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With millions of business websites online, and millions more constantly being created, it’s essential to craft a strategy to stand out from the competition, and hiring a digital marketing company is one of the most effective ways to achieve this, especially for small or medium companies without the resources to outfit a fully-fledged in-house marketing department.

If you choose the right digital marketing company, you’ll have a full-service firm that’ll handle every aspect of your marketing strategy and get your business optimized for lead generation and conversion across channels. Advantages to this include increased ROI, possible viral content, and measurable results from a personalized strategy. The flip side is that if you settle on the wrong company, they could make things worse for you by using blackhat tactics or simply through incompetence.

Here are a few crucial metrics for determining which digital marketing company would be the best partner for your business’s growth.

Related: Five Tips To Grow Your Audience For Your Digital Business

Experience is a crucial factor, but one mistake that many people make is not focusing on the cited experience specific to their niches when searching for a digital marketing company. While a company might have many years of experience building websites and handling ad campaigns for e-commerce companies, if you run a law firm it might be better to find a digital marketing company with experience handling projects that concentrate more on your particular services.

When you are outsourcing your marketing to an agency, the spectrum of services offered by the agency is a crucial point to consider. With many more channels you can use to reach customers and potential customers, like SEO, digital marketing, email marketing, content, affiliate marketing, and influencer marketing, it’s important to be able to engage on as many of those channels as possible. Ideally, the agency you’re working with will have the capacity in all the channels you want to use and more. As much as possible, you want to avoid having multiple agencies handle your marketing to avoid the risk of conflicting messaging or strategies.

No matter how good a company’s sales pitch is, you won’t benefit much from hiring them if they turn out to be unreliable when it comes to delivering your project and doing it on time. In checking out a company’s reliability, search for their name on Google and check if previous customers have reviewed them on the Better Business Bureau site or similar sites. Ask them for references and take the time to get in touch with those references for verification. Many agencies, like Lilo, list their past clients on their websites to make it easy for people to verify their portfolios. Look for companies who are transparent about their work, allowing you to deduce their strengths and weaknesses.

Being given a quote is one thing, but being sure that the quote is accurate and truly reflective of what you’ll eventually be billed is another thing entirely. Many digital marketing agencies use hidden charges to rack up expenses. Sometimes, you might need to give the company some financial wiggle room for them to do their best work, but ask as many questions as necessary to make sure you’re working with a company that’s upfront and transparent about its billing policies so you don’t get blindsided down the line. It’s important to keep in mind that lower prices do not always equal better value. You should evaluate offerings holistically to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

The ideal relationship between your business and a digital marketing agency will be a long-term one that will span many years as you grow your company from a startup to a multinational gem. The quality of customer service in your chosen agency is going to be a defining part of that relationship. Will you be able to get in touch with a rep when you need an urgent fix on one of your resources, and will you be able to quickly make changes to your campaigns to meet growing demands? A company that has a stellar, responsive customer service system is paramount.

Selecting a digital marketing agency is possibly the most important decision you’ll make in relation to your company’s marketing strategy. With the right agency partner, you’ll be able to rely on them to design and execute effective strategies that’ll increase the visibility of your products and services, as well as boost your bottom line.

Related: Customer Service Is the New Upsell

Source: Entrepreneur

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