If you’re looking to build brand awareness, digital marketing should be one of your top priorities and biggest investments. It allows you to connect with your audience where it spends the most time—online. As your engagement rises, so will your bottom line. For example, email marketing alone drives an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent.

Still, digital marketing requires proper experience, expertise, and tools to make your initiatives worthwhile. This is where digital marketing agencies can be incredibly valuable. They bring together various marketing experts and employ proven strategies to drive results efficiently. 

In this guide, we’ll show you how to choose a digital marketing agency for your business. You’ll read about the services they offer, selection criteria, hiring process, and potential downsides to be aware of.

We’ll also introduce you to a more efficient, affordable, and risk-free way to connect with expert marketers for your digital marketing campaigns—MarketerHire.

What Does a Digital Marketing Agency Do?

Digital marketing agencies promote your brand using digital means and channels to drive awareness, engagement, and, eventually, sales. Usually, agencies can tackle the entire marketing process, from strategy to execution, and offer a broad range of services, such as:

• Search engine optimization: Adapting your website and content so your audience can easily discover them in Google search results pages
• Web design: Creating or redesigning your website to ensure it represents your business in the best light
• Social media marketing: Building and maintaining your brand’s presence on social media through content creation and audience interactions
• Direct marketing: Communicating with your audience via SMS or email marketing campaigns
• Content marketing: Writing blog posts to educate your audience and establish your brand as an industry authority
• Paid advertising: Running paid search and social media ads to expand your brand’s reach while ensuring a high return on investment
• Analytics and reporting: Monitoring performance and adjusting the strategy to improve future outcomes

When and Why Should You Partner With a Digital Marketing Agency?

A digital marketing agency can be invaluable for small businesses and enterprises alike. Its assistance is especially needed if:

• You don’t have a marketing infrastructure and don’t know how to start building one
• You don’t have the expertise and time to run your own campaigns
• The competition runs high, and you need to stand out
• Your current campaigns aren’t performing as expected

The top five benefits of partnering with a digital marketing agency include:

1. Large team with diverse expertise: Agencies often employ various professionals, from strategists to specific channel specialists. Bigger agencies may have hundreds of experts and can support enterprise-level collaborations
2. Access to knowledge and tools: Agencies already have years of experience helping companies with their digital marketing initiatives. They also stay up-to-date with the latest trends, algorithm changes, and tool releases
3. Fresh perspective and innovation: As external associates, agencies can approach marketing objectively. They can also suggest innovative solutions to problems and creative ways to stand out from the competition
4. Time and effort savings: While it requires a financial investment, hiring an agency saves time and effort. You can focus on your primary duties while the agency handles your marketing
5. Ability to scale up: Larger marketing agencies can adapt their services to accommodate your evolving needs

What To Look For When Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency—Key Criteria

Before you start looking for an agency, define your goals and budget. Doing so will help you narrow down your options and ensure alignment before the collaboration starts.

Consider the following criteria when selecting your digital marketing agency:

The Process of Partnering With a Digital Marketing Agency 

Every agency has a distinct process of engaging with clients and carrying out marketing initiatives. In general, the process involves the following steps:

1. Consultation: You meet with the agency’s representative to tell them about your brand, challenges, needs, and budget
2. Analysis: The agency analyzes your brand, audience, competitors, and current marketing performance
3. Strategy: The agency creates a tailored strategy to define the goals as well as the channels, tactics, and messaging they’ll use
4. Execution: Once you give the green light, the agency implements the agreed-upon strategy. It may produce content for you or collaborate with your creative team
5. Optimization: The agency monitors performance constantly to ensure their marketing efforts are effective and enable continuous improvement
6. Meetings: Typically, the agency hosts weekly meetings to discuss progress and exchange feedback
7. Reporting: You receive monthly reports outlining the performance during the previous period and the next steps

How To Make the Most of Your Collaboration With an Agency 

Follow our tips to give your collaboration with the agency the best chance to succeed:

• Be clear about expectations: At the beginning, agree on the timeline, deliverables, budget, cancellation terms, and other crucial factors to eliminate any misunderstandings. Have a statement of work (SOW) to sum up and confirm all the information
• Communicate openly and regularly: You should establish a clear communication channel and exchange opinions honestly to ensure you’re always on the same page
• Provide sufficient information: Make it easy for the agency to access information about your company so it can better understand your unique position and work more efficiently
• Embrace suggestions and feedback: Being marketing experts, agencies usually know what works best. While your input is valuable, the agency should be the primary decision-maker
• Foster an amicable relationship: Collaboration will be much smoother if built on trust. That’s why you must treat the agency’s representatives with respect and maintain a positive and professional attitude

Pain Points of Engaging With a Digital Marketing Agency 

Before you start researching the best digital marketing agencies, learning about the potential downsides can help you determine if partnering with one is the right choice for your business:

• High price: Depending on the services you need, employing a digital marketing agency can cost tens of thousands of dollars
• Lack of control: Your insight into and say over the agency’s processes is minimal, which can be problematic if you’re not fully aligned
• Communication issues: Misunderstandings can happen despite regular communication. The agency may not fully grasp your brand’s vision and end up missing the mark, resulting in costly delays 
• No results guarantee: No matter how much you invest, success isn’t guaranteed, partly due to the nature of marketing. Still, some agencies may not be as effective as they claim
• Complex selection process: Choosing a suitable agency takes a lot of work. Also, if you make the wrong choice, the financial and reputational consequences on your business could be severe

You can avoid these pitfalls by hiring an in-house marketing team with MarketerHire—an on-demand matchmaking platform that removes all the pain and risk of recruiting marketing experts. A team that knows your brand inside out, involves you in its processes, and has years of experience will be a powerful asset for your business for years to come. 

Why Is MarketerHire the Best Choice for Your Digital Marketing Campaigns?

MarketerHire can help you recruit your digital marketing dream team with ease. It can connect you with pre-vetted expert marketers for any role in a matter of days. It also offers a free two-week trial and rematching, allowing you to get a replacement if your initial match isn’t the right fit. 

Since launching in 2018, the platform has made over 30,000 successful matches. It’s worked with some of today’s most popular brands, including Forbes and Netflix.

The platform can match you with various experts—from fractional CMOs who can assemble and lead your team to individual specialists, such as brand marketers and growth marketers.

The best part is—all you need to do is share your requirements. Thanks to its white-glove approach, the platform will handle the entire recruiting process and support you through each step.

MarketerHire works fast partly because its in-house experts pre-screen candidates rigorously before admitting them into the talent network. Only around 1% of applicants end up passing the vetting process. The platform also has a proprietary matching system, MarketerMatch, which combines AI and human insight to quickly identify compatible profiles.

With a no-obligation short-term contract, you can scale up, scale down, or cancel the collaboration as needed.

How MarketerHire Works

Here’s what the recruiting process looks like with MarketerHire:

1. Describe your needs: Schedule a short call with your dedicated marketing manager to discuss your company, project, and hiring needs
2. Meet your marketer(s): MarketerHire will find you a match within 48 hours
3. Start collaborating: You can make the hire in around three days

The platform can also connect you with pre-vetted Expert Assistants to support your marketing, design, or sales teams if they’re ever stuck with manual, repetitive work.

Don’t waste resources screening agencies—reach out to MarketerHire and gear your business with an elite in-house digital marketing team.

Hiring Guides To Check Out

If you’re going to assemble the marketing team yourself, use our guides to prepare: