7 Questions You Need to Ask While Evaluating a Digital Marketing Company

The business landscape has changed drastically over the last few months. The economic slowdown is a new reality. 

All this makes it hard to find new customers, shoot sales revenues, and grow your business. Well, if you are used to DIY when it comes to marketing, especially digital marketing, now is the time to optimize and think it over. 

Whether you’re in retail or healthcare, eCommerce, or technology, you need optimized efforts more than ever now. 

With depleting funds and slow revenue growth, you must spend every penny on digital channels wisely. That’s where an expert digital marketing agency can help. Rather than experimenting with your money, it’s better to spend your ad budgets wisely. 

How to choose a digital marketing company? Well, you need to ensure that an agency offering digital marketing services has a strong online footprint. 

On top of that, you need to ensure the agency is run by expert digital ninjas. These are people who know how things work rather than experimenting with your marketing budgets. 

Also, here are some questions to evaluate an agency’s expertise before you choose to hire a digital marketing company: 

1. Will you work with me to ascertain the target audience and define metrics?

Well, like any other business process, one needs to outline some basic objectives before starting to market digitally. You need to ask the agency if they will help you define your goals, identify and document your target audience, and define performance metrics. 

If the agency isn’t good at planning goals and identifying metrics, then you’ll likely not get desired results. 

In the absence of performance metrics, digital marketing efforts are futile. When your agency can’t ascertain the metrics, how will it report and analyze the performance of the campaigns? 

2. Will my work be outsourced? If yes, what are the team’s experiential credentials?

Does the agency outsource your work? Sometimes, agencies tend to offer client accounts to freelancers. 

If an agency will outsource, then ask for professional credentials of the team along with a detailed professional profile. 

Ask for case studies, success stories, and past results that the team has achieved. You can ask to interview/meet the resources who’ll be working on your account. 

3. Is the Agency Full-service or Offer Specific Services?

This is super important if you’re going in for the long run. You need to ask if the company provides only one set of services say SEO or can take care of all the aspects of your digital marketing strategy. 

If you’re keen on taking full advantage of your digital footprint, it is important that you have someone with comprehensive experience onboard. 

And don’t just take their word, ask for real-life case studies highlighting their success in SEO, social media marketing, blog management, and other aspects. 

4. What Project management and Marketing tools Do They Use?

You need to know about their stack in terms of day-to-day marketing and project management tools. If a digital marketing agency doesn’t have a well-defined process to manage routine tasks, then you’ll find a lapse in end results. 

So, it is recommended you ask about daily workflows. It also helps you understand how much effort you will have to put on an everyday basis during the engagement period. 

5. How Do They Define KPIs and Reporting Frequencies?

As discussed earlier, your agency should give you clear KPIs and report their performance. You must ask about the KPIs and how they show their efforts make an impact on your bottom line. Say, if their social media posts sales. Or their blogs are influencing prospects to fill up a lead gen form. 

You also need to ask how frequently they report to you and what are the performance benchmarks. This answer gives you a perspective to properly measure your investment in a digital marketing campaign. 

6. What Is Their Core Marketing Focus?

It is essential to know the mindset of the agency with respect to digital marketing. Whether they are just behind metrics or focus on value-addition and user intent too. 

A lot of agencies do good in the short term by playing on technical metrics like CTR, traffic, low CPCs but they don’t focus on user intent, which harms the campaign in the long run. 

So, it is really important to check if your agency has a short-term technical perspective or can handle more complex things such as campaigns appealing to core human drives, creating appealing creatives that influence consumer behavior. 

7. What Is Their Content Creation Expertise?

Well, last but not the least, the company should have the first-hand experience in creating influential content. 

As you know, content is the lifeblood of any marketing campaign, the digital marketing agency must be experienced in creating video content, blogs, infographics, textual posts, and other forms of content as required. 

So, ask for their content creation expertise if you want campaigns to make a long-term impact on the minds of prospects. 

Wrapping Up

All the above questions help you understand the level of accountability the agency is ready to take. Especially in terms of campaign objectives, marketing strategy, and performance measurement. 

If an agency gives appropriate responses to the above questions, you are left with just one thing to manage, your product, which you’re already good at. 

At N2Q, we are serious about empowering every client. We take care of outlining objectives, building a roadmap, planning segmentation, targeting, and positioning to give you a positive ROI on your digital marketing campaigns. 

If you’re still curious and want to ask any further questions from our expert team, feel free to book a free consultation session today.