We live in a data-driven world defined by rapid technological advances. For founders and business owners, the innovations of the 21st century have led to a wealth of opportunities–if you can stay ahead of the competition. Research has shown that digital marketing practices significantly impact customer attitudes and behavior, and businesses are taking note. If you’re wondering how to choose a digital marketing agency that can deliver the competitive results you need, Slam is here to help you figure it out.
In this blog post, we’ll cover:
- The basics of how to choose a digital marketing agency
- How to choose a digital marketing agency for your niche
- How to choose a digital marketing agency and review its portfolio
- How to choose a digital marketing agency based on references and reviews
- How to choose a digital marketing agency based on reporting and analytics
- How to choose a digital marketing agency with industry certifications
- How to choose a digital marketing agency with an RFP
- How to choose Slam as your digital marketing agency
The relationship between businesses and digital marketing agencies is all about synergy, and experience. As an award-winning B2B website design agency, we take care of digital marketing logistics so our clients don’t have to. By trusting us to handle everything from content writing and strategy to on-page technical SEO, our clients have more time and energy to focus on what they do best: scaling projects for maximum impact.
We also offer training products for aspiring digital marketers and founders. For example, our How to Start an Agency masterclass is a great resource for learning about current best practices in the digital marketing industry. Whether you’re wondering how to hire a digital marketing agency, or looking to learn more about the field in general, you can trust the Slam Media Lab team to connect you with the information you need.
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency: The Basics
Choosing a digital marketing agency is kind of a big deal. A well-executed campaign has the potential to turn your business or fundraising campaign into a million-dollar success story practically overnight. A subpar strategy, on the other hand, will waste your time and money. That’s why it’s important to do careful research and have a clear sense of your needs before engaging a digital marketing agency for your business or nonprofit.
When figuring out how to hire a digital marketing agency, we recommend following these three basic steps:
- Define your goals
- Assess your budget
- Understand your needs
These steps also apply to hiring a qualified agency for your website needs. If you’re specifically looking for help with web design, check out our guide on how to choose a web design agency.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the basics of how to choose a digital marketing agency.
Define Your Goals
Working with a digital marketing agency involves close collaboration in pursuit of a common goal. To ensure a focused and results-driven approach, your chosen agency needs to be on board with your specific objectives from the very beginning. That’s why it’s important to clearly define your goals before deciding who to hire.
Precise goals help ensure alignment between the digital marketing agency’s strategies and your business’s overarching aims.
Here are a few common examples of goals we come across in our work:
- Boost conversion rates
- Expand online presence and visibility
- Enhance content engagement
- Increase e-commerce sales
- Improve brand awareness
When selecting a digital marketing agency, make sure they understand your goals and have proven expertise in your niche. Ultimately, this will lay the foundation for a productive and successful partnership.
Assess Your Budget
When determining how to find the right digital marketing agency for your business, setting realistic financial expectations is a critical part of defining your marketing objectives. Understanding your budget constraints will allow you to better identify an agency that knows how to deliver effective results within your financial parameters. This will help you avoid overcommitting resources and potential financial strain.
For example, let’s say you want to evaluate your website’s SEO performance. Do you have room in your budget for a full technical SEO audit service, or do you mostly need help with SEO-friendly content creation? What about a full website design and local SEO package? A clear budget will enable you to optimize your resource allocation for maximum impact.
Budget transparency is also important for fostering a healthy client-agency relationship because it helps prevent misunderstandings. Make sure you’re on the same page with your digital marketing agency about how much you’re willing to invest and your expected returns.
Understand Your Needs
Like all successful relationships, understanding expectations and needs is vital when hiring a digital marketing agency. You’re investing valuable time and resources into forming a partnership, and you deserve to see equally valuable returns. This starts with a clear understanding of what you need to be successful.
When determining how to hire a digital marketing agency, make sure you can clearly articulate these three things to prospective partners:
- Business objectives
- Target audience
- Marketing challenges
By articulating your needs in these areas, you’ll empower your chosen agency to create a customized digital marketing plan that provides everything you need and nothing you don’t. Moreover, this will help set realistic expectations and provide a benchmark for measuring whether the agency lives up to its promises.
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency for Your Niche
Not all digital marketing agencies are created equal. Like any business, each agency has a chosen niche or specialized market segment where it truly shines. If you want to hire a digital marketing agency that understands your needs, you should focus your research and hiring initiatives on agencies with experience in your niche.
When evaluating digital marketing agencies, look for one that understands your market segment and focus. The agency doesn’t need to specialize exclusively in your niche, but it should have a proven track record of successfully marketing to your target audience.
For example, here at Slam, we’ve delivered award-winning results for diverse clients in the restaurant industry, the nonprofit sector, and more. We also happen to be an award-winning Hispanic marketing agency. That’s why our client LTX Connect hired us to promote their networking event LTX Quest to Latinx professionals. Our combination of professional and lived experience with LTX’s niche market led to a productive partnership for everyone involved. You can read more about our LTX collaboration here.
To choose a digital marketing agency for your niche, you’ll need to revisit those needs and goals we discussed in the first section of this article. For example, if you need a marketing agency for your restaurant, you should look for one with experience in the food and beverage industry. Similarly, if your goal is to create a nonprofit marketing plan, you should look for a digital marketing agency with nonprofit experience.
Ultimately, it’s important to select a digital marketing agency that understands your niche and is well-equipped to drive success in your specific industry.
Interested in working with Slam Media Lab?
Schedule a free consultation to learn more about our digital marketing services.
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency and Review its Portfolio
When determining how to hire a digital marketing agency, a portfolio review is a non-negotiable part of the process, as it provides tangible evidence of the agency’s track record and expertise. This will help set you up for success with an agency that can actually deliver on its promises.
Portfolios showcase an agency’s ability to create effective campaigns, meet client objectives, and deliver measurable results. By reviewing portfolios, you’ll gain a sense of an agency’s creativity and industry relevance. You’ll also learn more about the diversity of their work, which will help ensure they have tangible experience in your specific niche.
Better yet, by examining an agency’s past projects, you’ll gain crucial insights into things like strategic approach, ability to innovate, and capacity for addressing challenges. This information will help you make an informed decision about whether or not an agency is suitable for your business needs.
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency Based on References and Reviews
There are a lot of digital marketing agencies advertising their services on the Internet. After all, marketing is our specialty–of course we’re going to promote ourselves! Unfortunately, this can sometimes make it harder for prospective clients to find the right digital marketing partnership for their specific industry and needs.
How exactly does one sort through all the agencies and find the best option? We recommend focusing on references and reviews when figuring out how to hire a digital marketing agency. For example, Clutch is a great online marketplace to find references and reviews for digital marketing specialists. Take a look at Slam’s Clutch profile–and our 20+ 5-star reviews!
Looking at references and reviews will provide you with valuable social proof of an agency’s reliability, reputation, and overall performance.
Here are a few specific things to look out for when reading references and reviews:
- Client feedback
- Reputation in the industry
- References from businesses in similar industries
- Reviews highlighting how an agency handled challenges or setbacks
- Feedback on communication and collaboration
This information is instrumental in making an informed decision about which agency to hire. In addition, you can look for specific case studies highlighting an agency’s past work. Most agencies will feature these on their website. If they don’t, it’s a good idea to reach out and ask.
Slam Case Studies
As an award-winning website design agency, we’re proud of the work we’ve done to help clients crush their digital marketing goals. Our case studies page features specific examples and success stories from clients in a diverse range of industries, from tech and entertainment to the nonprofit sector.
Here are five client case studies we love to show off to prospective clients:
- Sprig and Sprout: This Vietnamese restaurant in Washington D.C. hired us to redesign their website from the ground up, along with a new direct-order feature to improve conversions.
- Symphonic Capital: We partnered with this venture capital firm to build a new brand and website that perfectly captures their unique story and identity.
- Quiet Films: The QF team needed help preparing community screening options for their documentary film The Death of My Two Fathers. We used our extensive knowledge of Memberstack + Webflow integrations to design a picture-perfect website with gated content options for their project.
- Fresh Approach: This California-based nonprofit organization contacted us about a brand refresh for their website. We delivered a brand identity that perfectly captures their mission to connect farmers and communities through food.
- Intrax Global Internships: As an organization that helps international students navigate the J-1 visa process, improving rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) was a top priority for Intrax Inc. We helped grow their organic traffic in a matter of weeks with keyword research and SEO-optimized articles.
These case studies demonstrate our agency’s versatility and proven capacity for marketing to diverse target audiences across multiple niche sectors.
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency: Ask About Reporting and Analytics
When determining how to hire a digital marketing agency, it’s important to ask about reporting and analytics. Your chosen agency shouldn’t just do its thing and expect you to trust the process! As the client, you deserve to have access to a detailed marketing agency report that provides you with a clear picture of the return on your investment.
Reporting and analytics provide you with tangible metrics to measure the success of your digital marketing campaign. These metrics should be clearly and regularly communicated to you, the client, so you’re always in the loop and able to quickly respond to any challenges that may arise.
When researching and evaluating potential digital marketing agencies, look into how they handle their agency client reporting. Do they have a clearly defined framework for communicating with clients? How do they handle transparency? Will they provide you with access to an agency reporting dashboard where you can track the progress of campaigns and measure SEO results?
An agency worth hiring will have well-defined reporting practices designed to facilitate communication and transparency. If they don’t, we recommend treating that as a red flag and looking elsewhere.
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency with Industry Certifications
Keeping an eye out for industry certifications and awards is a good idea when determining how to hire a digital marketing agency. These days, it’s relatively easy for anyone to launch a website and call themselves a digital marketer. Professional certifications and awards are what set the pros aside from everyone else.
Industry certifications and awards can tell you these five things about a digital marketing agency:
- The agency has expertise and credibility
- The agency adheres to industry standards
- The agency engages in continuous professional development
- Clients trust the agency with their business goals
- The agency has specialized skills in specific areas
For example, as a web design agency, we frequently build sites for our clients on a design and development platform called Webflow. We’re really, really good at what we do, but we don’t expect our clients to take our word on anything–we’d rather offer proof. That’s why we got our Webflow Expert certification to prove our expertise as Webflow developers.
We’ve also won several industry awards for our work!
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency with an RFP
If you’re trying to figure out how to hire a digital marketing agency and would rather have agencies come to you, consider posting an agency RFP on job boards like UpWork and Indeed. An RFP stands for “Request for Proposal.” It’s a document you can use to solicit proposals or bids from potential digital marketing agencies.
An RFP outlines your specific requirements, expectations, and criteria. It’s also a good idea to include the following details:
- Project background
- Scope of work
- Timeline
- Budget
- Evaluation criteria
By posting an RFP on popular job boards, you’ll receive detailed information from potential digital marketing agencies about their services and qualifications. This will also save you the trouble of reaching out to different agencies to determine whether they have the bandwidth to take you on as a client.
If you aren’t sure how to put together an RFP, feel free to use our agency RFP template.
Need help drafting an RFP that clearly communicates your business goals?
Download our Agency RFP Template today!
How to Choose Slam as Your Digital Marketing Agency
Here at Slam, we’re passionate about helping founders, nonprofit leaders, and businesses of all sizes with their digital marketing needs. Thanks to our 10+ years in the industry, we know exactly what it takes to design and launch an outstanding marketing campaign that respects our client’s objectives, time, and resources.
These are a few of the award-winning services we offer:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Webflow Design & Development
- Content Writing & Strategy
- Brand Strategy & Identity/
Want to get a sense of our expertise in all things related to digital marketing? You can check out our blog where we regularly post articles about industry trends, software, and data-driven techniques. We also send out a monthly newsletter that delivers helpful tips and resources straight to your inbox.
If you’d like to learn more about our products and services, contact us to start a conversation. We offer free consultations to prospective clients with no obligation, so you have nothing to lose!
