10 steps to maximize ROI from your digital marketing agency

Digital marketing agencies for many businesses are crucially important partners. They are the ones delivering new business and growing your brand. However, in cases where the setup is not effective, many companies struggle to maximum ROI from their agency. That’s why we invited 3 industry experts to share their tips on the topic.

How to Find the Right Marketing Agency

Finding the right agency is a crucial step. For someone who is new to the industry or the Middle East region, it might be hard to navigate themselves and find a reliable partner. Here are 5 tips that increase your chances you get it right.

Start with asking yourself: What am I looking for?

Think about whether you are looking for someone to take care of all your digital activities or a specific service? Maybe it is SEO or branding? You need to find an agency that is best suited at what you are looking for.

While you can have different agencies for different specialized services, there can be an advantage to having one stakeholder for all services. Your marketing strategy can be streamlined and all projects integrated under one roof. In this case, putting all your eggs in one basket would mean reduced hassle, confusion, and chaos but you also end up relying on one single partner.

At the end of the day, what really matters are your requirements and whether you are working with an agency that is fulfilling those while also doing justice to the potential for your business.

Aligning marketing strategies with larger business goals and requirements

When speaking to potential marketing agencies, it is helpful to convey and discuss your future goals. You should be able to tell them where you want your business to be in the next six months or even the next year, and they should be able to ask you relevant questions. Be transparent. The more you tell them about your goals, the more helpful they can be in achieving them.

A great way to know that a marketing agency is right for you is if they appreciate these discussions and are able to provide examples of marketing strategies that align with your goals. Agency that has standardized packages, templates and one-fits-all solutions will not be a good partner for you.

Finding an agency – ask around :

When you hear of a company through someone, the agency has already built a certain level of credibility. Ask the people you trust about which marketing agency they work with and how their experience was. If you are new to the region or industry and not sure who to ask, try one of these:

Industry events when you can network and ask people with local experience. Tip: Join our Meetup group AstroLabs Digital & Tech!
Ask on LinkedIn. You never know who from your network can have some useful tips for you.
Join different groups to ask others. For example, at AstroLabs Grow, you can join the biggest network of digital marketers in UAE and KSA to ask any questions as well as get updates from the industry.

Do your homework – online research

You can try and look for marketing agencies around and online. Are you looking for an SEO agency? Search in Google to see who does their job well. Make sure you use the right keywords to generate the most relevant searches.

When you land on an agency website, it should impress you within a 3 to 4-second time frame. A good marketing agency should be able to sell themselves well first before they work with other companies. But what should you look for? Services they provide, clients they work with (don’t just look for big logos – focus more on companies like yours) and most importantly – relevant case studies. Have they worked with a similar company and delivered great results? Get in touch with them!

Red flags to avoid when looking for digital marketing agency

Watch out for over-promising. Transparency is very important. If you get the feeling that they are boasting and making false promises, run the other way.

Are they trying to impress you too much? Don’t ask them about which companies they work with in general. Ask if they have worked with companies similar to yours and ask them to show you the actual work they did, not just statistics and numbers.

Avoid any generic packages – typically found on social media. Promise of delivering a complete digital marketing service for 2,000 AED is not realistic.

Measure agencies by how much they care about your business. If they don’t ask any questions and just deliver template packages, look for someone better.

How to set up cooperation with the agency for success

Even though you may have found the right marketing agency, ensuring that you build a professional relationship that encourages growth for both stakeholders can require some conscientious work and effort. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind.

Getting an overview of the project

Discuss the strategy and approach with them, what the process will be, who you will be dealing with, and what to expect immediately following weeks. Figuring out what a relationship is going to be like and what the outcome is going to be will help you ensure that your team is ready to handle the benefits of the outcomes and can supply to meet the increased demands.

From the beginning, be also clear who owns all digital assets involved in the project and who controls access to key tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Business Manager or even your hosting. In all cases, it should be you – the client – who has full ownership over these assets and invites the agency as an additional user.

Agree on deliverables

Sit down with the agency to set clear, concrete, and measurable checkpoints in your journey together. A little compromise and extra effort would be needed from both parties here.

Being open about the challenges and limitations that may come in the way.

Having foresight about potential challenges can help you devise strategies to navigate through the tough times. Open communication ensures that one of you is not falling behind.

Having one point of contact

If you are working with multiple agencies handling the same website, for instance, a media agency and a creative agency are working on a website, it is your duty to make it all work together. Make it clear who owns what process and when they are supposed to deliver.

Centralized task management system.

If you don’t have one, you can ask the agency for suggestions for technological aids like a task management system, which makes the organization of the marketing process much easier, especially when multiple people or agencies are working together.

With these considerations, you can find the right marketing agency for you and begin working with healthy professional relations and clearly defined goals for measurable outcomes. We’d like to thank our experts for sharing their expertise and helping others navigate in this important topic: