How to Hire a Marketing Firm in 5 Steps (Plus 3 Tips for Hiring a Top Marketing Agency)
If you’re like Leslie, you’re probably toying with the idea of hiring a marketing company. It’s a big decision to make, so you want to ensure you’re making the right decision for your business.
Luckily, we’ve got all the information you need to make your decision!
We’ll answer all your burning questions, including:
- How To Hire A Marketing Firm In 5 Steps
- Why Hire A Marketing Firm?
- What You Should Know Before You Hire A Marketing Firm
If you’re looking for a top-rated marketing firm, look no further than WebFX. With over 25 years of experience, we know how to craft marketing campaigns that drive results. Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our digital marketing services!
How to hire a marketing firm in 5 steps
You’ve determined you want to hire a marketing agency, and you’ve compiled your preliminary information. Now you’re ready to start looking for your perfect match!
So, how do you determine which marketing company is best for your business?
Here are five tips to help you hire a marketing agency that will help you grow:
- Look At The Services They Offer
- Look At Pricing
- Check Out Their Team
- Look For Reporting
- Look At The Results They Drive
1. Look at the services they offer
When researching digital marketing companies, you want to look at what services they offer. If you have your strategies of interest in mind, you can narrow down your list to companies that provide your services.
There are full-service digital marketing companies out there, but there are also companies that only specialize in one or two areas. Generally, choosing a full-service agency is best because you can keep your marketing in one place if you decide to expand beyond your original strategies.
2. Look at pricing
Once you’ve determined a marketing company offers the services you need, you’ll want to look at their pricing. You can narrow down your list by focusing on companies that have reasonable prices and fit with your budget.
Your prior research on these strategies will help you tremendously, as you can determine if the cost of services aligns with the average price. It can help you avoid companies that overcharge for their services.
This step can be challenging, though, because many companies don’t publish their prices online. They require you to contact them and get a quote. This process is time-consuming and makes it difficult to comparison shop.
That’s why it’s recommended that you stick to transparent marketing agencies. These agencies publish their prices and packages online, so you know what you’re getting and how much it costs. It helps you make more informed decisions without having to wait on someone to respond to you.
3. Check out their team
Another critical and often overlooked area to look at is a marketing company’s team. When you hire a marketing firm, you’re hiring a long-term partner. You want to ensure that they’re a good fit for your business, seeing as you’ll be working with them for the duration of your campaign.
Do some digging and get a sense of their team. Try answering questions like:
- Does their team come off as friendly and personable?
- What’s the team’s experience?
- Do they have a diverse team with experience in different areas of marketing?
- What are the company values that the team embodies?
By answering these questions, you can get a better picture of their team and understand if that marketing agency is right for your company.
4. Look for reporting
One of the most important aspects to look at with hiring a marketing company is reporting. If you’re investing money into digital marketing services, you want to know what’s going on with your campaign. As you vet different companies, look for evidence that they offer reporting.
Many companies offer weekly, monthly, or/and quarterly reporting — at a bare minimum, you want to get monthly reporting. You can typically find this information listed in their service packages, so if they don’t publish their packages online, you may need to contact and ask them.
If a marketing agency doesn’t mention anything about reporting, you’ll want to cross them off the list.
5. Look at the results they drive
The last item we’ll touch upon for hiring a marketing firm is results. When you choose a marketing partner, you want to work with one that will help your business flourish online. That means focusing on companies that have a record of driving results.
You’ll want to thoroughly comb your marketing company’s site to see if they publish results on their page. You can look for portfolios or case studies to help you find more evidence of their work. Generally, it’s good to know what they’re capable of doing for your business.
Our digital marketing campaigns impact the metrics that improve your bottom line.
See More Results
WebFX has driven the following results for clients:
$3 billion
In client revenue
7.8 million
Leads for our clients
5.2 million
Client phone calls
Why hire a marketing firm?
If you’re on the fence about hiring a marketing firm, you may wonder what the benefit is of outsourcing your marketing. Here are five reasons you’ll want to partner with a digital marketing agency.
1. You want to focus on running your business
Digital marketing is a big undertaking. It’s not a once and done thing. You need to continually put time and effort into creating, optimizing, and monitoring your digital marketing campaigns.
When you’re busy trying to manage other aspects of your business, though, you may not have the time to dedicate to marketing campaigns. You don’t want to leave your online marketing campaign to wither away either because it’s a valuable part of helping your business grow.
That’s where a marketing company can help.
By outsourcing your marketing to an agency, you can have someone work on your marketing while you focus on running your day-to-day operations. It allows you to reap the benefits of digital marketing without lifting a finger.
2. You don’t have a substantial marketing team
If your company has a team of marketers, you may not feel like you need to hire a marketing company. You may feel as though you can rely on your small team to handle your marketing.
The problem with this situation is that your team doesn’t have the same people-power or knowledge as a team of 500+ marketers from a marketing firm. Your team is limited in what they can do, which means that your marketing strategy may not perform as well as it could.
By hiring a marketing agency, you can take some of the pressure off your marketing team. They can focus on more significant projects while your marketing firm focuses on handling your daily marketing tasks. It prevents you from stretching your team thin.
3. You want to modernize your marketing strategy
One of the most time-consuming things about digital marketing is that it requires constant maintenance. Like we said earlier, you can’t just set it and forget it. You must continually monitor and optimize your strategy.
If you don’t, your tactics will become outdated, and your strategies won’t drive the best results.
So, if you’re looking to modernize your marketing strategy and keep it up to date, hiring a marketing agency is the best option for your business. By working with an agency, you’ll always have a campaign that’s using the most up-to-date tactics.
4. You want access to resources
To have a successful marketing campaign, you need resources — from people to marketing tools. If you keep your marketing in-house, you must find these resources on your own. You’ll have to hire personnel, research the best marketing tools, and figure out how to help your marketing succeed.
Not only is this task time-consuming, but it comes at a cost, too.
Instead of finding these resources on your own, you can get everything you need from a digital marketing company. The best digital marketing companies will offer you people, tools, and other resources to help your campaign succeed.
5. You want to save money
If you’re thinking about hiring a marketing agency, consider the fact that you’ll save money. Overall, it’s more cost-effective to invest in marketing services from an agency than to do it in-house.
When you keep marketing in-house, your costs are far higher. You have costs like salaries of your employees, benefits, and payroll taxes. On top of that, you must pay for software for any number of your strategies — the costs can quickly add up.
If you hire a marketing agency, though, you don’t have to incur these costs. Many marketing companies have in-house software or use third-party software but include it in the price. Not to mention, you don’t have to pay salaries or any other costs to have access to hundreds of marketers!
So, if you’re looking to cut costs, hiring a marketing firm is the way to go.
What you should know before you hire a marketing firm
If you think hiring a marketing firm is the right choice for your business, then great! But before you hire one, you want to ensure you have a few items prepared:
1. Know what you want to accomplish with your marketing
Before you hire a marketing agency, you need to establish what you want to achieve with your marketing. If you don’t know the end game of your marketing efforts, you may end up investing in more than you need.
Setting goals will help you focus on strategies that will enable you to achieve your goals. Some common ones include:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase traffic
- Increase leads
- Increase contacts (calls/form submissions)
- Increase sales
When you know what you want to achieve with your marketing, you can focus on strategies that will help you achieve your goals.
2. Know what strategies you want to use
Another essential thing to know before hiring a marketing firm is the strategies you want to use. You don’t need to have a definite set of strategies, but you want to have an idea of ones that interest you the most.
You’ll want to do some research on different marketing strategies. Some popular strategies to look at include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Social media advertising
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Web design and development
- Video marketing
Investigate these strategies and see what they can offer for your business. With a little bit of research, you can get an idea of what methods may work best for your business. You’ll feel more prepared when you meet with digital marketing companies and communicate what strategies sound best.
3. Know your budget
One of the most important things you need to establish before hiring a marketing agency is your budget. You must know how much you’re willing to spend on marketing services, so you can determine if a company fits within your budget.
When you set your budget, you want to ensure you’re selecting a realistic one. If you’re going to run four strategies on a $2000 budget, it may not be feasible or drive the results you want. You need to be realistic with your budget to ensure you produce campaigns that drive results.
As you research strategies, look for average cost information on your strategies of interest. It will help you determine if your budget is realistic and help you see if you can afford to use the strategy.
Curious to know how much digital marketing strategies cost? Check out our article on digital marketing pricing!
Hire a marketing firm that puts your business first
Your business means everything to you, so you don’t want to trust your marketing to just anyone. You want to work with a marketing company that puts your business first, offers transparency, and drives results that help your business grow. That company is WebFX.
WebFX is a full-service digital marketing company that’s been driving results for over 25 years. Our client-first approach has led us to drive over $3 billion in sales and over 7.8 million leads for our clients in the past five years.
Looking for transparency? We got it.
Looking for multiple marketing strategies? We offer them.
Looking to grow your business? We are too.
If you want to hire a marketing agency that can help your business spark online growth, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our digital marketing services!
