How to get the most out of your digital marketing agency

So, as a digital marketing agency that’s been around for a while (15 years to be exact), we’ve identified the ways our clients have helped us achieve massive success for their business. Here are our four tips on how to get the best results from your team of outsourced digital marketing agency professionals.

1. Set clear marketing goals and stick to them (for a while at least)

Clear goals are essential for both parties to understand the direction they’re working towards. Examples of clear goals:

• Increase organic traffic with 30% in the next six months;
  
• Increase the number of (quality) leads generated with 30% in the next 12 months;
  
• Increase our brand-related searches with 10% in the next quarter.

Your digital marketing team will then put their heads together on what they can do to achieve these goals and set out to achieve them.

As you may have noticed, we added a specific timeframe for each of the goals and none of them were short. Why? Because marketing (of any kind) is a trial-and-error type of business where we plan, implement, test, review and tweak to reach our goals. We have a good idea of what will work, but any marketing professional will tell you that what we think will work doesn’t work every time.

With clear goals in mind, and the expectation that the goalpost won’t move, we will strive to achieve them with the security that success can be obtained.

2. Make resources available to achieve the goals or adjust the goals to match your resources

There are extremely creative and trendsetting marketing ideas out there. Take the Lego Movie (one of the best content marketing examples in recent history), where Lego not only got audiences to watch a two-hour long Lego advertisement, but made them pay for the privilege. As a result, Lego’s profit grew with 12%. Though this doesn’t sound like much, 12% on a couple of billion dollars is immense.

If you’re a local business, however, making a full-length feature film is likely outside your budget. So, if what your digital marketing agency comes up with falls outside your budget, you should have an open conversation about your budget constraints. When you do, give them the opportunity to adjust the goals, or the time within which these goals can be achieved, to match what you have available.

If you are willing to adjust your goals, and revisit budgets when your business starts growing, your team of digital experts will strive to get you the most out of your budget.

3. Give credit where credit is due

Digital marketers thrive on results and feedback. When rankings climb, conversions pour in and core KPIs improve, there is nothing that quite makes our day like a simple ‘good job’ or ‘thank you’.

So, if you’re working with a team that has been getting great results, give them the credit and the trust that is due for helping your business grow.

What does trust look like? When they make recommendations on improving your results that will likely cost more, don’t see it as them trying to upsell you, trust that they’ve found, and are trying to take advantage of, an opportunity where your business can grow.

4. Make an effort to understand what we do

Our favourite clients are also those that are most demanding. They’re our favourite clients because they make constant effort to read (and understand) our reports and what we do to drive results.

And because they make the effort to understand what we do, they are naturally able to do the first three tips on this list.

As a result, we can show you an example of one of the clients whose business has grown exponentially; all because we worked together as a partnership. A picture is worth a thousand words, so we’ll simply show you what we mean:

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This client’s lowest month in terms of traffic (December), is 42 times more than when they first started with our services in 2016 (that’s a 4,200% growth) and 15 times more than December 2016 (that’s an 1,500% growth).

This growth has also reflected in their business’s growth throughout the years. To top this all off, they’ve expanded from a company that employed six people from a garage to a company with a national footprint and hundreds of employees!

Making an effort to understand what your digital agency does will pay off for your business’s long-term goals.

How do you get the most out of your digital marketing agency?

Approach your digital marketing agency in the same way you would approach working with people in your team. Have open discussions about what can and can’t be done, trust their judgement in the field of their expertise, acknowledge the victories they’ve won for you, and try to understand how their recommendations will influence your business.

About Starbright

We’re a diverse bunch of creatives who possess the same values: Try new things, solve problems, go the extra mile and strive to be better at what we do every single day.

We’ve been helping clients build websites, design corporate identities, rank on Google, generate leads, and manage their social media presence since 2005. Become part of our success stories.