When you come to a point where your in-house marketing team is not enough to make you reach your most ambitious goals, what do you do? Right, search for the resources to help elsewhere. Even if you use some outsource marketers or media buyers, it might be not enough to make global changes to your user acquisition volumes and quiality. It’s only natural to refer to a digital marketing agency in order to achieve more or even achieve the impossible.
Where do you start? Here’s the list of thing you need to know or define before you even start to search for the digital marketing agencies that match your criteria:
1) Choose your marketing goals
However obvious it seems, you need to make a list of things that, in your opinion, work good for you, find things in your current performance that are good, satisfactory and bad, what you care about and what does not matter much, analyze your points of growth and your bottlenecks. Of course, you can come to an agency and make them do the analytics for you, it’s much better to have a clearer notion of what is going on in your business, the degree of detail depends on the time you can spare and the amount of extra money you’re willing to pay for the research and may vary.
Think of the scope of work that needs to be done and try to virtually allocate the processes and responsibilities to both your and agency teams.
2) Measure your key performance indicators
.. and make a snapshot so that later you can provide anyone with a starting point for any estimates. Also, forecasting your ideals results with an agency is not bad, you’ll need that for the agreements.
3) Think of your overall business goals
It might be better not to focus on the monthly number of installs or purchases but rather imagine where you want to be three years from now. Monthly, quarterly and yearly goals must derive from something big and important, whichever method for defining the business goals you choose, SWOT, OKRs, or something ultra-trendy.
4) Don’t be ashamed of not knowing the current agency pricing
If you have no idea of the agencies’ pricing, it must not scare you off from planning the marketing budget: maybe you can have a clearer notion of the amount of money you can afford to spend depending on different campaign outcomes, and that will help you choose a marketing agency you really can afford (and not be pushed into “that’s how things work in the market” thing). If you have any friends or acquaintances to ask for advice, you might do that: they will tell you if your budget expectations are too far from reality.
5) Define your brand voice and brand message
If you haven’t done that before. Seeming quite straightforward and obvious in a small team where everyone knows everyone and everything about your company values, brand message may occur tricky when you try to explain it to third-party anyone. A decent digital marketing agency (any advertising agency, in fact) will ask you about your dos and don’ts.
Creating a brand book if you don’t have one might also come handy: you may find out that following your guidelines will require additional resources from the agency, maybe a non-standard media buying strategy, maybe more effort for the creatives, more time for the checks and approvals. Providing your counterpart with all the necessary information will save everyone from the pain of recalculating the costs and rescheduling the deadlines.
If you have any trouble with the adaptation of your tone of voice for different media, you may refer to this article.
So, you have figured out everything that needs to be figured out, and the hard choices time comes. What are the criteria your best mobile marketing agency needs to meet? What are the facts and digits you need to pay attention to?
The specialization of the agency or its areas of expertise.
- The specialization of the agency or its areas of expertise. Compare the scope of work they say they do to what you currently have. If it is not clear from the website or presentation, it’s always okay to ask, we are sure they’d be happy to tell you all the necessary details.
The successful cases in your vertical or likely verticals. Take a close look at the digital marketing agency portfolio. Of course, the likely verticals are the most relevant but do not neglect other products’ performance stats. Maybe you’ll find some suscpicious details, maybe you, in contrast, will find the unexpected inspiration for your future campaigns.
- The number of long-term clients. Even if you see an impressive number of companies of all sorts, ask the marketing agency which of them are the long-term ones. It is a good indicator of whether the agency can reach the long-term goals in accordance with the company strategy, its ability to scale the campaigns and keep the number of quality users stable and high. the growth hacking skills in general.
- The number of reviews, the placement, and who (the company, the status of the employee reviewer) they come from. It’s okay to trust your potential partner in terms of their promises, but reading and analysing the reviews and testimonials might help you resolve your unspoken concerns or prepare a list of issues for further examination. How were those stated goals achieved? What were the obstacles and the bottlenecks for the project?Be ready to face the fact that some of the numbers and even goals might be subject to NDA, this is no fault of an agency and is as possible as you reading this
- The number of employees. Is this number enough to satisfy you?
- The number of instruments they use – are they similar to or different from yours? How many crossings are there?
Have we forgotten anything? Is there anything you’d like to add to this list?
We hope this article helped you in your search for a perfect agency!
