Do you use a marketing agency? Believe it or not most companies are too small to have a marketing department. If they don’t have a qualified or competent person in the office to manage their digital media, they normally outsource those services to companies like ours. But what makes a great marketing agency stand out from average ones? Here at LeftLane Marketing LLC we like to think that we approach marketing from a different perspective.
Digital Marketing Qualifications
Just like a college degree, there are lots of certifications that most digital marketers can achieve. Why are they important? Well, at least you know your marketing person has some basic, relevant or at least specific digital marketing skill sets that can help you. If your agency doesn’t have a room full of people who are microsoft certified , adobe, Google certified, Hootsuite certified, Facebook etc, then you might be in the wrong room. The smoke and mirrors brigade shipped out a few years ago. If you’re still working with companies that just wing it and say they have the experience to back it up, you’re gambling with your marketing budget. Make sure you invest your hard earned dollars with people and companies that invest in their employees skill sets and continuing education. Here at LeftLane Marketing LLC, we pride ourselves on continuing education in our niche digital marketing skill sets. Smarter people make better marketers.
Digital Marketing Services
After you have considered the educational / skill sets of your marketing agency, then it’s time to look at what services they actually offer. Do you need a rebrand or a new website? Do you have any idea what your company’s tone of voice is? What about the user experience of your website? Does your online marketing align with your offline marketing? Before you let the agency tell you what they do, you should first understand what services you actually require and what services you can handle internally.
Consideration should also be given when your potential agency says they can do it all. Really? That’s kind of a scary proposition! They can build your website, manage your content matrix as well as your paid media, establish your tone of voice blah blah blah. The bigger the agency, the more expensive they are going to be. Why, because they are going to have massive overheads and lots of smart people in the room. Make sure that your potential marketing agency is the right fit for your business, not just their services.
Transparency and Accountability
You can easily be firehosed with data from your marketing agency. They’ll try to bamboozle you with lots of data around clicks, hits, conversions etc. They’ll also only want to talk to you at most once a month but probably once a quarter and in that meeting they’ll want you to consume, analyse and action a month or three at a time. That’s crazy talk! Your metrics should be measured weekly, monthly and quarterly; all with different metrics and key performance indicators.
Working with a marketing team that delivers easy to understand data that aligns with your predetermined offline endeavours is crucial. They should be held accountable for the work they do by providing you with clear and transparent data sets and metrics. If your intern can’t read the analytics reports from your marketing agency, we can assure you that you’re not working with the right agency. At LeftLane we provide clients with a top-notch service but we only share meaningful and impactful data when it matters. We use the other data in our special sauce recipe that gets you results. Most business owners want to know three things. How much did I spend? How many did I reach and how many sales did we get? No need for pages and pages of data. Most great reports are one-pagers. That’s what we do at LeftLane, No BS, just performance delivered results. Period.