5 Ways to Ensure You and Your Agency Are Focusing on ROI

When you begin looking for a digital marketing agency, you’ll find that each proposal you receive makes big, flashy promises. “We can give you the best in responsive website design,” they’ll proclaim. “Our blog posts will read like a Mark Twain short story,” they’ll promise. So you pick your favorite and set off down the trail to digital marketing happily ever after.

It’s not until a few months into the partnership you begin to notice you may not be getting as strong of a return on your digital marketing dollars you had hoped. While your website is flashy and your social media presence is strong, there just doesn’t seem to have been much thought put into a strategy that is driving real value for your business.

Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common. Many agencies are skilled in selling themselves, painting a clear vision of what they can do to turn assets into results for your business, but they don’t always have much substance behind the glitz and glam. So how do you ensure your agency’s vision is strongly aligned with your expectations?

Here are five ways to make sure your agency is focusing on your digital marketing ROI goals.

1. Set goals

Goals are one of the best ways to determine if you’re making progress, or simply spinning your wheels. Having a well-defined set of specific, attainable goals allows you to paint a clear vision of where you want to go and make a strategic plan for how to get there. Think of a goal as the destination of your digital marketing journey, and the plan as a roadmap for how you want to get there.

Help your agency better shape their digital strategy towards your goals by making sure they’re involved in the goal-setting process. They’ll benefit by learning where you want to end up, and you’ll benefit from their experience in making sure the goals are achievable with your set budget and other resources.

2. Make them measurable

While you’re setting your goals, it’s important to make sure that you can measure your progress towards them. Understanding where you are in terms of your goals and the overall journey is critical. Without knowing how your strategies are measuring up, you won’t be able to make the necessary corrections if you end up getting off track!

For example, you might not be on track to generate enough leads for your sales team. With a measurable goal in place, you would be able to quickly see that you need to increase lead generation efforts and get back on course.

3. Define ownership

As you begin implementing your digital marketing plan, don’t forget to clearly define who owns what. If you or your agency are unsure about who has what role or who is taking care of which project elements, your campaigns have little chance of success. By defining ownership and assigning responsibilities, your campaigns are able to move forward with ease and avoid any last-minute scrambling to pull together assets, which ties into our fourth tip…

4. Communicate regularly

It’s crucial that you communicate with your digital marketing agency regularly. Your communication patterns should always be mutual; you should feel free to reach out to them if you have any questions about your campaigns or marketing goals, and your agency shouldn’t hesitate to contact you if they see something that requires your attention.

5. Evaluate continuously

During your regular meetings, you should discuss what is and isn’t working. There’s no sense devoting valuable time and resources to a social strategy that is underperforming or a PPC campaign that isn’t gaining traction. By evaluating your different campaigns and strategies against your goals and measurements, you and your agency will be able to determine what’s working and what’s not, then figure out the best way to move forward.

A successful digital marketing strategy goes beyond simply partnering with an agency to design your website and write social content. For everyone involved, the overall goal should be realizing a high return on your digital marketing investment, which starts by establishing a clear path on how to get there.

Contact Pyxl

At Pyxl, we help you create a strategy that, yes, reads like Mark Twain—AND delivers the digital marketing ROI you need. Interested in learning more about what we do and how we do it? We’d love to hear from you — say hello!

Updated: Nov 15, 2024