ADVERTORIAL
7 Reasons Why It Might Be Time To Leave Your Marketing Agency
With 2022 right around the corner, business owners and marketing departments are staring into a digital world without tracking cookies, a vast array of opportunities with the Metaverse and are grappling with a more competitive digital landscape in which they compete for new customers.
Digital marketing agencies can provide support, guidance and growth. A good digital marketing agency invests in its own team’s knowledge and skill set on a weekly basis.
However, sometimes complacency can set in, communication between agency and company drops and digital marketing campaigns become dated.
As the CEO of Marwick Marketing, a 23 person Premier Google Partner Agency, and SEO coach for Unlocking Potential, I’ve seen it all over the last 12 years.
I thought it was time to share my seven top reasons why it might be time to switch up your marketing agency.
1 – Reporting
If your monthly reports simply show the “after effects” as results, for example; website traffic, clicks, cost per click, new users, top pages etc. – but doesn’t include what work was done, what did the agency learn from the past month, how the agency intends on increasing the return on investment – then your reporting is incomplete.
2 – Geek Speak
If you ask your agency a question and don’t understand the answer, the agency is not doing its job. A good marketing agency should humanise the language used in digital marketing and provide you with the information you need to make a business decision.
Sometimes agencies baffle clients to keep them from diving deeper into the results or work done. If you’re getting geek speak responses it’s time to move on.
3 – Results Not Contracts
A confident digital marketing agency isn’t interested in locking you into a 6, 12 or even 18-month contract. They will understand that results and relationships will forge a long partnership. If the client’s business is growing due to the measured results of the digital marketing agency then that’s a success.
If your agency is pestering you to resign for long periods of time, take the time to ask yourself why.
4 – Ownership
This one scares me. The number of times we’ve had to help business owners gain access to their digital assets is incredible. Simply put, if you’re hiring someone to optimise and manage your channels – you still own them, and you need ownership access. Platforms like;
- Google Analytics
- Google Ads
- Bing Ads
- Facebook Business
- Google Search Console
- Social Media pages
- Google My Business
- Bing & Apple Maps
- Citations
As a business owner or marketing manager, you must have complete control over these platforms.
5 – Communication
To have a successful marketing strategy, you should be in constant communication with your marketing agency. Marketing agencies should be coming to you with opportunities, new ideas, and if a challenge arises, it should be brought to you first.
6 – Cheeky Monkey – Number One
This one is specific to Search Engine Optimisation. If you’re hiring a marketing agency to improve the position of your website organically, they should be sharing with you a Keyword Placement report at least once a month. These are reports that track where your website is for a specific keyword in a specific location. It provides a tangible indicator as to how the website is performing online.
Some agencies only report on “organic traffic” fluctuations. But this can be influenced by factors not linked to the SEO agencies work and performance, for example;
- Increase in Google searches for your brand name due to external advertising or PR
- Increase in Google searches for products
- Staff visiting the website on a daily basis
- Bot traffic which interferes with Google Analytics data
- Seasonal variations in search traffic
7 – Cheeky Monkey – Number Two
This one is specific to Google Ads (and Bing Ads) and links to having ownership (number 4). Some agencies, sometimes by mistake, will bid on your brand name. This lowers and improves the “cost-per-conversion” metric, which they should be reporting to you. The problem is that conversion, or customer, would have found your website anyway as they were searching for your company name. So we’re incurring a cost per click to have that customer visit the website via the Google Ad and then screwing the actual cost-per-conversion for new business.
These are some of the conversations you want to have with your agency, with transparent action to the marketing platforms.
If you feel like one of these points speaks to you and you’d like a second set of eyes on something, feel free to reach out. I’ve worked in digital marketing for over 18 years in Cornwall, Canada and the US. I’ve helped micro-business launch successfully with small budgets and supported multi-national brands to reach new international markets.
Visit www.MarwickMarketing.co.uk or connect with me on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianthomson/.
