Many web entrepreneurs are struggling to get their sales off the ground despite a modern site and quality products. How should they go about easily achieving their business goals? What solution can they use to develop their activities on the internet? In this article we will discuss a few tips for achieving the goal.
Choose the right web agency
Your web agency is a key part of your ecosystem. In addition to having the heavy responsibility of ensuring your visibility online, the web agency will have access to confidential elements such as your business strategy or sometimes certain financial data. Therefore, it is essential to take the time to select your web agency. To do this, make sure you take the following into account:
Choose an agency whose expertise meets your objectives
Your business objectives must remain at the heart of the choice of your web marketing agency.
Why? Because depending on the nature of your web marketing objectives, different options will be available to you.
Example: If you are looking for transversal support to both optimize your organic presence on Google, advertise on search engines, manage your social media, and create your website, you will need to choose an agency 360-degree web marketing capable of covering all of these different areas of expertise. On the other hand, if you are looking for more vertical support, on a single digital channel, you could instead turn to a specialized web agency.
Make sure your agency understands your financial constraints
How much are you willing to pay for a qualified lead? How many leads do you want to generate at this price every month? Any serious web agency should ask you this question.
This will allow him to build a relevant and realistic web strategy that takes into account your profitability requirements and which aims to maximize your return on investment.
Tip: If you want to invest in advertising on Google, our free AdWords budget calculator may be of help!
Evaluate your web agency from the start
Choosing a web agency is a bit like recruiting a new employee, or even an entire marketing department. Would you hire a new employee without testing their level of expertise? Surely not.
To assess the level of expertise of your web marketing agency, learn as much as possible about the services you are looking for, read the latest articles on web marketing news, and prepare some technical questions to validate your skills.
Another effective way to assess the quality of your digital marketing agency is to check whether it adheres to good web marketing practices.
For example: If you are looking for an SEO agency, check its positions and reviews on Google.
If you are looking for a social media manager, check out their different networks. A good way to see if your social media agency is doing its job well is to go and analyze how it manages its own community.
Don’t get locked into the relationship with your agency
For a healthy collaboration with your digital marketing agency, it is important to ensure that it is based on performance and the achievement of results and not on contractual or technical constraints that could affect the quality of the relationship.
Keep control of your domain name
Some agencies want to own and register your domain name. If so, run away! Your domain name is used for your website, email addresses, and just about all critical sources of information and communication related to your business’ online presence. Entrusting this element to a third party is not prudent: you lose control over the main component of your web assets. If your agency goes bankrupt or comes into conflict with you, your entire web strategy is at risk.
Make sure you remain the owner of all your web assets
During your collaboration, your objective is not to interfere with the actions of your web agency. But keeping access to your various accounts, platforms, and analysis tools remains a significant guarantee of security and control. Among the elements to which it is necessary to maintain administrator access, there are:
Your web server: If you want to have access to the databases of your website
Your website: If you want to quickly change its content
Google Analytics: To track the performance of your website
Search Console: To analyze your website traffic
Your social media pages: To follow the evolution of the performance of your accounts and make changes if necessary
Your advertising accounts: AdWords, Bing Ads, or the Facebook advertising manager in order to keep the history of your campaigns and monitor the performance of your media investment
If you decide to stop working with your digital marketing agency, having all of these accesses will greatly facilitate the transition to your next employee.
Avoid signing a contract unless you find your account there
Collaborating with a web agency does not necessarily require signing a contract. By committing to 12 or 24 months, you give your web agency the chance to rest on its laurels. Your digital marketing agency should be held by its performance and the results it achieves for you. It is the only “contract” that has any real value.
Also pay close attention to contracts assigning your intellectual property (see previous point). For example, some companies sign contracts whereby their website becomes the exclusive property of their web marketing agency. These companies then lose all ability to react and control their website, and find themselves caught by the throat in the event of a dispute, a price increase or a change of partner.
If you sign a contract, make sure you get something in return. A contract can be justified if your web marketing agency makes a significant commercial effort from the start of your mandate (by reducing start-up costs, for example).
Check the quality of the work done by your web agency
You pay a web marketing agency to get results. In order to maintain a clear and relevant vision of the results generated by your agency, consider:
Measure your results against your initial goals
If your goals are clear and you have access to your analytical tools, then you can use them to assess your performance.
Demand full transparency from your web marketing agency
It is essential that you know exactly how your web agency spends the money you entrust to it.
You must demand from your web agency full visibility on the actions it undertakes on a daily basis. Where is your marketing budget invested? How much time do your web agency teams spend on your account? What specific actions do they carry out? These are all questions that require you to be able to request access to the internal management tool of your web marketing agency. More and more web agencies have chosen to give their customers access to this tool in a process of complete transparency.
