How to choose the right Digital Marketing Agency

Choosing an agency is hard

 Let us face it. Choosing a right digital marketing agency is really hard. Engaging one is a huge investment and commitment, especially when you are looking for a partner to help your business. With such a small market in Singapore, the competition here can be quite intense. Some agencies might even overpromise and underdeliver, submitting low bids to even under serving you once getting downpayment. We have heard the fair share of horror stories from clients telling us that. While it does stain the name of digital marketing agencies, not every one out there is a bad egg. Instead, good agencies believe in really helping the clients on their business objectives and building a relationship with them.

The question is: How can I choose the right digital marketing agency?

We hope that through this article you will make an informed decision. It does not even matter if you do not choose us 🙂 . Ultimately, we hope to educate and empower people to make an informed decision for their marketing and the best return on investment. 

What is your objective. 

First things first, what is your objective? Ask yourself this very simple question. Ultimately, at the end of the day and campaigns, what do you actually want? Do you want brand awareness? Getting more leads and sales? Are you building your brand from scratch or just to keep up with your branding? All these needs to be clarified up front and always have the objective in mind so that the digital marketing agency can make the right recommendations to you and your business.

 

I want you to help me with my SEO and have thousands of likes and followers.

 

We get this all the time. SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimisation, is something that constantly changes due to Google’s tweak in the algorithm. It is a method to get traffic  with Google ranking how relevant your content is and therefore showing the results on the Google Search page. Question is, it is constantly changing and  furthermore, the click through rate might be too small if you are not doing the right SEO!

Similar to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, it is constantly changing and has personal friends have haven priority over business page updates. Hence it is getting rather hard for you to push your message out if you are not doing any paid ads. Hence, you are unable to reach your Facebook page fans. After all, they make money through advertisement.

Remember those emotions that you see like angry and sad in addition to your likes? ( No pun intended). Yes they are also now part the weightage towards your news feed as well. Any reactions is a strong indicator to Facebook that the user is interested in the post and will begin to show more of such post to get you engaged. It is due to such changes that now we are beginning to see business collaborating with strong influencers because chances are fans are likely to like and react strongly to their idol/preferred influencers, therefore making sure that the brand’s visibility will not get drowned in the sea of other post.

It is really important to keep yourself updated with the changes in the social media landscape as things are changing so fast and quickly all the time. Remember those times where “digital marketing agencies” will sell you Yahoo Ads or Bing Ads? Maybe they still do cause they are not with the trends. Should we go for memes? After all millennials like memes with all those memes page. Well that really depends, especially if you need to be really careful of your brands for some companies.

All you need to know what are your business objectives and making sure that you are getting the best of your marketing investments. A right agency will give you the right advise and suggestions on what to do and make recommendations along the way.

 

Jack of all trades but master of none? Not true

 You will be hard pressed to find a digital marketing agency that only does one function these days. Pure SEO, pure web design, pure branding. Chances are very slim. In order to be effective, these days digital marketing agencies and marketers need a while range of skills in order to service their clients. You should consider agencies that can align with your goals, branding and objectives. For example, you want  to rebrand your website. Great now it is done. what is next. You need to market it. Here comes Google Ads and Facebook Ads, but how do I know which customers are converting, where are they coming from? The visuals for the ads, Is it aligned with the website. Social media engagement. How am I suppose to communicate with them and they type of two way communication to keep them engaged. All these should be considered and you do not want to find your self running around multiple agencies just to see it being done too. 

A rough description of what agencies can offer these days. 

 

  • Web design and hosting
  • Migration and backing up
  • Digital Analytics
  • Social Media Marketing
  • SEO
  • Social Media Engagement
  • Branding
  • Graphic/visual design 
  • Copywriting/ Content creation 

 

Our advice is that get an agency that can do most of it and does it well so that you need not find yourself running around different groups of people just to get what you need to be done. You should instead be focused on doing one thing and that is to close sales! 

 I just want to increase sales/get more clients right now. Can you help me? 

 That is perfectly fine and normal. Should that be your primary objective the only way to do it might be to do paid ads. Yes, By doing Google Ads and Facebook Ads to get your message across. While we do believe in SEO and organic ads. the fact is that it is too crowded these days and you will be on the losing end should you not do so. After all Google and Facebook make most of their profits through ads by selling ad space to clients like you. It is a mix of both organic and paid ads that will help you increase sales. Given Google and Facebook vast tools of ad, chances are this will be the best and easiest way to get more clients.

 How do paid ads and make sure it is effective for me?

 Paid ads is just a medium to generate traffic and get more sales. While some might boast about their heritage, special in house programs, AI, insider tips, the truth is that crafting a compelling ad is part art and part science. You need to be understand the science behind how ads are being shown to the audience and crafting a compelling statement that will get your potential clients to click. There will be trials and errors, failed campaigns and even wasted money on bad ads. But remember, there is always real work behind finding the right formula to get the right audience that will convert.

 How much should I put in? 

We all want positive ROI on our investments. We are marketers understand and we have seen countless of our clients trying with a small budget and wondering why it did not give them the right results. Truth is, some budgets are too small to see any returns for their campaigns as they are easily dwarfed and outspent by their competitors. Actually, the money that is being used is just for testing to make sure that you are on the right track. Sadly, most give up too fast before any ROI is being seen and making a conclusion that digital marketing is not for them.

 

Instead, tie it down to how much you can spend and think about the cost of accqusiion of one customer and working it out from there rather than just see it as an expense. Furthermore, such digital ad campaigns are much better than traditional ones as they offer tracking, flexibility, cheaper and not being tied down to an expensive contract. Also, be realistic, do not expect a $10 spend will generate $1million sales in just one day. Things will take time.

How do I hire an agency?

 

Here are just some questions for you to think about

    Expectations 

  • What is the agency supposed to do? Think of the problem that the agency is supposed to do and the reasons why you are engaging in one.
  • Target audience? Target? Expectations and results? Objective of campaigns? Post campaign support?
  • Cost of agency? Marketing rates / charges?
  • Target audience? Target? Expectations and results? Objective of campaigns? Post campaign support?

Reportings and feedback

 How are meetings and review to be completed? Is it bi weekly?

  • Is the agency responsive or just hiding from you all the time? You must understand that you are not the only client that the agency is handling so givee them some time to reply.
  • Is it calls only? WhatsApp or emails?
  • If you have too much to handle, consider delegating some task to your other staff or schedule a call for updates.

Timeline and length of project 

  • Things will not work magically overnight. It takes time to built. You web traffic or rank will not jump to the first after one night of campaign. Give it time to monitor and ask the right questions. SEO projects will take longer. Building a community, getting likes, followers will take a longer time if you want quality and organic followers.Do your basic homework
  • Get a basic understanding of the technical terms that you know that they are taking about and it is easier to communicate.
  • If you do your homework, the agency will not dare to pull a fast one on you too.

How do I know if an agency is qualified or not?  

Truth is, for digital marketing, there is no “qualifications” or official certs. What most agency should have at least is the Google Partners Badge like us, which means that we have exceeded a certain ad spend across our portfolio and have done the right stuff for Adwords to be qualified for it. 

Other things  you can look at is the clients, case studies and testimonials of the agencies. 

Still not sure, why not just feel free to contact us below and let us get you started on your digital marketing journey.  

 

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