What to Expect From a Digital Marketing Agency

If you haven’t worked with a digital marketing agency before, you may not know quite what to expect or how to integrate an agency’s ideas into your overarching brand strategy. It’s a good idea to set your expectations from the get-go to make sure working with a digital agency is right for your team and your business as a whole. 

In this blog, we’re lifting the lid on what brands should and shouldn’t expect when working with a digital marketing agency… 

Top Five Things To Expect From A Digital Marketing Agency

Hiring a digital agency can be an exciting step for many brands, and it’s a great opportunity to explore new ways to enhance your marketing efforts. Here are just some of the things you can expect when working with a digital agency: 

1. An Extension of Your Team 

One of the best benefits of hiring a digital agency is you get access to specialists working across a number of different departments, from technical SEO to paid media and everything in between. Variety is the spice of life, and digital agencies can be ideal for brands looking to further support their in-house marketing team. 

2. A Strategy-First Approach

‘Dive in and do it’ might sound exciting at face value, but you should expect a digital agency to deliver a more measured approach and fully immerse themselves in your brand, overall performance and competitor set before developing a comprehensive plan of action. 

It’s well-known that agencies are proactive and fast-paced, so you can expect hard work from the get-go, but in some cases it’s essential for a digital agency team to take a few weeks to dive into your site’s analytics first. If you’re just looking for someone to whip up a couple of social graphics or draft up a random blog in half an hour, we’ll point you to Fiverr. 

3. Hard Facts and Cold Truths

A good digital marketing agency is all about helping a brand to grow and achieve their goals, and sometimes a bit of tough love is needed. An agency should be honest about their views on how best to drive results, and should always put clients’ interests at the heart of everything they do. 

4. Regular Communication and Full Transparency 

Transparency and communication go hand in hand. You should know what your digital marketing agency is working on, when to expect a piece of work to be completed and what the end results are. Your agency should always be straight up with you about your site’s performance and any increase/decrease in traffic or revenue. 

If you’re worried about the classic ‘hide the bad results and focus on the good’ trick, with Flaunt Digital you can expect full access to a live, personalised dashboard so you always know what’s occurring. 

5. Flexibility

Finding an agency that will flex strategies to meet new goals and overcome new obstacles will be the key to a happy and successful partnership. Stick-in-the-mud ‘but that wasn’t in the plan’ personalities are likely to persist in following an out-of-date strategy that just won’t support your business as it evolves. 

Top Five Things Not To Expect From A Digital Marketing Agency 

If you’re thinking about hiring a digital agency to mastermind your marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to have a clear plan for how you and your agency will work together. Here are five things you should never expect from a digital agency: 

1. A Part-Time Team Member

Digital agencies exist as their own entity and, while they can be viewed as an extension of your team, it’s frankly a waste of time and money to set a list of ad-hoc tasks for your agency. You’ll no doubt get the work done, but your business might not grow at the pace you’d like to see. Digital agencies think strategically and work to meet long-term goals, rather than to fulfil smaller day-to-day marketing tasks. 

2. Instant Results

Surely you can just sit back and watch the results (and the revenue) roll in… right? Yes, but patience is key. If you’re looking for brand-transforming, millionaire-making results faster than you can brew a Pot Noodle, you’re probably not looking in the right place. Digital marketing agencies are your strategic partners, not Aladdin’s genie. Digital marketing is hard work. It takes strategic thinking, determination, patience and a team of experts dedicated to their craft to make magic happen. Trust your agency’s suggestions and help them to succeed. 

3. A Yes Man

Digital agencies might not always agree with you, and that’s okay. Agencies hire specialists rather than generalists, so chances are they have expert knowledge on their subject matter whose main goal is to help your brand grow and drive results. Trust us, no one takes any joy in being the person to say no. Agencies should be their clients’ champion and guardian, always doing right by the brand. 

A marketer naturally has plenty of questions and agencies should always look for answers. It’s a long-running SEO joke that ‘it depends’ is an answer often given by agencies, but real experts should always follow this up with ‘it depends, but…’ and detail a list of different options and suggestions. Agencies might not know the answer to everything (search engines can move in mysterious ways) but your agency team should be able to use past experience and knowledge to give you clear and strategic answers to your questions. 

4. All Agencies To Be The Same

Digital marketing agencies are just like any other type of brand – there’s loads of ‘em to pick from, and you need to choose the agency that aligns closest with your values. You’ll come across a myriad of different agencies all offering different services, price points and USPs – take your time to get to know the agencies you might want to work with. It’s not an off-the-shelf situation and agencies should provide a bespoke package that suits both their team’s specialist skill set and your business needs. 

5. All Talking, No Doing

Agencies absolutely should deliver strategy updates and regular reports but that shouldn’t make up 90% of their output. If all an agency does is discuss what might support your brand growth, when will they find time to actually do the work? The proof is always in the pudding, and agencies should be passionate about putting their ideas and plans into action. 

Choose An Agency That Does Things Differently

Here at Flaunt Digital, there are a number of things that separate us from the rest. Whether it’s putting our specialists directly in touch with clients or building in-house technology to help us deliver data-driven strategies that drive results, you’ll always find us working on the next big thing to help us stand out. Because, just like you, we know we’re in a competitive market. We care deeply that brands find the right fit to help them grow and achieve great things. And, you know, we’d quite like to be part of that. 

For the inside scoop on life at a digital agency, follow us on Facebook or Instagram and keep checking back on our blog for more tips and advice on digital marketing agencies.