Handing your marketing over to someone else is a leap of faith, and picking the wrong agency can cost you more than just budget, it can cost you months of momentum. Finding one that actually understands your business and its goals matters more than most people expect going in.
An agency ends up shaping how your business looks to the outside world, so what should you actually be looking for, and what should you be asking before you sign on? Here’s what we’d recommend keeping an eye out for.
Know your Needs
Start by getting genuinely clear on what you need from a digital marketing agency. Are you chasing a stronger social media presence? Facebook and Instagram advertising? Solid content and real SEO expertise?
Build a list of the services you’re after, and pin down your actual marketing goals alongside it, whether that’s building brand awareness, driving more traffic to your website and social channels, or bringing in more leads.
Questions to Ask The Agency
A good digital marketing agency exists to help you understand and hit your business goals. You’re not expected to already know the difference between Google Analytics, Google My Business, or how Facebook Ads Manager works, that’s genuinely what an agency is there to walk you through. Here are a few questions worth asking to figure out if an agency is the right fit.
1. What services would you suggest for my business?
Between social media marketing, search engine marketing, and search engine optimisation, there’s no shortage of options, and starting with all of them at once usually isn’t realistic. A good agency tells you what actually suits your business, rather than pushing every service on the menu just to pad their own revenue.
Take a new shoe brand with a limited budget, for example. Rather than spreading that budget thin across several services, it might make far more sense to focus purely on paid social first, get comfortable with the results, and only expand into other, more expensive services once that foundation is working.
2. How do you work?
Understanding an agency’s process, communication style, and team structure tells you a lot about how your work will actually get done. Some agencies assign an account manager to handle your relationship, but that person often isn’t the one actually producing your results, which means they may have limited insight into why the social or SEO team made a particular call on your account.
At agencies like OMDIGI, there’s no account manager layer at all. You get direct contact with whoever is actually responsible for your results, so if you need a change made or you’ve got a new promotion coming up, you can go straight to that person instead of routing everything through a middleman.
3. How do you measure the effectiveness of the recommended marketing campaigns?
A good agency should be able to explain exactly how they’ll measure success, whether that’s more leads, more purchases, or more traffic to your site.
Some agencies will hand you pages of data and expect you to be satisfied with it. But that’s only useful if you already know the difference between return on advertising spend and cost per purchase. A good agency pairs that data with real recommendations, and is happy to explain any of it in plain terms until it actually makes sense to you.
What to expect from the agency?
A genuinely good agency starts by digging into your previous performance: what advertising you’ve run before, and how well it actually worked. Expect them to ask for access to your Google Analytics so they can see where your current visitors are coming from and which channels are actually converting into customers.
Because their job is to deliver real value, they’ll also want to understand your product margins, your best-selling products, and how your business actually makes money, so they can help you make more of it.
When you’re evaluating agencies, ask the questions that matter to your brand specifically. Every brand is different, and figuring out what matters most to yours is the real key to knowing whether an agency is genuinely the right fit.
If you have any questions or would like more information about how a digital agency can help your business grow, get in touch with us today.
