Need Help With Digital Marketing? Do This

Before you look out for digital marketing help (or any help whatsoever), make sure that you know exactly what you are looking for.

You have no idea how many people are out there who have no idea what they need.

If you don’t know what you need, how on earth will you ever get digital marketing services that’ll help you grow your business?

They know they want to use digital marketing for the benefit of their business.

Many folks don’t know how to choose the right digital marketing agency, how to manage agencies or freelancers, how to make digital marketing decisions, the digital marketing channels that they want to deploy, and more.

The other day, there was this client who wanted a website done on WordPress. He signed up for a reliable hosting account and hired us for the website design.

The issue? He didn’t know what he wanted. He provided no content. He doesn’t even know why he wants a list of some 27 odd things he “thought” he wanted.

You want to use digital marketing for the wonder that it is, to use the power of Inbound marketing, and to spend less to get more leads (and then sales).

If that’s true, here’s how you should look out for digital marketing help:

Stay Educated

You can’t ever “get educated” — because that suggests that the task would be completed at some point. Education is forever. You can’t ever complete it.

But it’ll help if you take the effort to learn at least the basics of digital marketing; enough for you to get a strategic outlook of the tasks you’d want your chosen digital marketing agency, freelancers, or in-house staff to deliver.

You don’t have to spend hours trying to learn everything about digital marketing. Instead, you’d just have to know enough so that you know exactly what you need help for and why.

Arrogant entrepreneurs will only lead dead companies. Learned and passionate leaders , however, have the potential to kick ass.

Set your expectations right

“I am looking for an expert to bring in sales in week, leading up to Christmas”
“Are you a blogging ninja? Come work with us full-time for a whopping $75 per month”
“I’ll hire you. Tell me what you can do better than the previous agency I hired?”

Digital marketing experts are “experts” because they know what they are doing; not because they have a magic wand to bring in those leads or make sales happen.

Advertising experts know how to launch ad campaigns properly. Content marketing strategists have a knack for researching trends, developing content, and distributing that content.

Link building experts are outreach specialists and they build a network with influencers and then help publish content or do guest blogging on high-traffic blogs on your behalf.

It’s expertise. It’s about skills. They can do what you can’t (or don’t want to) do.

None of that means that your chosen partners are magicians. A lot depends on your business itself, your product positioning and USP, and your marketing strategy in general.

Then comes in the need for finding the right people to make it all work together.

Set your expectations right. Start wrong here and you’ll forever be sulking.

Respect your digital marketing partners

Our agency has a simple policy: refuse to work with clients (regardless of the size and value of the opportunity) who can’t seem to respect us.

You stand no chance if:
You don’t know what you want.
You throw a dollar bill at us and they treat us like shit.
You haggle like a fishwife
You have no patience
Your business doesn’t match our onboarding criteria.

It might seem harsh but this is a result of 17 years of agony we faced as an agency trying to deal with clients from hell.

Here’s a simple advice for you: your digital marketing agency partners, vendors, freelancers, and employees are people. Money isn’t the only thing that motivates people, as Dan Pink writes in his book Drive.

Stay patient

Did you actually hope that you’d start blogging for your business and you’d open the floodgates for traffic to your website?

Launch Facebook advertising campaigns today and get sales by end of the day?

Have you been busy trying to read books that teach you SEO hacking and other shit like that?

Digital marketing takes time. You need to stay committed to the cause, break your back, sweat like a pig, work like an at, and wait for it to work for you.

If you are hiring a digital marketing agency to work for you, give them time to make it all work.

Just because you let other people do the work doesn’t change the rules of the game.