Universal Bloggers
Through the course of 2019 and the trend growing stronger in 2020, more companies are embracing digital marketing in the world over to keep afloat. Many of these companies hire digital marketing agencies to take care of that area of business. Hiring the wrong digital marketing company could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars before you realize the need to pull the plug. Even worse, they could cost you your reputation. Here are 7 mistakes to avoid when hiring a digital marketing company.
Mistake 1: Failing to assess the competence of the company before hiring.
You should be able to differentiate between great salesman and great skills.
Granted, a fully fledged digital marketing company should have both great sales people and skilled web Engineers.
If a company only has great salesmen, then you are likely to buy into their pitch but they will lack the technical people who understand the workings of digital marketing. Digital marketing has its own set of rules. For the salesmen to be effective, they will need the marketing engineers to bring them in front of a digital audience. When hiring, it’s great to have people who can make a good sales pitch, but they need highly skilled digital engineers to back up their work.
Mistake 2: Hiring a traditional marketing firm to do your digital marketing
Many businesses were accustomed to working with huge traditional marketing firms to meet all their marketing needs. With the growth of digital marketing, these traditional marketing firms adopted the culture and hired a few people to cater for clients who ask for the service.
In most cases, the hired individuals have basic knowledge of digital marketing. Other than making a couple of posts on your social media handles, they often lack the knowledge to come up with complex and highly effective digital marketing strategies. It’s better to employ a small digital marketing firm with highly capable specialized experts than a large traditional firm with 2 or 3 people in the digital marketing department.
Mistake 3: Being the lowest paying client.
When you are the lowest paying client, you are likely going to be assigned the junior team. The senior individuals will be focused on keeping the higher paying clients happy as those are more valuable to the firm. Unless a firm has fixed prices, i’ts wise to pay well and in return you are likely to have better results faster.
Mistake 4: Hiring a digital marketing firm off of a recommended list.
There are several websites which make money off ranking other businesses. It’s a great idea to rank businesses, but if a business has to pay to get a favourable ranking, then the ranking is totally useless.
You need to take time and assess each of these companies at an individual level. Go through their websites, look at their services, assess their team, make calls and have meetings with each of these companies before you commit.
Mistake 5: Hiring agencies whose performance promise is quantified by traffic and likes.
If an agency tells you that they will bring in x amount of traffic or y amounts of likes and that’s their key performance indicator, then that’s an agency to avoid.
We all know traffic and likes don’t equate to sales. If the amount spent to get that traffic and likes doesn’t make a positive return on investment, then it’s not worth it. An agency with skilled professionals should know how much you make off each sale, then they can craft the marketing strategy and budget off this knowledge.
