Last Updated on 2021-04-01 by ppcguybklyn
When we are promoting the company's products and services, the most common question is: "Should we pay to find an agency to help with online marketing?". When working in an agency, it is also common to encounter clients who have not done their homework and are anxious to pay the agency to improve their performance. In this article, I will briefly analyze the factors that should be considered when deciding to find an agency, and how to choose the online marketing services provided by the agency.
Should I pay to find an agency?
I think the factors for deciding whether to pay to find a agency are as follows:
Our own marketing strategy
No one knows our company's situation, strengths and weaknesses better than ourselves, so before looking for an agency, the ideal situation is to have a clear marketing strategy. This includes the phased goals of online marketing, as well as the tools and services needed to achieve the goals. In this way, when discussing services with the agency, it will be easier for each other to reach a consensus. If you have clear goals and strategies, you can also greatly reduce the time spent on marketing budgets to test various promotion methods.
To put it simply, to find the motivation behind the agency's cooperation, the most ideal thing should be if the decision is in line with the current marketing strategy goals. It’s not recommended to have no goals and any background knowledge at all when discussing with the agency, the agency may not know how to help. Some agencies with a little lack of professional ethics are likely to take advantage of this and try to persuade us to spend a lot of money on inefficient marketing activities and tools, resulting in a waste of marketing budget and time.
Marketing budget and personnel costs
Another consideration is that we should compare the fees of the agency with the cost of online marketing itself. Compare this cost with the cost of hiring an digital marketing specialist directly within the company and determine which one is more in line with the current financial situation of the company. Knowing which digital marketing services to choose, it is generally cheaper to find an agency than hiring a specialist, but hiring an internal digital marketing specialist can save you the trouble of communication. The internal specialist is more involved and understands the company’s current situation better and can be more efficient in business execution. Therefore, when choosing an agency, one must consider whether the money that can be saved from the agency can make up for the inconvenience caused by not hiring an internal specialist.
Agency's professional competence
The last point to consider is the professional ability of the negotiating agency. This is more difficult to verify when communicating with the agency. It is better to ask the agency to provide some similar successful customer cases for reference and use it as a benchmark to judge whether this agency is really competent for the tasks we have to give them. Of course, when judging professional capabilities, you should also know that every client of the agency is not the same. The success of one client does not mean that the same method can be copied 100% to another client. Therefore you should consider the possibility of unsatisfactory results after finding an agency, and the backup plan if this happens.
Which digital marketing service is best for me?
After considering the above factors, if our final decision is to cooperate with the agency, how do we know which digital marketing services the agency provides are most suitable for us? The following is a summary of common digital marketing services and how to know that these services are suitable for our products and services.
SEO and website design optimization
The organic traffic brought by SEO is the cornerstone of online marketing. If my company can only choose one online marketing service, I will definitely choose SEO. According to the current trend of search engine algorithms, if a website wants stable organic search traffic, it must constantly generate corresponding website content for target keywords. Therefore, if our company website has a way to regularly update products and services related to the content, it would be a very good choice to cooperate with the agency to improve the company’s website SEO ranking. Choosing the right keywords and improving other SEO ranking elements is a chance to get a lot of traffic with a high conversion rate at a very low cost.
SEO services are not a panacea that can get results immediately after you pay. Many optimizations take time. At the same time, before choosing SEO services, we must also understand what kind of content our agency has arranged for us to fight for SEO rankings. It would be ideal if we have a little understanding of some basic SEO knowledge to avoid receiving traffic completely different from our target audience.
Of course, to profit from organic traffic is based on a website that has a good enough design to bring about a high conversion rate. If the website has a poor user experience and the overall conversion rate is too low, then paying for SEO to bring a lot of traffic may not necessarily have a good effect. Professional online marketing agencies have the capabilities to tailor an optimized website design to greatly increase the profitability of organic traffic.
PPC
To get good results from PPC and paid advertising, the website itself must have a good web design and conversion rate. Because advertising audiences who come to the website through paid advertising are usually willing to stay on the page for a very short time and are very easy to jump out. We must attract their attention in a short time and correctly guide them to complete the conversion to reach our ideal advertising performance. So I think it is very important to make sure that the website can provide a certain level of consumption or checkout experience before deciding to buy paid search ads.
Another advantage of paid search advertising is that it can obtain a very large amount of traffic in a short period of time. Therefore, if it is a newly established product or service that needs to expand brand awareness, it will be a good practice to use a large number of advertisements to attract potential consumers in the initial stage.
Paid search advertising is the easiest online marketing service to consume marketing budget. Therefore, before communicating with the agency and deciding to purchase paid search advertising, you must set the advertising goals (pursuing conversion or pursuing traffic) and budget to avoid spending money on advertising and yet failing to achieve the desired outcome.
Email marketing
Email marketing focuses on interacting with customers who have established a relationship with our website and have left contact information, so that they will continue to come back to buy our products and services. So if the number of our past customers has been so large that we can sort out an email list of a certain size, and the customers who visited in the past have a certain return visit or repurchase rate, then we can consider using email marketing to expand our profit.
Before using email marketing, we must make sure that we have enough materials (product photos, imitated life photos, etc.) to design various promotional emails for the office. Regularly updating these materials is very important to improve the efficiency of email marketing. If emails always use the same materials and content, consumers will soon lose interest and never open the promotional emails we send.
Social marketing
Most B2C e-commerce websites are very suitable for using various social media to establish and deepen the relationship with their own consumer communities. Professional agencies should be able to help arrange the most suitable social posting schedule and content, and design the copies that best resonate with the community. Similar to Email marketing, we must make sure to provide new materials and content on a regular basis to ensure that every time the community asks, there is a different content.
Conclusion
Before negotiating with a digital marketing agency, if you can spend a little time doing your homework in advance, you will be less likely to be led by the agency’s sales methods, and the agency can also know more clearly what your needs are. It is a very good thing for you and the agency, and it is easier for both parties to reach a consensus, which will lay a good foundation for future cooperation.
