Questions to ask when evaluating a digital marketing company

You're evaluating marketing companies. In this video, we're going to go through the three questions that you should ask in order to vet these digital marketing companies to see if they're going to help you. And we're also going to go through the answers of what they should say back and how you can evaluate their responses real quick. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We work with local service businesses and help them grow using technology and digital marketing. I actually used to be the director of sales at a large service business and I got frustrated with the digital marketing company. So I created a consulting company that partners with companies like yours to help them grow and to be the bridge between what is digital marketing, what is my business, how does it actually all work? And so in this video, we're going to go through three questions that are going to help you evaluate these companies. All right, so the first one that we're going to look at is how will you evaluate performance? Whether that's your performance or our performance. But how are you going to evaluate performance? I'm going to give you the marketing answer and I'm going to give you the business ROI answer, which is really what you want to get down to. So performance from digital marketing, there's a super high level one that's, oh, we're going to see how many impressions or how many people that we get you in front of. And that's marketing. It's just like having a billboard on the side of the road and all these people are going to see your billboard and hopefully they call you. Right. You can't really track that. So what is the actual marketing answer that you want to hear from these people is you want them to say, well, we're going to evaluate our performance based on how many leads that we generate for your business. And we're going to do this by using a tool like Google Analytics and I'm going to show you what this means. Or, and, or we're going to either get into your CRM or some type of way that you track your return, your projects all the way through to completion. Something along the lines of we are going to track leads or all the way down the line into sales. So the way this works on our funnel is a lot of times companies just focus on the visibility, so how many impressions that they get you, when really they could take it a step further and track how many leads that they get, which is good. And then a good company will want to get all the way to this, which is the sales so they may do this by meeting with you monthly or having some visibility between the two of us, like a Google sheet or allowing us into your CRM. There's a bunch of different ways to do this. Um, specifically for leads, what you can do is on Google Analytics, you can actually set up these goal completions. So what this means is if someone calls you, if someone fills out a form or someone does something on your website, you'll be able to track these goal completions, which is a lead, essentially. So you want them to say something like, we're going to evaluate our performance based on the number of leads that we produce for your company. Also, we're going to evaluate it based on the return on investment that you get for the business owner. What you want to know is that, yeah, you're getting me leads, but is it actually resulting in revenue generated? And how are you going to show me that? And you can ask them straight up, how are you going to show me that? And they should have an answer. If they don't have an answer, it might not be the right fit. A good answer that they could give you is, do you have a CRM? Can we use your CRM? Can we get in there and create campaigns and start tracking this stuff? We're going to provide a report every month. Something like that is going to help you do this. So that is how you evaluate your performance. All right, next question is, how will you track your progress? So a lot of times business owners think, okay, well, I'm paying for marketing and after three months, what are they even doing? After six months, what are they doing? After 12 months, what are they doing? And how are we always making sure that we are making progress and not going backwards? And this is really important because there are marketing companies out there that are set it and forget it, that are cookie cutter, that just do, oh, we're doing blogging or doing social media posting or doing this, and it's helping you get more visibility, which is true. But how is that, how do we know that's actually working? Like, how do we know that what we did last December is not. Is better than what we're doing this December? How are you evaluating your progress? And if you're not making progress, who's showing us that we're not making progress? Right, this is a big question. So how do you track your progress? All right, so the marketing answer is we will track year over year progress. So we will track how many website visitors came in last November versus this November. We will track how many leads came in last November versus this November. We will track how many keywords are on the first page of Google from last November to this November. Year over year progress is huge. And if you're not getting reporting on year over year progress, it's really important because if you're not making progress, then you're just spinning your wheels, right? Wasting money on marketing. Now, there are outside factors, right? Like the market conditions. Obviously there are other things that could go along in your business. For example, if you got a bunch of bad reviews, it's going to be harder to get more leads because it's going to hurt you in your conversion process. But from a marketing perspective, they should be tracking their progress and bringing these things up to you. Like, hey, we've noticed that it's been a pullback in this side of things. What do you think is going on and that is what you want from a business roi? Answer is, is my revenue growing year over year? Are my new customers growing year over year? Are my leads growing year over year? Because you can't grow your business if you don't have more leads, right? You can always increase your prices, but at the end of the day you want more leads. So are we growing lead flow year over year? Maybe they're not good leads. How can we fix this? Right? It starts these conversations. This is really important how you track your progress. There's so many tools out there to track this. They track like, you know, how many keywords on position one, are we declining? Why are we declining here? Is this good? Is this bad? There's so many different things that go into it, but those are questions that you can actually ask to get a response and see what they say. All right, and then the last question is going to be, how will you learn about my business? So this is a huge one. And this was one of my biggest sticking points when I used to work with these digital marketing companies as the director of sales was that like, how can you market my business when you don't even know about my business? How can you say what we do when you don't even know what we do? It never made sense to me. It was always just like fluff or cookie cutter stuff on the surface. And so how will you learn about my business? Is a great question. Because a lot of times business owners are just going to say, hey, I'm a hire. This marketing company, they're going to get me all these leads. But at the end of the day, they need to know about your business or what's going on. For example, let's say you do roofing well, February, March, April. Right? That's prime time for roofing. Maybe in August, September, October. You're focusing on something else. How are we going to learn about this? How are we going to learn about what you're focusing on? How are you going to be able to articulate that to us? The marketing answer for this is that we're going to meet quarterly and we're going to discuss your business and we're going to discuss our progress. We're going to meet monthly, we're going to have a content schedule every single month of what exactly we need to do the business roi. Answer for this is what if the marketing company says, hey, we're looking on Google Trends and we see that this is a trend right now, we need to market this. It's the next level to it that's going to help us get return on investment. These three questions are very important. I hope that this will help you have a good understanding of what you can be asking when you're evaluating marketing companies. If you're looking for a good marketing company, I created this company, Flash Consulting, to be the bridge. We are a done for you marketing solution for business owners that answer all of these questions because I know how important they are. And so if you're thinking about, hey, I want to work with some professional companies that actually care about my business and want me to grow, we will be happy to set up a meeting with you. I'll put a link down below. Also, I'm curious if you have any other comments or questions that you might ask and you want to know what a good answer would be? Definitely drop a comment below. I'll be happy to share whatever I can and be sure to hit like and subscribe. I'll see you in the next video.