Every business needs more sales in order to run in the market for a longer period of time and that is why every business (regardless of the size) has their marketing budgets that they invest on multiple places in order to attract their targeted audience and ideally convert them into paying customers.
Internet marketing (also known as Digital Marketing) became really famous mainly for two reasons. One of the reasons is the less amount of investment needed for this platform and one can expect greater ROI if s/he plays smart. Another reason is the availability of a larger audience being found in almost every niche helping content to become viral. According to multiple researches, people spend more time on the internet as compared to television or radio.
With the passage of time, many new companies (big and small) are investing their time and money on digital marketing and you can easily find companies that are spending heavily on digital marketing so as to get greater ROIs.
Startups like Dropbox, Kissmetrics and Pinterest became huge just by investing their money on digital marketing.
There are literally thousands of digital marketing agencies in the industry; however, one of the things that needs to be considered is the work quality of the professional or an agency. In this article, I am going to cover 5 things that an ideal digital agency should have in order to become an ethical and a results-driven agency.
In case you are looking for an agency to handover your digital needs for your business, you probably should look for these things before actually signing a deal with them.
#1. Content Lovers
When it comes to digital marketing, content is considered to be the backbone as no online marketing campaign can be performed without the help of some creative content that may include a text blog post, an infographic, a video or anything but there has to be a chunk of content.
Moz.com is considered to be one of the leaders when it comes to the digital marketing industry and if you closely look at their own digital marketing campaign, it is heavily based on content marketing. I am not saying that every agency should have to have that kind of content but at least they should be content lovers unlike the agencies that only care about securing rankings in search engine using certain key phrases.
Take my suggestion and avoid handing over your digital marketing requirements in the hands of people who only consider rankings to be the crux of the whole digital marketing game. It is much more than that where you have to think about traffic and conversions as well.
#2. Social Savvy
Digital marketing and social media go hand in hand. Social Media might not help convert much but when it comes to reputation development and brand awareness, there is simply no alternate to social media. Depending upon the kind of industry, the social media platforms might vary but there should be one or more platforms where the target audience should be present. For a digital marketing niche, platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook are considered to be relevant.
Talk about social savvy and who are better social savvy than Team Blue Glass. They recently won the UK and European search awards and their strategies to stay active on the social media and constantly communicate with the target audience are phenomenal.
When it comes to hiring an agency or a professional digital marketer, it is advisable to look into their immediate social profiles and see if they are socially active because if they are not, they might not be able to help you with tasks related to social media and without these, your digital marketing campaigns might not be able to achieve fruitful results.
#3. Ethical vs. Unethical Agency
One of the major problems of the digital marketing industry is the non-availability of a proper certification or anything that may classify digital agencies as ethical vs. the non-ethical ones. There have been businesses that were ripped off just because they had fallen prey to the wrong ones.
Here is a way to find out if your company is ethical or not! Ask them what tools they use in order to process the campaign? Remember that the tools, which help automate work like Magic Article Submitter, are unethical tools and Google suggests not using these tools to automate your work.
However, in case they are using software that helps them accelerate their work process like Raven Tools, CheckMarx etc, then they are more likely to be considered as ethical agencies and you can actually hand over your digital marketing campaign in their hands.
#4. Niche Reputation
Digital Marketing niche might not be as big as real estate or fashion but it is much more active than most of the niches available online, which clearly means that communication, relationship building and online help ratio is much higher than the rest of the niches. If you want outstanding results from your agency, it is important to see if they have their own online reputation within the industry.
iAcquire is one of those agencies who seriously works on its online reputation and maintains a consistent online presence by continuously working on different campaigns and receiving positive word of mouth from the community. Again, while handing over your digital marketing campaign in the hands of an agency, it is important to find out if the agency itself carries an online reputation within the community, and see what other people have to say about them.
Usually it’s hard to get positive word of mouth from the industry leaders; however, if they have it, they probably are the ideal one for you. In case they don’t have it, you know that you need to begin your hunt again.
#5. Transparency Level
This is probably the most important point to consider before choosing an agency to handle your digital marketing campaign because if they are not being transparent, there are chances that they will take your money and waste your time without even answering the basics like why and how it needs to be done.
There are companies like Portent who are famous for delivering quality results and have a transparent relationship with their clients, which means that the clients usually have an idea about what their agency is upto and what they should be expecting from the project on a month to month basis.
The agency, you are planning to work with, should tell you what is their plan, what exactly they are going to do, what kind of results are being expected out of it and what is the risk level. If they fail to deliver the answers of these basic questions, you probably should look for some other agency.
There seem to be a plenty of ideas that one should consider while hiring a digital marketing professional or agency but I believe the ones being given above would serve as a great start for you!
Images: ”asia businessman writing Digital marketing concept and other related words, on touch screen interface isolated on white background/ Shutterstock.com“
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