan that I create is
always open-ended, means, it will have enough scope to better it or tweak it
until it works perfectly and gets me the results I expect. I hate giving
deadlines to clients, but then it is important to have a plan on a timeline,
and to that end, I always keep some extra time on hand. In my experience, I have
seen some unexpected events happening, what better example than search engine
updates that turn your plans topsy-turvy. I have been there and done that, but
gone ahead and forgotten the bitter experiences.
I do have some blank spots on deadlines, just that
I may fall back sometimes or to tweak a few things since the competition has
gone one up to get better results. New technology, tweaks, ideas as you go into
execution need some space to implement and so the blanks are important to me.
All through, I never lose sight of my goals and KPI’s though.
Have a clear direction
I normally plan my content marketing direction to
be steady for at least a single quarter, unless something unusual comes along
in the domain and things change drastically. The direction will be oriented to
a particular goal and the goals are measured continuously in order to ensure
that I am doing everything right.
It is also critically important to understand that
all distribution channels are oriented to the same or similar messaging so that
a reader or a visitor is aligned to a singular topic or discussion. This will
enable a visitor to search for your channels and read through more thus
improving his/her chances of conversion or to turn into your brand advocate.
Have highly informative, shareable and SEO-friendly
content ready to achieve expected results and make the best out of your
marketing strategy.
Inference
To build a workable, effective and efficient marketing strategy, you should have some excellent content to fall back upon, of course, content is the raw material for marketing, be it articles, Facebook posts, tweets or any other form of content.
And, remember, executing a digital marketing strategy is a punctual time-line, having some project management experience under the belt could come in great use. All, digital marketing channels should be speaking the same language. Moreover, each and every detail is important including grammar, misspelled words and any other errors. One reader, coming across a simple overseen mistake could forever be gone, which means you have lost a prospective customer. Be a perfectionist and not a hobby marketer, it will get you nowhere in the long run.
For me, with over 15 years as a digital marketer,
marketing is still an art and a science and, no strategy big or small, I have
created was cut and dry.
The smallest elements that I give importance to are the brand story, visitor engagement, and journey through the funnel, the rest is taken care of by the digital marketing strategy itself. I strive to engage the largest group of audience, remember, the larger the number of visitors, the larger the conversions and customers. Not that I give importance to numbers or analytics, but I strive to convert 5 visitors from 100 instead of 2 from a thousand.
I am confident that you get my point here, the idea
is not about numbers but about customers who will turn into brand advocates and
will keep coming back for more.
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