How to help your digital marketing agency help you

Business Development

Do you want a good ROI for your marketing budget?

I’m assuming the answer is yes. 

There are lots of reasons why you might not get a good ROI from your digital marketing agency – many, many of them their fault. 

But what about the accidental, unconscious things that might be stopping them from delivering the best they can?

In this blog, we give our top tips for business owners and Marketing managers who want to make sure that they are doing everything they can to ensure the digital marketing agency they are partnering with is delivering the biggest return on their investment it can. 

Hope it helps!

1. Give access to your Sales team

Firstly, make sure that if they request it, you give your digital marketing agency access to the people who talk to your clients. In many B2B and service-based businesses, this will be the Sales team, although depending on your setup this might vary. 

This is important because it is the staff who are talking to your Clients who will know the common questions that your current leads ask. Your digital marketing company need to know what these questions are. 

That’s because, for us to write copy for your website that persuades prospects to make an enquiry, we need to ensure that it has the correct information in it. The content on your site needs to answer commonly asked questions and remove potential objections they might have. Effectively, we need to ensure that your website removes as many barriers as possible and encourages your prospect through their user journey towards making an enquiry. 

You would be surprised how many companies don’t let us talk to the people who deal with their Clients. If we don’t know what your clientele is asking, we won’t be able to write the best possible copy we can. 

2. Ensure you meet deadlines for approvals

If you are outsourcing your content marketing to a digital marketing agency they should be sending you blogs that need approval as part of your retainer. 

Make sure that you give/get approval for this content as soon as you can. Not releasing content on time can affect how quickly you see results, so it is in your best interest to make sure you approve content as quickly as possible. 

3. Pass on relevant information

This is a hard one to describe, as what do we mean by “relevant”? I think that the easiest way to explain it is to give a whole list of examples. A good agency will try to get “relevant” information from you during their onboarding process, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. You don’t know what you don’t know, and so we think it helps to surface the kind of information that will help your agency create better quality content on your behalf. 

• If you have done work around your brand identity (e.g. defined your target audience or created a set of brand values), pass it on. It will help the agency write content that matches your brand personality and also speak to your target audience. 
• If you have a document that lays out your target audience, pass it on. It will help the agency write content that speaks to your target audience.
• Tell your agency about the most asked-for product/service. This can help them come up with ideas for content that might generate leads. 
• If you provide “bundles” of products as a matter of course, tell your agency. They will be able to package up and describe your products/services more clearly on your site. 
• Tell them the process your lead goes through as you onboard them. This will help them determine the correct CTAs (Call To Action) for the different pages on your site. 
• If you provide a service that is unique to your industry, specialise in a particular sector, or have anything that sets you apart from your competition, tell them. This can help them create USPs (Unique Selling Points) that bring in new business. 

Basically, communicate frequently with your agency, letting them know about the nuances of your business and sales strategy. It will really help. 

4. Read your monthly reports

So many business owners I speak to tell me that they don’t get a monthly report as part of their SEO retainer. This is truly shocking. 

You must insist that your digital marketing agency sends you a report each month which details the activities that have taken place and how your website has performed. Then, you must read it! 

Basic information that you should expect includes:

1. Website Traffic
2. No. of enquiries
3. Monthly Activity
4. Outstanding actions

Other information that you might request (based on the activities that you’re expecting) would be:

• Open rates for email campaigns
• Performance of company social media profiles
• No. of backlinks gained
• Highest performing content on the site

Make sure you know what’s going on, and what progress is being made and be ready to chat through options for improvement. 

5. Track enquiries

This one really will help you. If you don’t do this already, create a document in a central point where you track all the incoming enquiries you receive – including referrals, website enquiries and telephone enquiries. 

Train your Sales team to fill it in every time you get an inbound enquiry. The tracker should contain this information:

1. Date of initial enquiry
2. Contact details
3. How they heard about your company
4. Query/Required service 
5. Status (have you submitted a quote, followed up, completed the work or has it closed out?)

You can of course add extra columns that are pertinent to your business. 

The third piece of information – how the lead found out about your business – is vital for you to determine whether your digital marketing agency is giving you a good ROI. Although all decent agencies should be tracking your website enquiries via Google Analytics or some similar platform, making sure you’re tracking where the leads are coming from too will help you to:

1. Hold them accountable 

You will be able to query any discrepancies you see between the monthly reports they provide you with. 

2. Determine where to spend your money

If you’re using multiple contractors (for example, a telemarketing company as well as a digital marketing agency), your tracker will help you determine which is giving you the best ROI. This can help you figure out where to invest more heavily further down the line. 

3. Follow-up enquiries

Using a document to track the status of each enquiry will help your Sales/Operations team to follow up leads more effectively. You can get a quick overview of which enquiries have been quoted for, followed-up, closed out or are in process.

4. Identify barriers to conversion

If you are getting lots of enquiries that close out because you do not have the correct accreditation or provision, then you can decide whether it’s worth investing in that area of your business. It might mean you train up one of your team in a certain service or work towards a certain industry accreditation or standard. Ultimately, knowing that there’s a gap gives you an opportunity to adapt and potentially grow your business. 

6. Tell them when things are (and aren’t) going well

Who doesn’t like a pat on the back, ay? If you are pleased with your digital marketing agency, then please let them know. Although during our best moments, we all love working in marketing for the sake of it, it also helps us to keep going through tough times when we know that people are happy with the job that we’re doing. You can ask to give a Google Review – the agency will be most happy to send you a link to their Google Business Profile. 

Conversely, let the agency know if things aren’t going well. They can only tackle problems that they know about. Here are some examples of when to speak up:

• If you are getting lots of enquiries, but they’re not the type of enquiries you want, then you need to tell the agency. More work will need to be done to ensure that you’re getting the right enquiries. 
• If your monthly report says enquiries are good, but your enquiry tracker says otherwise, there could be a fault with the tracking software which needs to be fixed. Make sure you let the agency know so they can attend to it. 

Build a partnership

Just like a marriage, the best professional partnerships are ones where both sides are working together and communicating frequently. If you want to make sure you get the best from your digital marketing agency (and all the money you’ve invested in your digital marketing), then ensure you are getting (and giving) the right information. 

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