We’re not your traditional digital marketing agency. We’re not satisfied with doing the bare minimum. We’ll set you up with a specialist. Not an account manager.
It used to be the case that people’s attention was focused on radio, newspapers, and other offline media outlets. So it was enough to take out ads on those platforms if you wanted to get in front of the right people.
But now it’s more complicated. People’s attention is split across a variety of different platforms.
Table of Contents
There are new marketing tactics popping up every day. It can be tough for busy entrepreneurs to stay on top of the latest trends, figure out the best ways to use different platforms, and become a master in every area of digital marketing overnight.
Hiring a team of experts to manage the more technical aspects of your marketing strategy allows you to focus on other areas of your business that you enjoy and do best rather than spend weeks or months trying to find the right person to hire and train.
In this article, we’ll go over how to evaluate a marketing agency, the questions you should ask, and how to decide between hiring an agency or handling your marketing in-house.
Google AdWords is a great way to capture the attention of potential customers right at the moment when they’re aware that they have a problem. Most people turn to Google to find solutions to their pain points, so running an AdWords campaign that targets those prospects can be highly profitable.
Getting your articles to rank high in search isn’t just about building “brand awareness” or getting more page views. There’s more to it than that. By getting your content to rank high in search, you’ll be able to capture potential customers at the perfect stage in the buyer’s journey — right when they realize they have a problem and need your solution!
Facebook’s targeting features combined with their massive user base makes it a fantastic platform for virtually any business to see a healthy ROI. You can target by gender, education level, income, location, interests, status updates, and even major life events.
YouTube reaches more 18-49 year olds than the top 10 primetime TV shows in the U.S. The massive audience combined with increased engagement that comes with video marketing also makes video ads a great place to see ROI. Video ads can be targeted by demographic, online behavior, location, interest, YouTube channel, and more.
Over 50% of mobile searches lead to purchase. When that search is related to a local business, that number is even higher: 78% of local mobile searches result in offline purchases, and search terms indicate high intent to purchase as well. There are a variety of options that agencies have when it comes to mobile advertising, such as mobile YouTube ads, in-app advertising, and campaigns to boost mobile app installs.
Source: Search Engine Land
Content marketing is the fuel that built many multi-million dollar businesses. Most companies think creating content is about writing a few blog posts every week and slapping them up on a website. But those who care about sales over vanity metrics realize that it’s more complicated than that. Services that agencies might offer within content marketing include blog post generation, infographic creation, SEO writing, content analysis, and social media promotion.
Email still generates the most ROI for marketers, even with all the new social networks popping up. In fact, for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in return. Agencies might offer services like list building, engaging with your list so that it doesn’t go cold, segmentation, or autoresponder sequence optimization.
At the end of the day, there’s one main factor that determines whether your site gets sales or not: are your visitors taking the action that you want them to take? That means having the right site UX, form design, and other elements to boost your lead generation and conversions. Agency services in this area could include conversion path analysis, CRO goal setting, identification of conversion metrics, and collecting data from website visitors.
Some agencies are more specialized than others, but in general, they offer some variation of the services listed above.
But before you can pick the right digital marketing agency with the right services for your business, you have to ask yourself and your potential agencies a few questions.
The first step is to figure out your own company’s marketing requirements before looking for an agency.
Do you need website design? Email marketing? SEO? Analytics?
If you already have an in-house marketing team, ask yourself which marketing strategies does your team have the skills for? What are the marketing tactics that you know you “should” do but haven’t gotten around to yet?
These are the sorts of questions that will shed some light on what you can outsource to an agency to get more efficient results.
One of the best signs about an agency that will indicate what they can do for your business are the results they’ve generated for themselves.
If you’re thinking about hiring an agency for blog management, how do they run their own blog?
If you’re thinking about hiring them for social media promotion, how do they handle their own social media accounts?
If you want to hire them for SEO, how do they rank in search for terms in their industry?
We rank near the top for marketing funnel strategy. :-)
You can verify these details on your own, and also ask the agency.
If they don’t “practice what they preach” for their own business, then it could be a red flag that they don’t really believe in or are capable of the services that they offer.
Most businesses track vanity metrics, numbers that might seem like they matter but have no real correlation to generating revenue for the business. For example, the number of “likes” you get on a post can be considered a vanity metric because it doesn’t always translate directly to sales.
The last thing you want is for an agency to charge you premium rates every month and only deliver more likes on your posts but no boosts in sales. How will they measure your success? Be sure to ask the agency this as you’re looking through your options.
Here are some important metrics in digital marketing:
Depending on how solid the rest of your marketing funnel is, a boost in traffic could be directly correlated with a boost in conversions. But if you’re not sure exactly who your target market is, generating massive traffic to your site and measuring their interaction with your site could be a great, quick way of figuring that out.
The number of minutes users spend on your site is data that shows how interesting and relevant your content is. If your content is highly relevant to their specific situation, then visitors will spend a relatively long time on your site. If not, then your content could probably be more targeted. Google loves using this metric when ranking content in search because it shows how valuable your website or blog is to a reader who searched for your keywords.
Other factors could influence time on your website as well, such as page speed. You can track your average time on site through the “average visit duration” statistic in Google Analytics.
Source: Engage the Crowd
It’s important to find out which channels users are visiting your site from. For example, if you find that most of your traffic is coming through a particular article that ranks high in search, then you’ll want to produce more content similar to that one. In addition to that, it’s important to measure what what type of traffic you’re getting. Are most of your visitors referral traffic from other websites? Are you getting most of your traffic from specific marketing campaigns? Are you getting organic traffic from search?
Bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors that leave your site after they land on it. High bounce rate could indicate that the content on your site is not relevant or valuable.
Cost per click is a purchasing model for paid ads where you pay each time your ad is clicked.
Click through rate measures the number of times your ad has been clicked versus the number of impressions it received. This helps analyze how targeted your ad copy is.
If you’re hiring an agency for social media management, then you’ll want to identify some KPIs in this area. Social interaction KPIs can help measure the extent to which your social media efforts help generate conversions. If you or your agency use a tool like KISSmetrics, you’ll be able to track the entire customer journey of people who come to your site through social media. That way, you can track exactly how many buyers your social media posts are generating, not just likes or shares.
When you’re in an industry that has a low barrier to entry, you’ll inevitably have to deal with people who claim to know what they’re doing, but actually have no idea.
Marketing is one of those industries.
There are plenty of marketing agencies that promise the world to customers just to close the deal, but lack the staff and the skills to deliver. In the worst cases, they keep charging you money every month and say that it will take a long time to see organic traffic results, even though they know that their actions will never deliver results.
Agencies also should not guarantee bottom-of-the-funnel results because there are just too many factors involved which are specific to each company that might result in differing ROI. For example, you could make all the right moves when it comes to your marketing, but results will take longer if you’re in a more competitive market.
You can filter out scammy or low-quality agencies by asking them for their “secret sauce.” What makes them different? What’s their strategy for getting you results?
For example, according to Social Media Examiner, a good question to ask at this stage is: “How are you going to help with content creation?” A good answer might go something like this:
First we’ll start by creating a publishing schedule. This is a list of keyword rich headlines which gives us a framework for the types of content we want to produce. Ideally, the content comes from within your organization, but if you don’t have the resources, we can help procure a professional writer who has experience with your industry.
Either way, we will have our SEO experts review and optimize the content before it’s posted to your website.
Additionally, we can leverage the content you’re already producing (whitepapers, case studies, webinars, emails, sales presentations, etc.). These assets can be transcribed, organized, and optimized to draw relevant traffic from the search engines.
According to Neil Patel, here are some common red flags to watch out for when hiring a marketing agency:
You tend to get what you pay for. If you find agencies that charge low prices, you might think you’re getting a great deal, but in reality you’ll likely have to deal with poor service.
Look up agencies on the Better Business Bureau website to see their ratings.
You can easily filter out low-quality agencies through price. Many businesses want to save money, so price is usually the first thing they ask about. However, if you find an agency that charges low prices, then chances are they deliver low-quality results too.
Think about it from their perspective: if an agency prices itself too low, then they make lower margins on their services. In addition to that, they’re less likely to go the extra mile for your business because there’s not much incentive. Agencies that charge higher prices tend to treat their clients with more generosity because they can afford to do so. Don’t cut corners when finding the right agency for the job.
Learn more about the various agency pricing models that you’ll come across.
Let’s start by thinking about what it takes to run a successful marketing campaign. Here’s a general list:
Before running a successful marketing campaign, you need to have deep insight into your customer’s behavior. Most marketing messages end up sounding generic because most companies don’t take the time to truly understand their customers and the stories behind their problems.
Scaling anything requires proper documentation of systems, processes, and workflows that go into completing a specific task. That means having a structured system to follow when you create a blog post, run a PR campaign, run social media promotions or paid ads, etc.
Inbound marketing campaigns require a variety of tools from start to finish. For example, you might need email marketing tools (like MailChimp or Drip), analytics tools (like Google Analytics or KISSmetrics), communication tools like Slack, and more. These tools help you accomplish your key tasks and hit your goals more efficiently.
One of the most important skills when it comes to inbound marketing is patience. Typically, noticeable results only come in after several months and some of the most successful companies have been consistently putting in effort over the course of many years.
It’s easy to write random blog posts, but can you write quality content that your specific target audience will love to read? That’s what separates decent blogs from truly great ones.
Lastly, you should make sure that you have experience designing and running some portion of inbound marketing campaigns.
Hitting these different criteria takes time. It’s not easy to publish high-quality content that your audience values consistently, or document rock-solid processes that keep your systems on track. Hiring an agency can help you avoid the cost of getting yourself and your team up to speed as well as avoid getting sidetracked from other important things you have to do in business (like closing deals or getting investors).
If you hire an agency, you’ll get a team of experts who work for you every single month. You won’t have to worry about assembling your own content team. In fact, you’ll have more people working for you to get results, which can help accelerate your results.
However, the downside is that you won’t be able to oversee every detail of what the agency does on a day-to-day basis for your company. Because of that, there is a risk of the relationship not working out, which is why it’s important to choose an agency that also vets you as a client to ensure that the relationship will be a successful one.
Since entrepreneurs tend to crave control, that might be be more difficult than it sounds for some people.
Also, although you may think that the expense of hiring an agency is a downside, it can often be more expensive to hire and train a team in-house to fill necessary roles.
Let’s run through a few marketing case studies.
Here at Single Grain we worked with Intuit to boost visibility across common search terms in the industry.
Source: Single Grain case studies
At the time, Intuit, a financial and tax preparation software company, was adding on the Intuit Website Builder as part of their product portfolio. Based on their research, they found that their customers wanted simple tools for other aspects of their business as well, such as building their website.
The challenge for us was helping Intuit build visibility and become known for services outside of the main ones for which they are known. Plus there was some concern around their highly-specialized competitors like GoDaddy.
To solve that, we helped Intuit build visibility in organic search results. That meant building out content on the site to help position Intuit as a website-building solution.
Tactically, we used a mix of link-building techniques to help Intuit rank higher for relevant keywords in this space, and leveraged social media to connect with new users who had a high likelihood of being interested in Intuit’s new website building solution.
DisabledGo is an information provider for disabled people in the UK and Ireland. They provide information on 120,000+ places to go that are accessible (i.e. bars, parks, cafes, museums, etc).
Agency51 was tasked with helping DisabledGo execute an SEO migration strategy from an old platform to a new platform. The goal was to help DisabledGo acquire new customers while still retaining old ones.
They made sure that the move was as smooth as possible from an SEO point of view. For example, they implemented 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones across various forms of content. 301 redirects are ways to send readers and search engines to a different URL than the one that was requested by the server. This is a way to redirect users to a new page while still keeping 90-99% of the ranking power in search. They also transferred meta data (titles, descriptions, and tags) to the new site, set up Google webmaster tools, and set up a new sitemap.
The main goal of the project was to keep the site’s SEO alive throughout the migration, ensure that readers could still follow all the calls to action and navigate the site, and ultimately boost the number of new leads.
Agency51 helped DisabledGo boost their visitor numbers by 21% year over year. Because of the URL restructuring on the new platform, DisabledGo was able to rank higher than their competitors for keywords and phrases in their niche.
At Single Grain, we worked with a client who manufacture scooters (who wishes to remain anonymous). Scooters started off as a simple skateboard with handlebars, but over time they have become small two-wheeled vehicles made for people to commute longer distances. It’s now a common method of commuting for both high school and college students.
The client approached us with a limited ad budget and a desire to start experimenting with some digital marketing tactics to capture a larger share of the younger demographic.
When ad budgets are tight, some entrepreneurs mistakenly conclude that organic traffic is their only option.
However, for those who understand how to utilize paid traffic, you can get significant reach and conversions in a very short amount of time which could benefit your business more than waiting months and months to rank in organic search.
For the scooter manufacturer, we launched campaigns on Google AdWords, Bing, Yahoo! Stream Ads, and Amazon Product Ads across all major devices. This way, we could be sure that the client had visibility on different devices and on different ad platforms.
The campaign consisted of display ads to drive brand awareness and product-listing ads that users would see when they searched for a competitor. From there, we monitored the ROI of each channel and killed all underperforming ads.
We drove nearly $1 million in revenue for the client in just a little over a year.
Source: Single Grain case studies
If you have doubts about your ability to generate ROI through a marketing campaign, then you may find it easier to hire an agency to take care of everything for you. Digital marketing agencies can handle the systems, processes, and workflows that go into running campaigns from beginning to end. They have a structured process to follow when they create blog posts, run social promotions, etc.
When you start looking for an agency, here are some things to keep in mind:
The right agency could generate millions of dollars in revenue for your business, give you peace of mind by handling everything for you, and allow you to avoid the cost of setting up a team in-house. That way, you can focus your time on your strengths, and perfect what you’re already good at instead of worrying about your weaknesses.
Can Single Grain help with your unique situation? Let’s have a friendly chat to find out!
We have put together an entire course on how we gained clients like Uber, Amazon and Salesforce using content marketing frameworks that you can duplicate.
Single Grain will help build strategies and/or consult with you or your team to set you in the right direction for long term growth. Execution is not included.
Single Grain will customize and execute a marketing campaign for you. Let us innovate and come up with the ideas and then do the work for you so you can focus your efforts elsewhere.
Single Grain is a digital marketing agency that helps companies like Uber, Amazon and Salesforce grow their revenues online using SEO and paid advertising.
Thank you for answering this poll. You may also be interested in Marketing School, a daily podcast by Neil Patel & Eric Siu.
Listen to podcastGet a special FREE version of Crazy Egg PLUS A Chance To Win A One Year Annual Subscription of Crazy Egg Each Week.
Tell Me more
“We really lean on Single Grain as an extension of our team, which enables us to increase our impact without increasing our headcount.”
Get the complete playbook we use to grow our clients’ (and our own) websites to 50,000, 100,000, 1M, even 45M visits per MONTH!
Don't miss out - we'll share tactics from the exclusive inbound marketing playbook that gets us millions of site visits and Fortune500 clients.