How to Determine If A Digital Marketing Agency Provides The Best Price For Its Services
TechsPlace | Knowing if you’re paying for high-value digital services is thorny since the services are intangible. As compared to walking into an ice-cream parlor and tasting a sample of the ice-cream to decide whether to purchase or not, digital services aren’t as straightforward.
In the digital marketing context, in-depth research is important for you to decide whether the pricing structure is best for services provided. Not conducting any research may result in paying more for less return.
Here’s how to determine if a digital marketing agency provides the best price for its service:
- Do Online Research about the Agency
To know whether the pricing is for the best service value, desk research about the agency is important. You need to know about the agency’s client portfolio since it displays other businesses and individuals that have paid for the agency’s services.
More than usual, the agency’s website is decorated with work that the agency has produced for clients. As a result, you can see the valuable work that the agency offers. Listed accolades that the agency has won together with staff credentials and recognition further direct you in the direction of whether the pricing matches the value promised by the agency.
The company make-up of the agency also determines the pricing structure offered. For example, an agency that is made up of a remote team of three will price its services differently from an agency made up of 10 on-site members that need to include the running costs of the business. Finding out such information leads in the right direction.
You can also look at the agency’s company culture. Checking out the cultural values of the agency means you can benchmark your needs and decide whether you and the agency will get in terms of an agreed outcome. An agency may provide the best prices to one client, yet the same price may not be agreeable with another because of value differences.
- Agency Pricing Structure
Digital agencies hardly have a uniform pricing structure. It is important to discuss agency pricing models that specific agencies implement.
There are a number of factors that will determine pricing structures. These include the type of digital project that you require the agency to tackle, the size of the project, and how the success of the project is to be calculated.
- One-On-One Assessment
Most agencies provide free consultation sessions that include pricing models. Having a chat with the agency opens channels of communication, transparency, and clarity. In your chat, you can ask questions, such as “How are you able to help with my content generation and how you can make it interactive?”
The responses you get indicate whether the agency can deliver value for money. Where responses are wavered and uncertain, you will know off the bat whether to zip up the purse or take a chance to be proven otherwise.
You can also ask questions about the agency’s marketing strategies and examples. Most importantly, it is important to know how the agency will build a lasting impression of your brand. The end goal is to establish a solid customer base and sales through digital marketing, which is made possible through qualitative branding.
As a tip, equip yourself with knowledge of how digital marketing works before the meeting with agencies. As the agency pitches, listen to the ideas bounced off you. Pay attention to whether the agency thinks out-of-the-box or if the agency sounds like any other record in the store. The goal is to pay for services that will make your product service stand out among the sea of competitors. Having pitched the ideas, inquire about the full circle processes that the agency launches.
- Ask Pertinent Questions
The value of the money spent is within the results. To know if you’re going to have good results, ask the potential agency if there will be a solid customer base, and will there be a returning client database? Is the content curated in a viral-based style? Does the agency interactive generate the content to the extent of luring customers and clients that did not have any knowledge about your products or services?
These questions determine whether the pricing stated matches the service delivery that you require as the client.
- Return On Investment
Agencies will always state the ability to deliver. However, only a few agencies will provide you with a return on investment reports.
ROI reports are evidence of the deliverables and their effectiveness. It’s through these reports that you can decide whether your money is returning in tangible form through the digital marketing agency.
Statistics show that 82% of marketing executives provide marketing services without the expectation of being measured on it. 18% state that they can measure the ROI on digital PR and only 26% can measure the ROI on social media.
You want to make sure that your agency can measure ROI and provide timely reports to you. The agency must be able to provide a sample of ROI reports during your initial assessment.
This is how you will know whether the digital marketing strategies are working for your product service, else you risk paying for a service in which you do not benefit.
- Trust Your Instincts
Having done your research, interacted one-on-one with agencies, and taken a look at sample reports, you would have made up your mind about the agency by then. Through-out the whole process, red flags and green lights would have emerged in your mind. It is important to trust your instincts on whether the agency will provide value for money, based on the information that you would have gathered.
You can back up your instincts by further researching general reviews about the agency on social media review websites. These reviews will sum up your decision by providing a general picture of people’s experiences with the agencies in question. The key is to put together all the information that you gathered.
- Lean towards Agencies That Price Hourly
When you are done researching and analyzing, hourly pricing is a strategy that easily shows you your value for money. Agencies must justify the pricing based on hourly input. This way, you can decipher whether the pricing should be increased or decreased, and you can determine the rate of production to decipher value for money.
Digital services can be charged in terms of value or productivity, which are efficient pricing strategies, depending on the type of project. However, hourly pricing is more transparent and easier to analyze, both as agency and client.
Conclusion
It is up to you to do some research about the agency that you wish to work with. What you find out will give you pointers on whether the agency provides the best prices for services offered in line with the kind of work you expect.
Your invested time in looking around and researching will tell you which digital marketing agency will give you value for money. Remember that no price fits all in digital marketing. You will have to state your wants and needs and intended outcomes clearly.
This article is contributed by guest author on techsplace.com.