Digital marketing is an absolute must if you’re looking to grow your business online. There are 3 ways to go about doing it:
– Hire a full time marketer
– Hire a part time employee/freelancer
– Hire a Digital marketing agency to get their hands dirty on your behalf
Going with one of the last 2 suffer from problem called ‘Trust’ and ‘Uncertainty’. You will either come out a winner or a scar that you’ll have paid for in time more then money. So here are some essentials to keep in mind when hiring a freelancer or a marketing agency.
Spam and Blackhat
You are not an expert at marketing and analytics. You don’t know where or how the traffic is coming from. Majority of the agencies resort to spamming that might damage your reputation. 2018 is not the time where you grow by just bringing in random traffic. You need to focus on brand building and conversions!
Blackhat techniques to show you the numbers is another common practice which you should be aware of
Breadth of services and capabilities
It pays to keep the touch points as low as possible. A single agency handling everything from content to videos will save you considerable time and let you focus on your core business. This would also enable you to maintain consistency & sync between all your marketing collateral and operations.
Experience
Digital Marketing is a game of experience and patience. To become an overnight success, you need to burn the midnight oil for years. You need to hire experienced folks who are confident and know what they are doing.
Having said that, there are smart folks who out perform competitors irrespective of the years of experience under their belt. Look for A teams.
Cost
Digital marketing is too competitive a market. There are 1000’s of players in the market offering the same service at a multi fold price difference. Look for moderately prices agency. Too high is probably just over spending for the extra edge which most times you will never get. Quotes with too low a price is a Big No No!! They probably will never execute, and might just make it all the more difficult for the next agency by spamming your content and website all over.
Note: It is important to engage your visitors and make yourself more visible if you want to be seen online. Write blogs and publish them on your site which is informative and can draw your visitor’s attention. Create a subscription database so that each blog that you publish goes to these recipients, thus increasing your site traffic. Content optimization helped our clients increase their traffic by almost 300 percent. Check our healthcare digital marketing and legal digital marketing services for success.
Stakeholders
The stakeholders should be honest, smart and responsive. They should own the services they provide. Otherwise you’ll always be stuck in a loop of dealing with a CEO, account manager, or an executive who runs your operations.
Tools/Services used
It’s 2018 and there are tools for everything. Look for teams who don’t shy away from spending a little extra on tools to automate and streamline processes, thereby delivering higher quality output at low expense. If they’re not using these tools, chances are, their processes and practices are dated as well.
Licensed & plagiarism free Content
Make sure the agency you choose knows the implications of using copied content. The best ones would use licensed images, videos, Gif’s, software etc. The content should be 100% plagiarism free.
Attention to detail
Digital marketing is fairly complex. There are over 200 points(yes, we started counting, but that a topic for other day) to keep in mind when executing upon your strategy the right way. Make sure the agency suggests the right approaches and has an eye for detail. A high level strategy will get you from A to B, but Z is still far far away.
Reporting
Monitoring and reporting are 2 critical elements when hiring and agency or a freelancer. You need to make sure that the tasks are being done the right way, at the right time in order to prevent unnecessary delays or non-performance later.
