How to know if my marketing agency is doing a good job?
Many business owners don’t know the ends and out’s of marketing, and get taken advantage of everyday by bad marketing agencies! Not all agencies do this with intent, but there are a lot of agencies that outright scam business owners. In this article we’ll teach you the basic things to watch out for when insuring your agency is doing their job properly, or when selecting the right agency.
Step 1.Having a good website
The very first way to tell if you're marketing agency is bad, is if you have a bad website! Even if this is your own doing, you're marketing agency should not be billing you for other marketing campaigns if your website is bad! This will simply lead to wasted ad dollars!
Your website is the most important factor in your online marketing campaign and many companies skimp out on their websites because they don’t see the value in them.
But your website is more than an online business card, it’s about trust and representation.
The quality of your website tells potential clients and customers just how you do business. If your website looks like a Wix or SquareSpace website you most certainly will send customers to your competition who paid a professional to develop their website.
Your website should never have to much reading on any of the main pages, even if you have allot to say. Text should be instead hidden in articles and blogs throughout your website allowing users to read more. A website is first a presentation, and last documentation.
Your Agency should know the importances of the best and most professional website. And shouldn’t be taking you on as a client if your website is not up to par!
Step 2. Having good SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
If you don’t know what SEO is you can learn more here!
Good SEO takes a lot of effort and time. SEO lives by content and we see many bad marketing agencies neglect their clients content time and time again! The easy way to spot this is out is if your website does not have articles or a blog.
The best SEO practices require keeping content up-to-date. The only way to do this properly is by creating new content. This is typically done by writing new articles or blog post (content development). If an agency is simply telling you that you’re paying for keywords, this isn’t enough to warrant the cost of their service!
Most of the time an agency should spend on SEO is market research, and developing strategies to produce conversions. This may or may not include content development. The main goal that many agencies lose sight of is Acquisitions which happen through conversion.
Conversions in marketing are events that convert a visitor into a lead, and move them further through your sales funnel.
Step 3. Appear on the first page
You're marketing agency should be doing everything they can to get you to show up on the first page on search engines for keywords. If you have been working with an agency for a while and they haven’t got any success with your website appearing on the first page for keywords, this is a major tell-tell sign you're marketing agency isn’t doing a good job!
You're marketing agency should be working with you to plan out the best keywords or key phrases. This in terms gets you visibility on the first page for that particular set of keywords or key-phrases. If they aren’t even planning this out with you then this is a really bad sign!
Like we said previously the biggest time an agency spends on SEO is panning and market research. If they are not discussing keywords with you then how will they know the most important search terms you want to appear under?
You’re marketing agency shouldn’t be to optimistic with this by focusing on very competitive keywords. Instead they should be focusing on smaller niche keywords for your industry that will get you clear results.
Step 4. Planning
An agency should spend allot of their time studying your competitors in the industry and coming up with a plan to achieve the same results as that company did or better!
Your agency should discuss with you on their plan or strategy, and this should be clear!
The agency should also clearly indicate the work they are doing or have done. For an SEO campaign they should never just provide a random list of keywords that they’ve added to your website.
Your agency should provide suggestions based on their findings of studying your competition.
A good agency will provided detailed insight on their work and explain in detail just what they are doing.
Step: 5 PPC advertising & Social Media
A good agency should take care of all your marketing needs, and offer these services to you. You shouldn’t have to go to one company for SEO, the other for Pay-Per Click and another for Social Media marketing.
Outsourcing your marketing is supposed to free up your business and your time, not make things more of a hassle!
A good agency will focus on all around marketing, taking care of the most basic needs (website, SEO, PPC, and Social Media).
Step: 6 Focused attention
A good marketing agency should focus their attention on quality instead of quantity!
In a SEO campaign it’s not about having the most keywords it’s about having the best quality of keywords that produce results. This same rule applies to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad campaigns.
Never get excited about a marketing agency that provides you a ton of keywords. This is essentially worthless to impress clients who simply do not know enough about marketing.
A good marketing agency will focus on a few high quality keywords at a time, and focus more on the results those keywords produce than the amount of keywords. When you're comparing the cost between marketing services remember quality over quantity.
Would your rather have 50+ keywords that results in little to no leads or would you rather have 5 high quality keywords the produce you a lot of leads and get your website on the first page for those results?
Don’t get sold on SEO campaigns that sell you keywords essentially they are worthless without results. And if they are promising you that, then they don’t understand much about SEO themselves.
As stated earlier planning and market research is were most of the time is spent in SEO and not producing a ton of keywords. You will not be successful by having an agency loading your website up with a ton of keywords. Results are generated by selecting the best keywords that produce results and page rankings on search engines.
Step 7 Tracking, reports and ROI
And finally a marketing agency needs to understand the success of their marketing efforts to know the areas they need to improve on. This is done by tracking what visitors came from what source, and if they converted into a lead, or acquisition.
Marketing agencies if relying on SEO need to have a forum to track conversions. More tech savvy agencies will provide you insight on technologies to use to track calls or how to setup CRM software (Customer Relationship Management).
Understanding the success of a marketing campaign is crucial to your ROI. And every agency should be tracking this or getting this information from you if calls are your primary way of obtaining new business.
A marketing agency should be able to show you monthly, quarterly and annual reports of the success of your marketing campaign(s). A marketing agency should clearly indicate what they are doing and explain this in detail if requested.
A report should include analytical data of how many website visitors you're getting, the sources you're getting those visitors, acquisitions, and conversion data. Conversions are different results like completing a forum, joining a mailing list, watching a video, reading an article/blog post, or clicking a button. Acquisitions are when a website visitor becomes a closed deal/sale.
You should see a clear ROI from the sales a marketing agency is producing you. You should never speculate or assume that your agency is doing a good job just because you're making sales. These sales very well might not be their efforts at all and could even be impacting your overall sales.
Don’t get taken advantage of by bad marketing companies! Use these few tips to help make sure your with the right agency or choose the right agency that fits your needs.
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