The Best Digital Marketing Agency is a phrase regularly typed into search engines such as Google. We assume people are looking to recruit the best digital agency to help their business, plus a fair smattering of people are looking for jobs in this growing industry.

It’s a relatively sensible and obvious choice to type in, but does that mean the results you get will be equally robust? Sadly, No.

It can’t be that hard to find the Best Digital Marketing Agency?

But why is that? For a start, most people will have heard the phrase, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. This famous quote about Internet anonymity originated from a New Yorker magazine cartoon by Peter Steiner (dating back to 1993 – a year before I first fully embraced this exciting new medium). To a degree, the same is true about telling the truth online or, as Trump might say, “Fake News”. So just because a business claims to be the Best marketing agency in its on-site copy or advertising doesn’t mean its clients would agree.

So, a good pointer is to find out how long clients stay with an agency—and ask for stats to prove it, not vague claims. If you’re interested, our average is four years, but some have been with us for a decade.

Digital Marketing is the next part of the problem. To some prospective clients, this may encompass everything from logo and website design to coding to build complex databases and platforms that enable a website to exist, email and social media marketing, paid advertising through mediums such as Google Adwords, and ensuring the site is optimised to be found and presented in its best light by the search engines—so that’s SEO or search engine optimisation, as it says on the tin.

Now, other people think a Digital Marketing agency ONLY builds websites using relatively simple-to-use (easy for me to say, I know it’s not that easy!) platforms such as WordPress or Magento.

Yet another group thinks a digital marketing agency is full of people who are good at promoting a website once it’s built and ready to race—so they are like drivers taking instructions over the radio from a team principal in an F1 car.

So, precisely what you are looking for in your search for the best digital marketing agency will depend to a considerable extent on which of these search types you fall into. Some large organisations are after the one-stop shop, and they like getting all their critical data in a single monthly report or dashboard. In our experience, this rarely works as well as expected as, increasingly, each skill making up a digital marketing agency task list is now highly specified and best completed by teams who only do that function.

Some smaller clients also like a one-stop shop as they don’t feel they have the bandwidth and time to manage multiple relationships. The solution here is simple: Pick a lead supplier and ask them to coordinate results with all the other agencies making up the whole solution.

If design is the main goal, look for a web agency that has delivered not only good-looking websites appropriate to your sector but also carefully checked them out to see that all the pages load, for example, on a desktop and mobile, on different browsers, etc. A good agency will do this as standard.

If you are looking for people who can drive traffic to your website by increasing its prominence, two things should be considered, as they both use different experts.

Paid search advertising is an art form requiring adverts to be created and tested, then placed using effective bidding strategies for each click so you do not pay through the nose for prospective leads. Most agencies will charge a fee based on the scale of advertising money spent through them (they used to get a kick-back commission from advertisers like Google but now don’t). Unfortunately, this model encourages expenditure rather than frugality, so trying and doing a deal is essential based on how much you save or what you achieve.

SEO is a whole different skill. It takes time to persuade search engines to find, read, and like your content and then push your products or services higher up the search results. For this, you pay a monthly service fee to the digital marketing agency, but no funds go to Google or others, and it’s unusual to pay a commission on leads or sales.

With SEO, it’s important to find an agency that can work in your sector and tailor budgets around what is affordable for you. All the while, they deliver good results and do not get clients banned or penalised. The best SEO agencies will be those that are transparent about what they do, even down to how they decide on a budget—do they simply think of a figure and double it? Some do!

So then, finding the best digital marketing agency is as much about your business as it is about the agency itself. Who appears at the top of the search results or claims to be the best may not be so, and even if they are great, they may not match the offering you seek at a price you can afford. But we hope this guide has clarified the search for you.

Happy hunting.

Stuart Haining
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