You have to admit that growing your business means getting all the help that you can get. This means linking up with vendors, suppliers, and partners to maximize the different verticals in an organization.

Given the exigencies of modern times, technology and digital platforms have become the go-to-choice for improving sales, marketing, and customer reach for businesses.

In this regard, businesses have two main options in front of them:

1. Set-up an internal/in-house digital marketing team of professionals for search engines and social media.

2. Work with an expert digital marketing agency where you outsource your marketing needs and strategies for search and social.

Most businesses feel that working with outside external help is a better choice for them. It helps them save salaries, workspace, and additional tensions. They can also fix better targets, push an external agency and bring them up to notice if something goes wrong.

In this article, we take advice from digital marketing professionals from one of Singapore’s leading digital marketing agencies, Digitrio. We ask them to help us with five important questions that businesses should ask an agency before signing them on.

5 Important Questions to Ask a Digital Marketing Agency Before You Hire Them

1. Is the agency partnered with search engines and social media companies?

Leading digital marketing agencies once they start doing a significant volume of work become directly accredited by search engines like Google and Bing. Being partner agencies opens them up to numerous direct advantages from these huge tech corporations.

The same goes for social media giants like Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. Companies offer direct inputs to agencies and give them feedback when it comes to improving their campaigns. If you are a business linked to such good agencies, you stand to benefit a lot.

2. Does the agency have the resources to handle the work, or will it outsource the same?

When you are handing over your business to a digital marketing agency, you do that with the belief that their teams and professionals will carry out the work. However, most agencies these days are just interested in getting new clients, but not do the actual work involved.

This results in a dip in the performance levels when it comes to your business’s goals and objectives. Asking this question is critical if you want the highest levels of quality for the work. You need to clarify this very important point before you sign them on.

3. What would be the level of interactions and work processes?

A business is entitled to ask the agency for updates as and when it feels like. However, calling up your agency three times a day or asking for their executives to come down to your office twice a week is not a good idea. It is best to discuss what the interactions would be like.

For example, you can schedule physical in-person meetings twice a month, and maybe phone calls once a week. If there are some important campaigns running, you can request daily updates. Different agencies have different variations in their work processes.

4. How are you setting goals and what strategies will you adopt?

Being too ambitious or too careful is both dangerous for businesses. An agency that is promising unreal returns is probably bluffing just to get your business. Most business owners by this time are acquainted with some of the other form of digital marketing strategies.

You need to ask the agency to set goals and see whether there are sufficient returns on investment on offer. Following this, you need to ask about the strategies they will use to achieve these goals. Warn them that they should not follow any strategy that could get the business penalized on search engines or social media.

5. What inputs are required from the brand for best performance?

One reason why you are looking to work with an external digital marketing agency is that you want to ease the burden. However, if the agency keeps demanding inputs, data, and assets three times a day, it will become very difficult for you to manage and coordinate with them.

This is why you need to clarify right at the outset what it is that they require from you. Constant to and fro in this regard will be detrimental to your digital growth and performance. Once you hand over everything you have, the agency can stop bothering you going forward.

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The Benefits of Working with a Digital Marketing Agency

In this section, we will look at some of the major advantages that businesses can enjoy by working with a digital marketing agency.

• A digital agency has numerous professionals working in different departments. In case there are any troubles, an agency can troubleshoot problems effectively. This is something that you might not be able to experience if you have a limited in-house team.

• Getting an internal or an in-house team means investing in the hiring process. It also means paying salaries, giving them access to paid tools, software, and more. All this means an additional expenditure on the business. All these financial investments can be saved when working with an external agency.

• If a business works with an agency, they can pull them up in case there are any problems concerning your account. You might not be able to exert the same kind of influence on your employees.

• Lastly, as a digital agency works with several other clients, they are up to date with the latest information and strategies for digital success. This can help with the agency fine-tuning plans of action for your business accounts as well.

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The Bottom Line

Many businesses feel that they should have a clear understanding of when the results will start to show. However, this is something that is difficult to assess in an objective sense. It depends on a lot of factors and variables. Digital marketing strategies need some time to start showing effectiveness. You can think about a time frame between three and six months.

By following all the above-mentioned questions, you can be in a much better position to narrow down and select a high-performance and result-oriented agency for your business.

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