Through my consulting, I run across a lot of digital marketing proposals from a lot of vendors. Most of them need a lot of work. Here are 3 things I think are vital when considering a vendor and their proposed solutions.
Details, Details, Details
Most of the proposals I see have pages and pages about why you should work with the agency and how a digital marketing strategy will help your business. This is fine when they also detail their recommendations and the services they are planning to provide. If they say they are going to help you acquire links or citations, they need to be able to tell you how many over what time frame-even if it is only a range. If they tell you you need to spend “$4,000″/month on Google Adwords, then you need to know how much is going to Google vs. their management fees. If they say they are going to “optimize content”, you need to know how many pages and who is creating the pages.
Don’t be satisfied with line items or long explanations that do nothing to detail what the output of work or expected outcome should be.
Conversion to Sale Level Reporting
The great thing about digital marketing is that you can track so many things: User behavior, lead sources, demographics, etc. You need to know which marketing efforts are generating specific leads. This will help you make better decisions going forward on where to invest your marketing efforts.
Tracking leads from forms should be an easy integration with Google Adwords, Google Analytics and other tools. You can even tell whether the source was organic, from a banner ad, from local, a social referral and a paid search at the keyword level.
If you receive many of your leads through phone calls, there are very affordable technologies that will help you track calls at the same level of detail you can track form submissions. If your vendor is unwilling to track paid search calls at the keyword level, I would ask them to figure it out or leave and go to another vendor.
If you can work with the vendor to tell them which leads they give you result in good leads and sales, you can work together to make your efforts much more profitable.
Is it Holistic?
Almost all marketing strategies work much better when part of an overall strategy. If you vendor is unwilling to consider how to work with your other strategies then you might want to avoid that vendor. There is nothing wrong with vendors who sell one type of digital marketing, as long as they recognize that there are other strategies they need to play well with and other solutions may be more profitable than theirs. A really good vendor will even tell you about strategies they don’t sell that will enhance what they do, and maybe even have a better ROI. For example, many social media experts will tell you you may need to invest more in search engine marketing before spending more on social media, or vice-versa.
How Can You Make The Best Decision?
- Educate yourself
- Hire a consultant who will be on your side.
- Get references
