How To Choose Your Digital Marketing Agency

Why Use A Digital Marketing Agency?

Whether large or small, businesses of all sizes and with varying in-house capability use agencies to support their digital marketing activity and ensure future growth and success of their campaigns. You may choose to use a digital marketing agency due to factors including capability, cost, time and results.

Capability

The first thing to think about is the capability within your team and within a potential digital marketing agency. Proficient digital marketing agencies will possess a multitude of skilled digital marketers, often specialists in certain digital marketing practices. You may currently employ a digital marketing manager and an executive or two, for example. However, it’s unlikely they will possess the in-depth knowledge and years of experience applying their trade across a myriad of campaigns and industries. Having this skillset at your disposal can be invaluable and prove to be extremely good value for money. For example, for a monthly fee or one-off campaign payment, you could have beneficial input from marketers/advertisers, developers, designers, content specialists, web admins and directors. Having a mixed skillset from an agency to support your in-house marketing manager can often be a very shrewd move and generate fantastic results.

Cost

The second factor to consider is cost, or more particularly the offset of capability versus cost. Hiring employees to cover the skillset of an agency would be extremely costly and is often achievable unless progressed over a long period of time, or if the company receives sizeable investment. Avoiding the costs associated with hiring employees such as recruitment, tax and national insurance contributions, pensions, sick pay, salaries and any other associated benefits, will help avoid a large potential outlay. With an agency supporting your digital campaigns, you’ll have specialists helping you maximise your returns on investment, helping you reduce third party costs which can then be reinvested to facilitate further growth.

Time

The third factor to consider is time. It’s often the case that agencies have more time than you do and they have processes and procedures in place designed to best service digital marketing accounts, which you don’t have in-house. They should already have industry-related tools and technology in place too for further support. Agencies will take time-consuming tasks off of your hands such as monitoring, troubleshooting, reporting or communicating with third parties such as Google and Microsoft. This enables you to focus on running your business and managing the direction of your marketing without getting bogged down in detail. An agency will also have time and budget to invest in learning and development. Its staff will keep on top of industry trends, new features or platforms and best practices and this will ultimately help futureproof your company's digital performance. Depending on your contract, agencies will often have great scalability and be able to tailor your package as your business requirements grow.

Results

Finally, and something which all of the above contributes to, we come to results. You engage a digital marketing agency to improve the return on investment of your digital activity. An agency will be able to help you get more from your campaigns by applying their expertise and technical capabilities, stopping any stagnation or decline in performance and bridging any knowledge or experience gaps within your team. Many businesses use digital agencies as a form of outsourced team to support an in-house digital marketing manager. Having a fresh pair of eyes with an external perspective can prove to be very beneficial. 

Auditing, forecasting, setting goals, strategising, interpreting/reporting data and executing work are some of many things an agency can do to help you achieve your desired business goals. 

How Do I Choose A Digital Marketing Agency?

Here are seven steps you can take towards choosing a digital marketing agency:

Research - Start looking at some local agencies and ask your connections if they would recommend the agencies they use. Try and work out if the agencies you are looking at would be a good fit culturally for your business. Review testimonials and case studies and understand the importance of being recognised partners, e.g. Google Premier Partner.
Shortlist - Decide on a few agencies which sound most credible and a good fit for your business.
Have your house in order - Ensure you’ve had the relevant conversations with your businesses stakeholders. Have clear goals and targets set and understand your need for an agency and how the role will play in facilitating your businesses online success.
Start a conversation - Reach out to your shortlisted agencies and discuss with them what you are trying to achieve and find out how they can help. Be clear on your overall goals and targets.
Understand pricing - As the old adage goes “you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” and this is especially true in the digital industry. There are agencies for all sorts of price points and required skill levels. Make sure you are sold results based on your predetermined goals and not hours of time or rankings.
Receive proposals - Agencies will often provide you with a proposal of how they envisage you working together.
Review your options - Carefully review and commit to working with an agency. Some agencies work on a retainer (contract) and others do ad-hoc project work. Make sure you choose the option which provides you with the best return on investment. 

Why Choose SilverDisc As Your Digital Marketing Agency?

A SilverDisc, we understand the importance of fostering a great relationship with our clients to achieve the required results. Here are some reasons why SilverDisc could be the ideal digital marketing agency for you to partner with:

We Get Results

Ask yourself, What Makes A Good Digital Marketing Agency? The answer is results. We focus on your business goals and how digital can help you achieve them. Your bottom line is what matters and the work we do with you will reflect that. See what our clients have to say.

We Understand Your Full Digital Marketing System

Whether you are aware of it or not, you have a digital marketing system. SilverDisc works with you to ensure you fully comprehend your digital marketing system and consider what needs improving to drive your business towards digital success.

We’re Strategists, Engineers And Marketers

As an agency with a strong technical background and over 25 years of experience marketing on the internet, we’re best placed to drive your business’s online growth. From audits to strategy, execution and support, we have the experience and foresight to see what’s missing from your digital presence and make changes to help invoke action from your customers.

We understand the role technical solutions can play in the ongoing optimisation and success of your digital campaigns and can put these solutions in place. With advancements in technology comes a closer synergy between technology and marketing; the seamless integration of technical capability and marketing is where SilverDisc excels.

You’ll have access to a variety of resources, skillsets and tools, with team members from our marketing, content, development and design departments available to work towards your business goals.

A Partnership Approach

We partner with you, as opposed to working for you. This approach leads to a better all-round relationship and fosters creative discussion and debate, which fundamentally leads to exceptional results.

As your trusted advisors, you can rely on us to keep ahead of industry trends and advancements to help futureproof your digital offering. We work in a variety of ways with our clients, whether that’s as an outsourced digital department, a digital director or simply as digital guidance and support to your in-house digital marketing manager. You can count on us to provide you with expert knowledge, strategy and assist with the overall direction and structure of your digital campaigns.

Our Core Business Values

Our core business values - friendly, knowledgeable and collaborative - run throughout the business and everything we do. We’ll ensure your dedicated account manager is on hand to assist and communicate your results, with weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings available to suit your schedule and to review performance versus targets and set new benchmarks.

Although many of the core principles of search remain, we understand the importance of change. We’ll work with third-party providers such as Google to keep informed on the latest products and features available to improve performance, so you don’t have to. Being in the know on the latest changes means we’ll be able to discuss them with you and make optimisations to help generate better results.

SilverDisc Guarantee

At SilverDisc, we’re so confident that we can better your current digital performance, that we guarantee it! We pride ourselves on adding value to your business and don’t leave success open to interpretation. Rather than selling time or services like agencies traditionally do, we’ll agree to generate a predetermined number of leads or revenue, which show a tangible return on investment.

If you’re striving to get more returns from your digital marketing investment, please do get in contact with us at SilverDisc to see how we could help.