Traits to look for in a digital marketing agency

When companies switch between digital marketing agencies, they feel that something is missing from their current service providers in this niche. In most cases, this insufficiency can be boiled down to one thing — a lagging profit increase. 

After all, every marketing effort has one simple, final goal in mind — helping a company increase its profits. If that’s not happening, then the agency in question simply isn’t doing a good enough job. And in the modern world of digital marketing, everything is data-driven. In turn, that means that the performance metrics of any online campaign can be outlined quite clearly. That’s why companies do not offer many second chances to agencies which don’t do a great job the first time around; finding a replacement is rarely difficult.

In order to provide a company with more profits, a digital marketing agency has to increase the number of leads that may potentially be converted. While there are many link-related factors to consider here when it comes to online marketing, ultimately, serious clients will want to be aware of where your leads come from.

The reason for that is not difficult to surmise; clients want to know if you’re doing a good job with diversifying leads. Similar to investments, you don’t want the bulk of leads to originate from a single source. That leaves your campaign open to disruptions — a single server shutting down temporarily could mean a lot of lost revenue.

Another one of the key traits to look for in a digital marketing agency is efficiency. Sure, this work does require a dose of creativity. However, it’s simultaneously a very technical kind of job, meaning that clients expect results in agreed-upon timeframes.

While customer retention can definitely be one of the goals of a marketing campaign, the emphasis is usually on acquiring new customers. As a client company, you’re fully within your rights to know how much the acquisition of each new consumer would cost. That kind of metric is another way to showcase the cost-effectiveness of a digital marketing agency. 

This metric is usually calculated across different marketing channels. You divide the funds you’ve used to acquire customers using a particular channel by how many customers you’ve managed to obtain. And that figure is how digital marketing agencies provide some proof of success to their potential clients.

Apart from acquisition costs, client companies can ask how much individual lead generation costs throughout a campaign. Of course, if the conversion rate is low and these leads don’t become customers — that’s an entirely different issue. But, an affordable lead generation cost is simply one of those qualities digital marketing agencies should have. 

It should be noted that this cost can vary based on the industry of the client company; it’s not always up to the agency itself and its methods of lead generation.

The previous highlight among the traits to look for in a digital marketing agency is a neat segway into the big one — lead conversion. Just how good are the sales and marketing teams in their quest to create sales from prospective leads? A high amount of leads with lower sales would indicate issues in the sales department, and vice versa.

In this day and age, social media represents one of the most important digital marketing playgrounds. With that in mind, the level of engagement that people have with the content of a digital marketing agency is certainly a key performance indicator. This goes for both the content that the agency has produced for other clients and for their own social media accounts.

As a company, you don’t want your customers to make just one purchase. That would mean a big waste of resources for lead generation, conversion, and subsequent retention. Instead, you want to build a long-time relationship with your customer base, one that results in mutual benefits for everyone involved. With that in mind, customer retention rates are definitely traits to look for in a digital marketing agency. The same goes for subscription-based services; you need to know how many subscriptions you lose each month and adjust your choice of a digital marketing agency accordingly.

Every business operates according to predetermined goals — and digital marketing agencies are no different. Before hiring an agency, try to find out how good they are at hitting their targets, both in working with clients and their own goals.

If your brand has an online presence maintained by a digital marketing agency in the form of a website, try to see if you’re getting your money’s worth out of the traffic on the site. Calculate the ratio between how many people visit your website and the number of leads you get from it.