How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Agency

Choosing the right digital marketing agency is tricky, and the consequences of a wrong decision can be a catastrophe – this article will tell you how to avoid it.

As a manager, you know how hard it is to find the right partners to grow your business. There are over 55,000 digital marketing agencies on Clutch alone. How are you supposed to know which agency is best for your company?

The hardest thing about marketing used to be that you couldn’t really measure the results. Even if sales went up, you barely had any idea if it was thanks to a campaign you spent all your budget on, or if it was just luck and referrals.

But in the digital world, marketing results can be quantified. You can follow a customer’s journey from the moment they first find you, to the moment they sign a deal.

And yet, a lot of managers are still in the dark. The hardest thing about marketing is not the lack of data anymore. It’s choosing which partners to work with, which channels to focus on, and knowing when to stop doing things that don’t benefit your business.

The consequences of choosing the wrong digital marketing agency

Some of these consequences will sound familiar to you, and hopefully, this article will help you avoid those problems that you haven’t encountered yet.

How do I know about these issues? Because before starting my agency, I spent several years building marketing departments, with my crowning achievement being 3 years as CMO of Deviniti (an international IT company with 250+ employees). We managed to turn it into one of the fastest-growing companies in its market, and by the time I left it, its revenue had grown 4 times in 3 years.

It wasn’t easy, and some of my biggest challenges came from choosing the wrong solutions.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Nobody’s responsible for results

This probably annoyed me the most – agencies that didn’t take responsibility for the results of their work. Which is ironic because they’re in the business of driving results.

At a certain point I found myself in a pickle: the SEO agency didn’t want to take responsibility for traffic, because in their opinion the web dev agency didn’t do a good job with our site. The web dev agency didn’t want to take responsibility either, and ultimately it all fell on my head.

Which is why now I think it’s extremely important to precisely define what the agency is responsible for before you enter into an engagement.

Your company

For the last 15+ years, we have been growing our experience in working with IT and tech companies. Cooperating with analytical people is our faculty because our main driving force is our ability to analyze data, and make decisions based on it.

If you are responsible for marketing processes in your IT&Tech company, such as SaaS, software house, cybersecurity, testing, etc. – then you might be the perfect client for us.

Your needs

Our ideal engagement is when you’re starting to build your marketing process, as well as when you’ve already tried different strategies but aren’t sure what works best.

You need someone to:

• Create a detailed marketing plan,
• Decide which channels you should invest in,
• Streamline and optimize your marketing to focus on what generates the most ROI.

Our services and responsibility

STEP 1: Audit and plan for 6 months

Our work with clients always starts with the creation of a marketing audit and plan for 6 months.

We carry out the audit and marketing plan in 10 – 20 working hours. During this time, we ask for access to your analytical tools. Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console and others. With access to the data, we can suggest customer acquisition processes that have the greatest chance of success.

We don’t want to be a company that reads the “whole restaurant menu” and makes you choose. Or worse, a company that sells only “products” – “Facebook Ads”, “Google Ads”, “SEO” – that are in a typical agency basket, regardless of whether these solutions will generate the results you need.

There are 19 customer acquisition channels thanks to which it is possible to acquire new business. We don’t want to offer them all at once. Especially when most of them won’t work in a specific sector. We want to choose those that will work best for your company, so we can deliver the best results.

We believe that a long-term relationship between two companies is only possible
when both sides earn money.

• Create business model canvas,
  • Where we define what is unique in your service/product, who is the target customer, what problem it solves, and so on.
• Conduct competitors and market analysis
  • We use marketing analytics software to learn what activities your competitors are doing in order to win on the market, which actions are the most successful in their case, and what we should use.
• Prepare a plan for the next 6 months
  • A spreadsheet where every action has its estimated number of working hours, budget and time of realization.

We take this first step to sign an NDA and transfer all the copyright for our work to you. Thanks to this, you can do what you wish with the audit and plan.

When the plan is ready, you can let us execute the plan in 100%, or use our knowledge and experience to execute the entire plan internally with your team. We can also meet in the middle – some tasks will be done by us, the rest by your team.

At this stage, our key responsibility is to define what marketing activities you should invest in.

STEP 2: Marketing outsourcing

After we go over the plan together, we can sign another agreement, detailing our KPIs (the main one is usually leads or trials) and activities we will take to reach the goals.

We’re agile – we report the progress of our work during sprint meetings, where we plan how many hours we’ll work, and what we’ll be doing in the next period.

During this meeting, we present which customer acquisition channel works best, how many potential customers we have acquired, and how much investment it took.

If we sign the contract, we take responsibility for how many leads we generate for you, plus for any additional KPIs stated in our agreement.

We always include a clause in our agreements that allows you to terminate the deal immediately whenever you feel that it’s not going well. So far none of our clients decided to use that clause which, to be honest with you, I’m very proud of.

Sounds like we’re the right agency for you?