When it comes to hiring online marketing agencies, it is important to understand that this job cannot be completely outsourced. It is important to understand the actual requirements of your company and what are the goals you are looking forward to achieving through this. Considering all that, you can work in conjunction with a third party which can help you with your online marketing agenda.
Sometimes it can be hard for entrepreneurs to identify the best help they can find for their job. Being a very new profile in the market, online marketing agencies can sometimes be hard to judge on their credibility, and sometimes it is even harder to call off bluffs and people trying to rip you off your money. Therefore, a good homework is important.
Following are some points which may help you in your pursuit of a credible online marketing agency for your company.
1) Pinpoint your needs
Study your model closely. Find out the missing pieces, and then figure out the services that you actually need to increase the viability of your model. Once you know these things, you are ready to start looking for an agency that can provide you with just that. This helps you to come up with an action plan and to segregate the things that can be solved internally by your home staff, and things that need the intervention of an external agency.
2) Research
Once you come across a company, it’s important to dig into its previous work. Try to find out about the previous projects that the company took up. Try to look for projects similar to yours, and try to find out how much was the company able to help that client. This will give you a glimpse into your future association with the company, what to expect and what not to, and whether that helps your cause.
3) Company’s credibility and reputation
Online Marketing Agencies are a fairly new thing in the market, so decades of experience may not say much about the company’s reputation and credibility. It is important to look deeper into things like how many projects have the company taken up for the particular service that you are looking for from the company. It is also worth looking into that how has the company initiated and then progressed over the years. Awards and recognitions also say a lot about the company’s credibility.
4) Communication
After you have handed over the project, the only thing that will connect you to the agency will be its communication channel. Make sure that the agency maintains a healthy and bidirectional information flow over its communication channel. It will also help you in evaluating that how much will the agency take care of your own digital marketing.
5) Contact previous clients
Every agency will advertise some of their previously successful associations with their clients. Take an opportunity to contact these clients. You cannot just go by the face value of the advertisements put up by the agencies. A conversation with previous clients can reveal a lot about the nature of the agency. Analysing the level of satisfaction, the cost-effectiveness of the services offered, etc, can all help your research a lot.
6) The Price charged by the agency
It is important to have a clear idea of how much money are you willing to spend on hiring an agency. Some big agencies may offer you additional services, which you may not need, but will drop a big-fat bill on your lap. You want to avoid that scenario and have a clear idea beforehand about exactly what services you need from the company. That being said, it’s also very important to avoid associating with some companies which may offer very lucrative price points but may not guarantee the desired result. The key here is to stop thinking from your pocket and concentrate on the quality of individual services that you expect from the agency, and materialising the money spent on each of them.
7) SEO Agencies
While it is a widely known fact that a healthy SEO campaign is very important for the growth of any online marketing, many entrepreneurs lack proper idea about its implementation, and thus have no other option, than to turn to third-party agencies to do this job for them. The problem is that they are not always the good guys. Some SEO agencies may come to you with the sole intention of taking your money from you, by offering just minimal, or sometimes no benefit to your SEO campaign. There are some tips that you should have on your fingertips when you set out to look for a good SEO Agency.
● Any company promising you the moon is most probably lying to you. There is no way to guarantee good rankings on Google because SEO optimization is a dynamic process.
● If any SEO agency promises you that duplicates in content has nothing to do with the rankings of the website, then they probably don’t know what they are doing, and you should immediately walk away.
● If the SEO expert that you are talking to has no knowledge whatsoever of the content that your website carries, you should probably reconsider your association with them. SEO is a dynamic process, and each type of website requires its own type of optimization.
● If your SEO expert refuses to share the information about his processes with you, saying that the processes are too complicated for you to understand, you should probably insist them, and refuse further association if they deny you access. No matter what your field of expertise is, understanding the processes of SEO is not a very tough thing.
● Changes should be made with every update in Google’s algorithms, or at least an eye should be kept out for any significant changes that can affect the rankings of your website.
● Your SEO expert may tell you that overloading your content with keywords will help your rankings. But that is not the case anymore. Any unnatural repetition of keywords will leave your rankings as it is, if not adversely affect it.
Endnote
An online marketing agency holds the key to successful promotion of your product on the internet. This article has tried to enlighten the reader about the qualities of such an agency, so that he can make an informed choice.
