Top questions to ask your digital marketing agency

With so many components involved in an effective digital marketing strategy, often businesses simply don’t have the resources in-house to handle all that is required.

At this stage, many turn to sourcing digital marketing support through an agency, who will provide your business with a team of marketing experts at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house.

Choosing the most suitable digital marketing agency is where the real challenge begins. Whilst you want to find a cost-effective alternative or addition to your in-house marketing team, you also want to ensure you receive a quality service that achieves results. When you bring an agency on board you are trusting them to be the ‘voice’ of your business, whether on your blog, social platforms, emails or website in general, so making the wrong choice could have a significant impact on your business’ reputation.

To aid you in your decision, we’ve compiled a handy list of questions that should help you to determine if a digital marketing agency firstly, knows their stuff, and secondly, that they are the right fit for your business.

Do you have experience in my sector?

Although an agency will be well-versed in the fact-finding process when it comes to getting to know your business and industry, if they have previous experience in your sector, this puts them well ahead of the game. This will allow them to get started more quickly, with less questions for your team to answer and with a better idea of what works for your industry and what doesn’t.

What marketing strategy do you recommend?

Any digital marketing agency worth their salt will develop a detailed proposal; without this, how will you know what you’re getting for your money? Take this proposal away and analyse its relevance to your business. This should give you a clear indication as to whether or not an agency has truly looked at your specific business and its requirements.

Who will be my main point of contact?

Being passed from pillar to post within a company and having no fixed contact for the day-to-day handling of your digital marketing will ultimately lead to a frustrating experience. A dedicated account manager will get to know your business inside out, where work is up to and what you are ultimately looking to gain.

What does your team specialise in?

Whether you want to focus on email marketing, design, SEO or any number of other activities, you want to know that an agency has the knowledge, resources and capability in-house to handle these. Your ideal agency will have a variety of specialists in-house so that you truly receive a full digital marketing service.

What marketing tools do you use?

There is no right or wrong answer to this question, only what is right for your business. However, working with leading marketing tools and software such as Hootsuite, Search Console and Google Analytics, to name to just a few, will indicate that an agency will implement an efficient, informed and transparent digital marketing strategy.

How will you track progress?

Of course, you want to know that your digital marketing goals are being met by an agency, and therefore you want to ensure that they provide regular, detailed reports on their progress. Depending on the activities they handle, these reports should include website analytics (how many visitors have you had? What pages have been the most popular? Have you had any conversions?), social media metrics (how many people interacted with a post or clicked through to your site?), email stats (open rate, bounce rate, click rate, unsubscribes), amongst a variety of other metrics that will highlight what is working and what isn’t.

How do you keep up to date with industry developments?

The marketing landscape is ever-changing; a technique that worked one month could be entirely outdated the next. As experts in their field, your agency should be dedicated to keeping up to date with the latest techniques, innovations and developments that are impacting the industry. Say for example when Google changed its algorithm to focus on mobile sites, and you failed to adapt your website as a result, this could lead to significant drops in your search engine rankings. Ensuring that your agency keeps up to date with the fast-paced nature of the industry, therefore, will ensure that your strategy is continually working in line with your goals, not hindering them.

Digital marketing will act as a valuable tool for growth for a business but only when carried out by dedicated, experienced and knowledgeable marketers. In asking the questions we have outlined, we aim to provide you with a clear view on the expertise of an agency, and the value they will bring to your business.