How To Choose A Digital Marketing Agency
It can be tricky to decide on the perfect partner agency to manage your online presence. If you’re not technically minded, it can be especially easy to find yourself caught out by agencies to whom you might be ill-suited. This week on 21 Digital’s blog, we’ll run you through a couple of top tips to help you pick the ideal digital marketing agency.
Invest In Your Online Presence
Basically, don’t just pick the very smallest and the cheapest, as neither are a concrete guarantee of quality. Some people prefer dealing with small agencies – being quite small ourselves, that we can understand!
But remember, your online presence is a part of your brand. That means it’s often worth spending the extra penny with a trusted, established agency, rather than a one-man band just quoting the lowest prices.
Think About Big Pictures And Long Term Relationships
Linked closely with our last point, lots of people have friends who are web developers or SEO experts. This makes it tempting to just go into business with their mates, rather than go to the trouble of finding an agency.
However, this isn’t always a great idea. For example, if your friend builds you a website, and then you somehow fall out with them, you have two options:
- Continue dealing with them, and try to ignore the awkward outside context to your interactions.
- Pick a new partner agency, pulling the plug on your business relationship and putting all their hard work – and your money – down the drain.
There’s also the matter that if they decide to end the relationship themselves, you could potentially be locked out of your brand-new website. Meanwhile if their work isn’t up to your standard during development, you might sometimes risk your friendship by pointing this out (especially if you’re going back and forth repeatedly).
At 21 Digital, we’d advise keeping your professional and personal lives separate – in this case, anyway! Picking a brand new partner agency allows you to forge a solid, professional relationship from scratch, leaving both your business and personal lives free from stress or worry.
Make Sure They’re Communicating With You
This is a big one. It doesn’t matter if you’re not digitally minded – you need to understand where your money is going, and it’s the job of the agency to explain that to you. If they’re not capable of this, you might want to think carefully about dealing with them.
At 21 Digital, we pride ourselves on speaking honestly, simply and clearly with you. When you spend money with us, we take care to justify every decision we make with solid data and reasoning to back it up. We’ll also let you know before we act on any major decisions with your site or campaigns. To be honest, that’s the bare minimum we think you should be able to expect from your digital marketing agency!
Get A Feel For Them
Once you’ve narrowed down your possible agencies to two or three, it’s worth visiting their premises to get an idea of how they do business. It’s true that you can tell a lot about a digital agency from how they present themselves online. But when it comes right down to it, there’s no substitute for gauging their professionalism and dedication in person. It gives you a chance to get to know their staff, how their company works and how that will help your business.
(We’ll admit to being a little biased on this one here at 21 Digital agency, as we’ve just had some brilliant new window graphics done for our studio Think Tank. But our points above still stand!)
And Finally…
Above all, one rule stays the same no matter what your industry. Go with your gut instinct. If something feels off – whether it’s in the way they talk to you, something they’re not keen on discussing or even just the way in which they first got in touch – you should never hesitate to disengage. At the end of the day, it’s your brand on the line!
Our staff at 21 Digital agency understand this better than anyone. We’ve got a range of services to help you make it on the web, and we’ve got the skills and enthusiasm to apply them. What’s more, we pride ourselves on helping our customers to understand exactly what they’re spending money on, which is one of the reasons our loyal customers keep coming back time and again.
Check out some of our case studies to find out how we’ve helped businesses just like yours, or give us a call today on 01282 660 560. Let’s talk!
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