8 things to know when hiring an internet marketing service provider

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internet marketing
internet marketing

If you are a business owner or working on a start-up firm, you might know that tapping into digital marketing is one of the most important aspects to prioritize. If you do not have an in-house digital marketing team, it’s important to hire an internet marketing service provider in order to streamline your business’s digital growth.

However, some businesses fail to make the most out of the investment they make in hiring a digital marketing agency by making several mistakes along the way. In this post, we help you steer clear of such mistakes and make your investment in a digital agency worthwhile.

  1. Outline your goals and brief the agency

One of the common mistakes many businesses, especially start-ups, make is not having proper and defined goals when approaching a social media marketing agency or a full-stack digital marketing company. 

Sure, digital marketing agencies such as Hubmedia can help you streamline your digital growth goals. However, it’s a different story when you have identified and defined your businesses’ digital growth. This is because nobody understands your business better than you. 

After you have identified and defined your goals, brief them to the agency you plan on hiring. Doing this is an important step in helping the agency become more efficient and result-oriented in planning a digital marketing strategy for your business. 

  1. Collaborate in planning and creating a digital growth roadmap

When it comes to planning and creating a digital marketing roadmap, it’s important to have collaborative efforts. Make sure to work with the internet marketing service agency when planning a digital growth roadmap for your business. 

You may have more than one goal, such as increasing sales while improving your digital brand presence. By working together with the agency, it becomes easier for you as well as the agency to streamline all your goals in the roadmap and make the overall digital marketing strategy more result-oriented. By leaving the task of creating a digital growth roadmap entirely to the agency, you risk losing the opportunity to tap into all your goals and efficiently and cost-effectively reach them. 

  1. Choose regular reporting as KPIs 

One of the best ways to make sure that you are getting the right returns from the digital marketing agency you’ve hired is to make regular reporting an important KPI (Key Performance Indicator). You can take this step during the initial onboarding of the agency.

Make sure that the agency dedicates one or more project managers from their team who will be coordinating with you or your business’s brand manager. By receiving weekly or monthly reports from the project manager, you will have a clearer picture of how your and the agency’s digital marketing efforts are progressing towards achieving the right returns. 

Brief the project manager to categorize the reports to include updates on progresses on different digital marketing domains, such as SEO, social media marketing, website management, e-commerce management, etc. 

  1. Allow creative freedom

If you are specifically hiring a social media marketing agency, it’s important to allow creative freedom. Many businesses make the mistake of having a subjective perspective for creative work, including social media calendars and creatives. Pass too many instructions to the agency’s creative team and you risk making your business’s social media marketing cold, sterile, and non-engaging. 

Allow room for creative freedom in order to help the agency’s creative team transcend their creative process beyond the instruction barriers and boundaries. Even if you have specific instructions, it’s important to be open to the inputs of the creative team in order to make the final work well-polished. It’s often the creative freedom that makes it possible for achieving great social media marketing results. 

  1. Be flexible with the deliverables

Allowing flexibility is important when working with a digital marketing agency. Although there may be deadlines in place, it’s not always possible for agencies to deliver quality work within the specified deadline and timeframe.

This is true, especially with creative work. At times, creative work, including social media marketing, requires different thought processes and extensive research which can be time-taking but worthwhile eventually. If you have created a deliverables sheet with the agency you are working with, make sure to include buffer time for tasks that may require extra time.  

  1. Schedule regular reporting meetings

Sure, sending and receiving regular reports through email is a great way to improve efficiency in overall operations. However, nothing comes close to person-to-person meetings when it comes to making the most out of collaborative efforts.

As part of regularly coordinating with the agency, it’s important to schedule meetings with the project managers either at your business or the agency’s location. By scheduling regular meetings, you’ll have a better picture of the direction of digital marketing progress that the agency is taking. Also, briefing the project managers about your new inputs becomes more effective in person-to-person meetings than via email or video conference calls. 

  1. Prioritize hygiene maintenance with the agency

Many businesses overlook the importance of hygiene maintenance, especially for business’s website and social media marketing. If you are working with a social media marketing agency, make sure that the agency’s social media marketing team performs regular hygiene maintenance.

Also, if your outsourcing website development and maintenance work to an agency, make sure that the development team prioritizes website hygiene maintenance by working in tandem with the content marketing team. 

  1. Acknowledge quality work

A lot of time and effort goes into producing quality work. As part of maintaining a good working ethic, it’s important for you to acknowledge good and quality work that drives great results. By acknowledging quality work, you motivate the execution team of the agency which, in turn, inspires them to push the creativity boundary. 

Acknowledging good work also helps foster better relationships with the agency which, in turn, benefits you in consistently receiving quality work and achieving great results. Building a good relationship with the agency is a win-win factor as it boosts yours as well as the agency’s credibility.

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