Digital marketing is considered to be a source of growth in the digital era. Since the businesses are getting digitally transformed, digital marketing & branding services are in demand. According to Google’s reports, over 80% of marketing campaigns are active online. Irrespective of the business domain, the companies are seeking services from digital marketing companies.
Today, expert digital marketing companies offer digital marketing consulting services. These services allow you to gain clear visibility of your competition and design strategies that work best for your business. However, the number of companies that offer these digital marketing consulting services is very high. Therefore, the selection of a potential consultant becomes even more difficult. This post aims to simplify your selection by sharing your key selection factors.
18 Tips for Selecting the Best Digital Marketing Company
Not just Information Technology but nowadays almost every business has its online presence. From small scale businesses to established enterprises, every company invests in digital marketing & branding services. Due to this extreme demand, the market is flooded with companies that claim to offer superior services. However, that is not true. The following tips will help you arrive at the right conclusion with minimal efforts.
1) Assess your Company’s Marketing Requirements:
The first tip to select a digital marketing company is to know what your company needs. Digital marketing is a goal-centric marketing process. Therefore, you must know what your company’s marketing requirements are. Before seeking companies and digital marketing services, you must list out marketing requirements for your business. Recognize if your business needs digital branding or it needs audience engagement or maybe it needs to augment its social media appearance. List out your needs and then only look for a marketing agency.
2) Refine Your Goal:
As you are aiming to opt for digital marketing consulting services, you must know your goals. However, being an expert, a consulting company can help you refine your goals. A business goal is not perfect until it is practical. Therefore, while looking for digital marketing consulting services, look for the company that helps you refine your goals or realign your goals to meet changing market trends.
3) List Out and Narrow Down Digital Marketing Companies:
List out available digital marketing consulting agencies. No worries if the list is vague, but you must know available options. Once the list is made, you can rule out the options that do not fit your primary requirements. Narrow down the list to a few options, and then consider crucial digital marketing factors to identify your best fit.
4) Check Their Services:
Digital marketing a broad term that encompasses various services like SEO, PPC advertising, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and video marketing. If you already know your business goals and requirements, you may also understand that all these services may not be needed for your business. If you are unable to determine the services that are best for your business, you can always have a discussion with these agencies. Perhaps, you will get a better idea after a few discussions. Along with this, you can also check if they offer any other related digital transformation services such as web design services, app development services, and so on.
5) Select the Best for You Not the Best in The Industry:
There are several digital marketing industries that make tall claims regarding their efficiency and industry experience. However, the best in the market does not mean best for your company. These companies may focus on individual businesses that bring profit. You must look for a digital marketing consulting company that understands your business purpose and makes efforts for putting the best face forward.
6) Check their Experience:
Expertise comes with experience and this stands true in the case of digital marketing consulting services. They know what Google or other search engines like or dislike. So, you need to check their experience and client profile before approaching them. You can do slight background research for knowing their experience.
7) Case Studies and Recommendations:
Digital marketing consultant agencies often put case studies, testimonials, and recommendations to improve their credibility. You must have a look at their case studies and recommendations on platforms that offer unbiased, views of every company. This can help in getting a genuine idea about the company’s performance.
8) Take Reviews With a Pinch of Salt:
Digital marketing involves reviews on social media and search engines. Certainly, some reviews are genuine but it cannot be taken as 100% truth. You must consider reviews as only a base of listing out digital marketing companies for your digital marketing and branding services. For final selection, deeper and thorough research must be done.
9) Verify Their Accomplishments:
Again, here your background research and eye for detail would work. You must check if the digital marketing company has awards, honorable mentions, professional certifications, etc on their portfolio, then the company may be a good fit for advice. For this, you can either read news online or visit their news section or check some special accomplishment news displayed on their website.
10) Analyze Their Marketing Strategies:
Before selecting the company for digital marketing, you must ask for a rough idea of their marketing strategy. Without knowing the marketing strategy and activities, you cannot judge the potential of the company. If the marketing strategy is strengthened with digital marketing tactics like SEO, social media marketing, Google adverts, ChatBot conversations for customer engagement, etc, then only the company should be chosen. However, a digital marketing consultant would only help you put all the in a profitable manner. A company offering digital marketing consulting services must create strategies for your short-term and long term business goals.
11) Conduct Cost Comparison:
Cost comparison is one important factor since you are investing in the services. In the digital marketing industry, companies are pitting against each other in the price war. This means several companies will offer services for way lesser cost than market rates. Cheapest does not mean the best, neither does the costliest. You must compare the service charges according to services being offered and estimated performance. This way, two companies with the same services but different prices can be identified and you can invest. Look for the digital marketing services that offer value for money.
12) Pay Attention to Their Performance Not Promises:
In order to gain customer attention, digital marketing companies promise several services. However, there is a guaranty that they will serve all. Therefore, you must study their performance for their prior clients. For this performance inspection, checking out their earlier client’s backlinks can help. Check a few past clients and their backlinks, so that you can get an idea about the performance of digital marketing agency.
13) Technical Collaborations or Partnerships:
The digital marketing consulting services only add value when the company offering those services has an in-depth idea about technology. You shall look for a consultant that has collaborations and partnerships in that specific technology. You need to check if they own Google certified partnerships or any other industry partnerships. Although this is not always mandatory, these partnerships are not easy to earn and are only awarded after rigorous testing.
14) Technical Expertise in SEO and Digital Marketing:
Analyzing the technical capabilities of a digital marketing consultant is important. Although today consultants use Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or other third-party services, you need to check if they have developed their own platforms. For instance, Futurism Technologies has developed Futurism Dimensions that offers users exceptional insights on leads of their digital marketing campaigns.
15) Check their Business Values:
If you scout through websites of different digital marketing services you may find that they offer similar services. But they do not offer the same values. Here is how you can check on their values:
16) Quality Standards:
As in any other business, quality is a priority in digital marketing consulting, too. Although most companies operate without certifications, still, many have them. You need to check if they own any quality certifications such as ISO 9001: 2015 or any other relevant certifications for your industry. This is because many of these certifications involve several phases of scrutinization.
17) Analytics and Reports:
How would you measure the success of your digital campaigns? Well, it would depend on the analytics reports. You need to check with the marketing agency if they provide detailed analytics reports on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly basis. Additionally, you can ask questions on different KPIs tracked by them and how these KPIs would contribute to your business growth. You can also ask them for a few report samples if any. If you find the answers satisfactory then decision making becomes quite easy.
18) Go for a Detailed Discussion:
Once you have done all your background research and shortlisted the companies, it is important to hold a detailed discussion with a few of them. This will give you an idea if the firm holds true to its claims, or if the testimonials on their website are true. During the discussion, you can focus on points like:
Now that all the tips to select a digital marketing consulting service providing company are discussed, you can look forward to working with prominent consultants like Futurism Technologies, Inc. The company has been offering digital marketing services for several years. The company offers digital marketing service consulting services with over 15+ years of experience.
They are highly committed to service quality and customer’ data security and satisfaction, therefore their services are complainant to ISO/IEC 27001-2013 standards. Over the years, the company has partnered with leading technology companies like Google, IBM, and Procult. These qualities and their expertise in digital marketing make them suitable as a potential company for small and mid-sized businesses looking for reliable digital marketing consulting services.
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