You may be using digital marketing, but are you sure you’re using it to the full?

Getting a specialist agency to help you with just one digital marketing channel is okay—that is if you were planning on using just one channel for your digital marketing efforts.

But as today’s consumers become increasingly sophisticated and diverse in their use of digital media, specialising in the use of just one digital channel may not be enough to reach more customers and grow your business. That would mean having to diversify your digital marketing efforts to include more channels, which would mean having to engage multiple agencies.

Engaging multiple agencies is also okay—that is if you were okay with having to coordinate with several teams completely independent of each other, and having to explain your needs and the history behind your brand to them multiple times.

Getting a single full-service digital marketing agency—a 360 digital marketing agency—greatly facilitates your digital marketing efforts, and reduces the chance of your digital marketing messages becoming disjointed or misaligned.

Talking to one team, made up of different specialists who all have the same goal—your business growth—in mind, better ensures consistency and efficacy throughout the whole of your digital marketing communications.

Choosing an agency is like choosing a boyfriend or a girlfriend—it’s all about partnering up with someone who has your interests at heart, someone you know will do anything to make you happy.

And like anyone in the process of choosing such a partner, you’ll have to get to know your prospective agency to see whether they and your business will be a perfect fit.

While visiting an agency’s website or stalking them on social media are common first steps for anybody looking for a partner, your decision-making process shouldn’t stop there. Talk to the people at the agency in person and find out whether you see eye to eye, particularly on the following points:

a. Whether the agency will allow you to own your data, or the data generated by the digital marketing activities they’ll be performing for you. This data is an invaluable goldmine of marketing insights that can help you grow your business, so you’ll want to have complete control over your own data, in case you want to move on to another agency.

b. Whether the agency understands the need for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, or whether they’re more into guerrilla marketing tactics. You’ll want to have an agency that thinks long-term, rather than gunning for quick wins without a clear picture of what comes next to ensure sustainable business growth.

c. Whether the agency is dependent on a single platform, or whether they understand the need to have that single platform supported by other digital marketing channels. The fact is that there is no single perfect digital marketing channel that you can count on at all times to keep your customers coming in. You’ll want to have an agency that understands the entire digital marketing ecosystem, and how customers—and businesses need to navigate it.

d. Whether the agency charges reasonably for its services, given, of course, that you understand what goes into those services, and why agencies in general charge their clients the way they do. You’ll want to have an agency that’s straightforward about the cost of their services, and to be wary of any agency whose rates are too good to be true.

e. Whether the agency is transparent as regards their operations, because you’ll want to ascertain the quality of the tender, loving care your business is going get from them. You’ll want to have an agency with not too many clients vis-a-vis the size of their team, an impressive enough track record of businesses that they’ve helped, and thoroughly trained and highly experienced specialists working on your campaigns.

By its very nature, digital marketing is one of the most traceable, trackable and accountable activities a business can engage in, making it relatively easy to determine whether your efforts in this sphere are working or not.

Determining this requires the establishment of objectives, or what exactly you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve, before any of those efforts are undertaken.

Once those objectives are in place, tracking parameters and protocols are put into place to keep tabs on the performance of your digital marketing activities. The beauty of this setup lies in being able to adjust, or fine-tune the inner workings of your digital marketing engine even while it’s running, to make sure your objectives are met.

Say, for example, your objective is to rack up X number of consultations at your medical practice within X number of months. After X number of weeks, the tracking parameters and protocols tell you that only X number of consultations have been booked at your practice so far. The ad copy may then be tweaked or the budget allocation for ad spend may be adjusted to encourage more people to book a consultation.

Businesses are like fingerprints—they may look similar at first glance, but upon closer inspection, no two are exactly alike, and as such, how much they ought to spend on digital marketing will vary.

Factors affecting the determination of a business’ digital marketing budget include its size and the saturation of its market, the latter, in turn, being affected by the industry, or vertical the business happens to be in. While all industries are competitive these days, with a precious few having undisputed market leaders, the competition is undeniably more fierce in certain verticals.

Ballpark percentages for how much a business “should” spend on digital marketing vary between digital marketing agencies, but hover in the neighbourhood of 7 to 16% of the business’ gross or total revenue. Smaller businesses are said to spend about 3 to 5% of their income.

To arrive at a figure closer to the mark for your business, you’ll have to figure out what your digital marketing objectives are, and how much you’ll have to spend to reach those objectives.

Say, for instance, one of your specific objectives would be to have your website appear first in the results of a search on Google. You would then figure out how much it would cost to engage a specialist in SEO for as long as it took to achieve this objective. You would also have to factor in other costs incurred in the process such as improving your website’s content (for which you would need to engage a writer and/or a designer).