Digital Marketing Agency Checklist

Hiring a digital marketing agency is a big decision. You want to find the right agency that fits your brand, has the same vision, has significant experience, and fits your budget. Making the right decision can be your ticket to accelerated growth. Making the wrong decision will end up with frustrating meetings, sub-par marketing performance, and wasted time and money. 

In this checklist, we’ll map out items to check before hiring a digital marketing agency.  This checklist is broken down into several larger categories, specifically: experience, cost, terms, ease of working, customized approach, ability to drive business growth, references, and reviews. 

Experience

Every digital marketing agency has some level of experience, but some experience isn’t enough. Make sure the agency has the following:

• Industry experience

• • • Every industry is highly unique and requires a unique finesse. Ask about their experience in your industry, and if they work with similar clients with similar goals.

• Platform experience

• • • Depending on the platforms you’ll use (i.e. Google Ads, Meta, Mailchimp, etc.), make sure the agency has sufficient experience on each platform you’re active on. 
  • Years of experience
    • Having one or ten years of experience is a major difference. Ask how seasoned the team is, from the account manager up to the director position. 

• Relevant case studies

• • Ask for case studies of how the agency drove growth for similar clients. 

Cost

I would never advise choosing an agency based on cost.  There is always someone cheaper, but that doesn’t mean they’re better. Generally, any upfront cost savings by hiring a low-cost leader will create a lot of pain and frustration down the road (not to mention opportunity costs). 

That said, while cost is not the deciding factor, it is a factor. Make sure you work with an agency that works with budgets you’re comfortable with. You don’t want to be the biggest client (that means the agency doesn’t have a lot of experience working with companies your size), nor do you want to be the smallest client and get very little service.

Choose an agency where you’re somewhere in the middle, you’re not the largest, nor the smallest.

Terms

Ask the agency what their terms are. At Rise we strongly believe that a partnership shouldn’t be forced through contractual terms. That is why every agreement our clients can cancel or pause at any time, no questions asked. We believe if we’re providing a ton of value, our clients will keep us. 

Speaking from experience in working at a past agency, some terms are very lengthy. Some may require an annual commitment or six months. 

I strongly recommend making sure the terms are very flexible, just in case you get into a spot where you need to pause the partnership, for whatever reason (economic, performance, internal factors, etc.). 

Ease of Working

When you hire a digital marketing agency, you’re going to be working with them closely, for a long time. Make sure they’re easy to work with and enjoyable!  

Oftentimes during the sales process, this can be a precursor to the relationship. If the sales process is seamless, easy, transparent, and with quick response times. That is often an indicator of how the team operates. 

If the digital marketing agency is difficult through the sales and onboarding process, that could be a sign of things to come. 

Also, set your terms on how you want to work with the agency. Do you prefer certain dashboards delivered on a specific day of the week, prefer weekly or bi-weekly status calls, and quarterly strategy sessions? Lay these out up front, to make sure the agency will make working with you easy and enjoyable. 

Customized Approach

This is a big one. There are many large agencies that service a lot of clients and have scaled by being hyper-processed. They can stick clients into their process and hope for the best. Make sure the agency will customize the marketing approach to your needs and your unique business. 

Being a small (but growing!) and independent agency, we have the flexibility to customize our approach for each client, vs. bucketing 10-50 similar clients together and working with each the same. 

Ability to Drive Business Growth 

This is a big one. Any agency can launch ads that have good vanity marketing metrics, but only the best agencies can drive real business growth. Don’t be sold on an agency that promises a high amount of traffic, strong CTRs (click-through rates), or even low CPCs (cost per click). Anyone can do that. Traffic alone does not drive business growth, especially if it’s low-quality traffic. 

Make sure the agency is aligned with its goals of driving real, meaningful business outcomes. At Rise, our core KPI is driving business growth.  For example, we will always favor buying qualified traffic (that drives business outcomes), vs. cheap traffic that will never convert. 

References

This is super easy, but make sure you talk to at least one client as a reference. Ask questions on how they were to work with, how did they drive growth, would you recommend them to a friend, etc. References are very telling. 

Reviews

Similarly, it’s important to look at online reviews. Look at all reviews from across the web, for example: Google, FB, Clutch, etc.  Make sure they’re strong. Not every business will have all 5-star reviews, but make sure they’re mostly strong. 

Hiring an agency is a very exciting time and comes with a lot of promise and potential for future growth!  Before you sign the next contract, make sure you go through this checklist to make sure it’s a great fit for a long-term partnership. 

If you have any questions or are interested in our services, feel free to drop a line on our contact page.