Finding Digital Marketing Happiness – Getting the Most from Your Agency
We all know digital marketing is a fast-paced industry and we’re constantly on the lookout for the best ways to stay ahead of the competition. With digital media available to us across a magnitude of devices like never before, there has been a real shift in the landscape where content is now available through more mediums than ever, be it search engines or social media, it has taken over our lives. For this reason, it is crucial that you are getting the most from your digital marketing agency to ensure you are present in this competitive landscape. When you and your agency are working in synergy your brand is in the best place to take every new opportunity and achieve your campaign objectives. In this article, we will cover off a few ways in which you can ensure you are getting the most from your digital marketing agency.
Communication is Key
Voicing your expectations from your digital marketing campaign early on will help your agency clearly understand what your objectives are and what results will make you happy. By doing so, your agency will be able to build a tailored strategy based on what goals and objectives you are hoping to achieve, ultimately enabling everyone involved in your campaign to strive towards the same thing. Also by communicating your expectations with your agency, they will be able to advise you on realistic key performance indicators (KPI’s) and time scales in which to monitor growth and performance based on their previous experience and industry knowledge.
Building a good working relationship with your agency will help them to better understand you and your business and the best ways in which to successfully work in harmony, without treading on any toes or missing any tricks.
Understand Your Objectives
As time goes on don’t lose sight of your agreed digital marketing campaign objectives, whether you are you looking to increase online sales or lead generation, ensure that you stay focused on your main goals that were agreed at the start of your campaign. Avoid getting side-tracked by other campaign objectives that were not agreed before your digital marketing strategy was devised as this can have a detrimental effect upon your marketing campaign, remember your campaign has been carefully designed to achieve specific KPIs. It is also vitally important that the objectives you set with your agency are specific and measurable (SMART goals are best), with so many different tactics available to marketers today it is imperative that the goals you agree upon can be reported on and the performance can be accurately relayed to you.
Integrate for the Best Results
It is often tempting to keep channels separate in a bid to encourage competition amongst different agencies and departments. However, as the customer increasingly switches between devices and channels, integrations between departments becomes important to enable marketers to seriously compete on the digital marketing battleground and get the most fruitful results. Understanding which channels and the types of content that perform best for your client is vitally important when planning an integrated campaign. Ensuring you are integrating your digital marketing campaigns where possible is a great way to ensure your brand is covering a large proportion of the market by combining PPC campaigns, including Google Ads and Google Shopping, with your SEO strategy and social media advertising campaigns. When agencies and departments talk to each other and share information, campaigns have more chance of really flourishing.
Integrated Marketing is an approach to creating a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with the brand/enterprise; it attempts to meld all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and social media, through their respective mix of tactics, methods, channels, media, and activities, so that all work together as a unified force. It is a process designed to ensure that all messaging and communications strategies are consistent across all channels and are centred on the customer - The DMA.org.
Stick with What Works
Marketers are now presented with an ever-growing list of potential opportunities and platforms to optimise marketing performance. It’s all well and good if your agency is demonstrating that they are constantly exploring new avenues and utilising the newest techniques in the industry, but it is vitally important that you continue to build upon your strengths and even propose investing more budget into your strongest aspects and refine other aspects that may not have performed so well.
Happy Customer = Happy Business
An agencies success is dependent upon their clients success. So your agency should be asking for your feedback and reviews in order to continuously improve the relationship, campaign and results.
In Summary
Achieving digital marketing happiness is an ongoing process that requires dedication and plenty of forward-thinking, but ultimately holds the key to running a successful digital marketing campaign built upon a solid and trustworthy foundation in which to build a transparent relationship with your agency for many years to come. Following the steps outlined in this article should help ensure you get the most outof your partnership with your Digital Marketing Agency and achieve some fantastic results together.
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