Finding a digital marketing agency capable of helping you meet your growth and sales goals is not as simple as running a quick Google search on ‘digital marketing near me’. There is quite a bit more to it than that. As a company that has been in the digital marketing game for years, we believe it is very important to ask questions.
What questions should be asked? There is no clear-cut list. Clients have different needs, golds, and circumstances, and what is important to one may not be important to another. Still, we can suggest five questions to get you started. The answers can tell you a lot.
1. What specific services do you offer?
A good place to start is inquiring about the services a digital marketing agency offers. Here in Salt Lake City, we have a lot of clients whose customer bases are made up mainly of people in the greater Salt Lake region. They found us by searching ‘digital marketing near me‘.
For these particular clients, local marketing services are invaluable. It is what they need most. Yet we also offer a range of additional services, including ecommerce SEO, content marketing, PPC services, digital and social media marketing, and more.
Knowing the particular services you need makes it easier to match your company with a digital marketing agency. It makes sense to hire an agency that offers the right services, rather than adapting other services to meet your needs.
2. How do you establish goals and measurements?
Next, inquire as to how a digital marketing agency goes about establishing goals. Along those same lines, their marketing goals should align with your company’s overall goals for sales and growth. This suggests that they really need to get to know your business. And once goals are established, there needs to be a way to measure success.
That’s the next thing to inquire about. How does the agency measure success? What are the metrics they look at? How do they determine whether positive numbers are translating into genuine growth and sales?
In our business, there is something known as metric chasing – the practice of coming up with a long list of metrics that are constantly measured, quantified, and analyzed. Yet most of the metrics are meaningless to the organization’s stated goals. They are being measured only for their own sake.
Metric chasing is bad for obvious reasons. It is better to settle on a few key metrics directly related to an organization’s goals and focusing exclusively on them.
3. How will you get to know my audience?
Audience identification is everything in digital marketing. If you don’t know the audience to whom you are speaking, how can you speak directly to them? You can’t.
A key part of our audience is the small business that wants to embrace digital marketing but doesn’t know how. That small business may or may not have its own marketing team. They come to us looking for assistance.
Interestingly, this might sound exactly like you and what you’re looking for. You are reading a blog post written specifically to capture the attention of this key subset of Webtek’s audience. We understand that audience. As a result, we target them with unique content that speaks to where they are.
4. How do you approach continuous engagement?
This next question is especially important given the fact that so many organizations misunderstand how digital marketing actually works. Digital marketing is not a one-off, short-term enterprise. In fact, most digital marketing strategies don’t return instant results. Successful digital marketing takes time.
Digital marketing requires continuous engagement over a long period of time. The question for digital marketing agencies is how they approach continuous engagement. Do they give time and attention to each and every client, or do they focus on the best paying clients first and leave their less profitable clients for whenever they can get to them?
Continuous engagement is ongoing. As a result, a digital marketing agency needs to be able to adapt. Marketing campaigns should be constantly monitored and adjusted to account for performance issues, directional changes, demographic changes, and even technology.
5. Do you have any mobile experts on your team?
The very last question may seem irrelevant, but it is critically important at a time when people use their phones more than ever before. In a nutshell, mobile rules the internet. There are no two ways about it.
Mobile is so important that Google now favors mobile-friendly sites over those that are not mobile-friendly. Friendly sites load just as quickly on mobile phones as they do desktops. They also perform just as well. A user doesn’t lose any function or access as a result of visiting a website on their phone.
Given that mobility is so important to Google, it is reasonable to expect that mobile friendliness is just as important to digital marketing. If you are not sure that this is true, go back to the phrase ‘digital marketing near me’.
Near Me Searches
What we call ‘near me’ searches are pretty specific. A person running a ‘near me’ search is looking for a business located in the local area. That person is looking for something close by. Here is the curious thing: people tend to run ‘near me’ searches using their phones. They are not at their desks. They are out and about and need to find something near to where they are at that moment in time.
A site that isn’t optimized for mobile won’t do well on ‘near me’ searches. That matters to Google because it matters to consumers. Not only does a digital marketing firm need to be familiar with the mobile environment, but it also needs to target that environment in ways that are unique to it.
If your organization is looking for a new digital marketing agency, don’t just sign up with the first one that comes along. Do some research. Ask a few questions. The more you can learn in advance of making a decision, the better your decision is likely to be.
