Have you ever experienced a bad fit with a vendor?
This doesn’t have to mean they scammed you. Maybe you just had different communication styles or maybe you felt like they just could never manage to deliver your expectations.
When it comes to entrusting an agency with your digital marketing budget, finding the right fit is crucial. Digital marketing is confusing, overwhelming, and always evolving. If you don’t work well with your selected agency, you can’t build trust. Without trust, your relationship is set up to fail. So what should you be looking for when you’re interviewing agencies?
We are an agency who...
...understands your goals for your business.
It’s easy for an agency to build you a site, to write some blogs, and to slap a standard digital marketing package together without looking at your long-term objectives. Does your agency know that you’re hoping to open an office in a new city by the end of the year? Do they have a plan for how to help you launch that new service offering you’re building? Will the plan they put together support your goal of doubling your revenue in the next 12 months?
Your agency should be your partner in achieving your goals — not just executing some tactics without measurable objectives.
...will understand your business and market.
One of the mistakes we made when we first started with Inbound Marketing was assuming the Inbound formula works for all businesses in all markets. To our credit, for a time it worked well enough to seem true. Consistently creating fresh, relevant content increased our organic rankings and converted website traffic into leads.
With experience comes wisdom. Over time, everyone started doing some version of Inbound or content marketing. The internet became saturated with content, and suddenly just doing the work wasn’t enough anymore. For some industries, paid advertising was the best way to generate leads long after we typically taper them off. For others, no matter what we did in certain markets, the first page rankings were dominated with huge companies (and huge websites), and we just couldn’t compete.
Get on the same page about what your working relationship will look like.
Every organization has their own unique processes, working styles, and communication styles. What’s important is for both parties to be clear about what the expectations are up front — and make sure you’re both happy with them.
Unmet expectations destroy trust. Getting clear on how meetings will go, what deliverables will be, and how and when communication will happen is vital to a successful relationship between your organization and your digital marketing agency.
What Does Partnership With Waypost Look Like?
When you allow Waypost to come alongside and partner with you, our expectation is that we will become a long-term partner.
We’re going to have discussions with you about your business goals, timelines, and how we can support them. We’re also going to invest heavily into the success of your business, and much of that will happen in the beginning of our engagement together.
Because of that up-front investment, and because so much of the work we do builds on itself, we typically ask for a 3-month contract in the beginning of our engagement. This is not to lock you into something you can’t get out of, and it’s not merely to secure an expensive monthly retainer. It’s because we know that what we do works, but we also know that those first few months of foundation-building don’t always move the needle in obvious ways. It takes time to build organic rankings — if you’ve never successfully done SEO, it can take up to 18 months to get on page 1.
Organic rankings aren’t the only things that matter, and we always look for other ways we can boost revenue and generate more, better leads for you while that organic work is ramping up. If you’re looking for immediate leads, though, we probably aren’t going to be the best fit for you.
While we can’t guarantee results, we will definitely commit to a few things:
Waypost Blog
Working With Waypost: The First 90 Days
Waypost Blog
3 Formulas We Use to Track Your Marketing ROI
Honesty
We commit to treating your business like it’s our own. We pledge to be good stewards of your budget and to model the motives and actions of trustworthy marketers.
Transparency
We commit to collaborating with you on objective-based strategy and creating transparency through regular review meetings.
Diligence
We commit to responding to all phone calls and emails within one business day — even if we don’t yet have the answer you’re looking for, you will still hear from us.
Are We A Fit?
If you’ve read all this and you feel like our organization would be a good fit for yours, let’s talk. Give us a call at (864) 288-6162 or request a consultation online to discuss your goals and challenges with us.