How to know if a digital marketing agency is good
How to know if a digital marketing agency is good
Have you ever gotten nervous before a big purchase? When you’re buying an expensive product — say, a new car — it’s easy to feel worried about the quality of that product. What if there ends up being something wrong with it? How can you be sure that it’s good?
It’s not just buying a product that can bring on this feeling, though. When evaluating professional services, many wonder how to know if a digital marketing agency is good. Maybe you’re considering a specific partnership, but you’re having doubts. Or maybe you just want a guideline to go by before you start researching options.
Below, WebFX shares several indicators of a quality marketing agency.
1. They assign you a dedicated account representative
Something you’ll often see with low-quality agencies is that when you want to talk to them about something, they’ll throw you into a generic support line queue. That kind of impersonal approach makes it hard to talk to someone who’s directly involved with your account.
An indicator of a good marketing agency is that they assign you a dedicated account representative. That representative is only responsible for a few different clients, so they have the time to get to know each one personally. That makes it way easier to talk to them about what’s happening with your marketing.
2. They don’t rely too heavily on automation
When you evaluate a marketing agency, make sure that it assigns actual humans to manage your marketing. Some agencies try to cut corners by automating as much as they can, to the point where they have automated programs fully running all of your ad spend and data analysis.
A good agency will take a human-first approach. They’ll have actual marketing experts making campaign decisions, assessing your data, creating your content, and more. That doesn’t mean that any automation is bad — it can actually be really helpful. But you want big, important decisions in the hands of actual people, not machines.
3. They have a lot of marketing experience
The reason human marketers are so important is that they have a lot of marketing experience. That experience informs all the decisions they make regarding your campaigns. Of course, not every agency meets this requirement equally.
If you want high-quality marketing results, you should look for an agency that has many years of experience in the field. An agency that’s only been around a short while hasn’t really proven itself yet and may still be learning the ropes. That doesn’t mean newer agencies are inherently bad — it just means a more experienced agency is a safer bet, and it will probably produce more reliable results.
4. They give you full ownership over all accounts and data
Not all marketing agencies are completely honest. Some of them behave unethically, and one way they might do that is by keeping all your campaigns and data somewhere they have ownership over. That means if you ever try to leave for another agency, you won’t be able to take any of your campaigns with you. You’ll have to start from scratch.
When you evaluate a marketing agency, one of the things you should check for is whether they give you full ownership over all your campaigns and data. For example, if they create an account for your business to better monitor your search traffic, they should give you ownership over the account.
5. Their own marketing is high-quality and effective
Imagine you visit a marketing agency’s website, only to find that it’s poorly put together, with badly written content that doesn’t rank in search results. That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement of their skills. If they can’t even create good marketing campaigns for themselves, how will they do so for you?
One strategy for choosing a digital marketing agency is to find one that has a stellar marketing strategy for itself. You want an agency that has a clean, functional website, plenty of pages ranking high in Google search results, an engaging social media presence, and so on. If they can do all of that for themselves, they can do it for you.
6. They’re transparent with their processes
One sure sign that you’re not choosing the right digital marketing agency is if they refuse to be transparent and open with you. If they promise to fix your marketing but then proceed to do all of it behind closed doors without letting you in on what they’re doing, that’s a giant red flag.
A good agency will be very transparent and honest about how they’re handling your campaigns. In addition to giving you any information you ask for, reputable agencies will send you regular reports on what they’ve done with your campaigns and what results they’ve driven. That gives you peace of mind about the state of your marketing.
7. They drive a significant profit for their clients
When you evaluate a digital marketing agency, one of the biggest considerations you may have is cost. And of course, that’s a good thing to consider. You want to make sure their price is within your budget. Arguably, the more important consideration, though, is whether they drive a profit.
It might seem like a less expensive agency is always better, and sometimes it is, but that’s not always the case. Even if an agency costs a lot, it’s worth it if it drives so much revenue for your business that you receive a high return on investment (ROI). In other words, focus on the ROI when deciding if a particular agency is a cost-effective option.
8. They have plenty of positive reviews
There might not be any better indicator of a good marketing agency than positive reviews. If you want to know what kind of treatment to expect from an agency, just look at how they’ve treated their other clients. Check out some different review sites to see what people are saying about them.
Are the reviews largely negative, or an even mix of good and bad? In either of those cases, the agency you’re looking at may not be worth it. But if you find an agency with a huge number of positive reviews, that’s a great sign. Every agency will have a few negative reviews, of course, but the key is finding one where the consensus among clients is overwhelmingly positive.
This story was produced by WebFX and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
