Whether its SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Youtube Marketing, Tik Tok or any other service offered .. MOST of the agencies out there are not experts and should force you to thoroughly vet an agency before handing over your hard earned money.
We’ve been in the industry for over a decade and we understand how it works. It’s probably not too dissimilar from other industries, but there are tons of companies out there claiming to be experts who will gladly take your money. In some cases they may actually believe they are experts.
The problem is that to have real success online is rare. And if an agency were comprised of a bunch of winners, they wouldn’t be offering agency services as their main source of income.
Winning the digital marketing game is kind of like figuring out the combination to a safe. Sure there are some people who can figure it out, but it is a small percentage.
Everyone’s opinion of success online is different. What most agencies and companies seem to forget is that you need to be making a profit on your investment. The problem is that the digital landscape is confusing and complex, the clients are uneducated, and the agencies are incentivized to keep the clock running on your relationship. It’s quite easy to string a client along month after month if you show them data and craft a story that shows progress.
The core issue is that unless an agency has an expert or experts at the very top, someone who is currently successful at digital marketing, SEO, PPC, SMM, Youtube Marketing, or Tik Tok Marketing, then the agency likely will not be successful for you.
This is because agencies are top down businesses. You have the leaders who need to know the trade secrets, then you have the project managers, and then the team that puts the campaigns together. The most important thing is the strategy and the execution. Strategy has to come from the top, and if the top doesn’t know what a successful strategy is, then it is not going to trickle down and you certainly aren’t going to benefit from it.
Here are some things to look for if you were hiring a Digital Marketing Agency:
- If you are looking for an SEO, PPC, Tik Tok, Content, or Youtube Marketing Agency – look at those specific channels to find one.
- For example, if you are looking for the best SEO agency, Google “Best SEO Agency” and see who ranks in the top spots organically. If they are ranking well then chances are they know a thing about SEO.
- If you are looking to do well on Youtube, look at a digital agencies youtube channel – do they have a healthy subscriber base? Are their videos getting healthy views? If so then they probably know a thing or two about Youtube.
- The key is to judge an agency by their own performance. If an agency says they know SEO but have bad SEO rankings, then clearly they are full of it! The same can be applied to any other form of digital marketing.
Other things to watch out for when hiring an agency:
- Be wary of “case studies” these are way to easy to cherry pick for the agency and to show amazing progress on past clients. That doesn’t mean they can’t be true, but it does mean some information may be omitted to embellish.
- Look at how large their agency is structured, and find out who will be strategizing and doing the work for you. One reason I barely read articles online is because most of them are low effort and written by interns. The icing on the cake is the intern likely copied another article they found online written by another intern! The point is to make sure you have someone with skill and smarts actually working on your business.
- An agency has to be managed by you. Left alone, an agency will continue to take your money for as long as you let them. They will always show “progress” and tell you things are going the right way. The challenge as business owner who isn’t educated on the topic, is to understand if you can trust them or not. You need to have a good BS detector and you should always be trying to get the best results for your money and time invested.
- Always make sure you are focusing on the right thing. For example an agency may try to tell you that you should invest in SEO however if you invested in content you may have a greater ROI. So always make sure you are putting your investment behind the most bang for your buck.
How is Trex Digial Different?
We call ourselves Digital Trusted Advisors. Can we do agency work? Sure. However we LOVE the word Trusted Advisor. Ever since we learned what the word meant we knew it was us. When thinking about how we can help clients, we knew we didn’t want to be an “agency” so we came up with “Digital Trusted Advisors”.
What is a Digital Trusted Advisor? To us it means helping first. Our goal is to build trust. We know the only way to build trust is to give advice/do work which we deem the best, have a client or friend use that advice/work, have them benefit from it, and then realize we know what we’re talking about.
We don’t think every small or big business or entrepreneur should just be sold on SEO, PPC, Content, Youtube etc. We believe every situation is different. We are more like a doctor that will examine your situation and make the best recommendations to help you achieve your goals. Our goal is to give the best advice and guidance possible, even if that solution does not benefit us financially. We know overtime the relationship we build with you will be fruitful in the long run.