To hire the right digital marketing agency, first list out the marketing scopes you want to improve (e.g., SEO, PPC ads etc.). Afterwards, search “top 20 digital marketing agencies in (your location)” on Google. Look for agencies and visit their website, reviewing their portfolios and success stories. Look for third-party referrals and platforms that provide insights about these agencies and review their performance. Make a shortlist of agencies and reach out to them for an interview, asking critical questions to align your business needs. Afterwards, ask for a detailed proposal as to how they can meet your needs and if yes, proceed to a short-term contract with a pilot project without a long-term commitment.
Key Takeaways:
- Hiring a marketing agency is generally beneficial because it offers low-cost, flexibility and specialization in digital marketing areas.
- It’s crucial to consider a few major factors before hiring a digital marketing agency, such as understanding your business size, setting your business goals, setting up marketing budget, laser-targeting your audience etc.
- To hire a marketing agency, you have to shortlist the top 10 agencies in your location, review their portfolios, success stories, Google and third-party platform reviews. Afterwards, contact the shortlist for interviews and talk to figure if they align with what you need, and ask for a detailed proposal. Finally, start with a pilot project to see if both parties can collaborate for a longer period in the future.
Introduction:
Surviving in competitive markets in any industry can be overwhelming for businesses nowadays, let alone stand out from the competitors.
What’s more?
Navigating through all the marketing landscape can be challenging. For example, managing SEO, PPC ads, social media marketing, content creation, product photography, video production, website development etc. with an in-house marketing team can be very daunting or over-stressful.
That is where online marketing agencies come into play.
However, if you’re looking to hire a digital marketing agency, it’s crucial to understand your business objectives, goals and how marketing agencies can deliver them, without any fluff.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how and when you can decide to hire the right digital marketing agency that fits your business size, growth target, marketing budget, needs and impacts ROI.
Things to Consider before hiring a marketing agency:
Before we get into hiring a marketing agency, it’s important to find out if your business is actually in need of marketing assistance. Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you need an online presence?
- Is your goal focused on website traffic or ecommerce conversion?
- Do you want to lead nurture campaigns or a few promotional contents will do?
- What’s your team strength? What strength do you need from an online agency?
Conduct a SWOT analysis, find out the “weakness” and “opportunity” in areas you need assistance from marketing agencies. For instance, we’ve worked with Infinity Mega Mall., one of our clients, where we saw they were some of the most popular brands in Bangladesh to have a breakthrough sale during holiday campaigns like Eid.
However, they were struggling to maintain a strong online presence, so we focused on their web store development, SEO optimization and media buying instead of video production, product photography or even content creation.
As a result, we managed to gain $39,147.36 USD in gross sales (4,782,475.50 BDT) in 2023, from the yearly campaigns, compared to the campaigns previous year which was $18,335.23 USD (2,239,941.44 BDT) in 2022, leading to 113.51% growth rate.
Now let’s look at the size of your business:
- Solopreneur
- Startup
- Small business
- Medium Sized and Large business
Solopreneur:
If you’re running a one-man business, being the founder and all; we would suggest you reconsider hiring a marketing agency. In our experience, we have turned down many solo clients who happen to run low on their revenue flow, which would ultimately harm the company’s net profit after paying for our services.
That being said, you can hire either a freelancer, go for a DIY experience, or a team of freelancers, or an in-house marketing team working full-time for your brand.
- Hiring a freelancer depends on your work needs as they won’t work full-time and only based on the projects you hire him/her for.
- On the contrary, a team of remote freelancers or studios based on specific projects can help you scale up or down the business size and stakeholders. However, managing such freelancers required well-briefed expectations.
- An in-house marketing team can work full-time with a deep understanding of the brand, market and its products. However, they can be costly if your business doesn’t need scaling to that extent, not to mention the internal training procedures.
- A marketing agency, on the other hand, will help you in specific areas that need support. For example, you can hire a marketing agency just for “search engine optimization” or Meta ads, focusing on specific services that will help you grow.
So, who should you hire as a Solopreneur?
Startups
It might be unwise to hire a digital marketing agency for startups; unless you figure out if the current sales will let you pay them with profit.
If you don’t have a monthly or quarterly revenue flow, that doesn’t mean hiring an agency will instantly triple or quadruple the numbers. From the start, you might want to focus on:
✅ website design
✅ social media management
✅ content marketing
✅ work on search engines to build your domain authority.
Remember, any marketing strategy, whether it’s SEO, social media marketing or PPC ads, they usually take time to see the result; and you have to pay them month-to-month.
What’s worse, some startups focus on getting an agency while having an in-house marketing team. This leaks a huge amount of money, while destroying a work culture indicating that the full-time employees don’t have a good reach.
💡Pro tip: The best suggestion would be to hire a freelancer, or a digital marketing consultant for specific areas you need to work on, then proceed to hire an agency later if you see a good trend of conversion and growth rate.
Small Businesses:
Small businesses do need marketing services, but that should be specific just like the startups.
Once a redditor said on a subreddit and we quote “agencies and consultants aren’t always the quick fix that many smaller businesses expect them to be.”
There are many agencies who offer small, flexible packages of digital marketing services for small businesses.
Since you’re a step ahead of a startup, you might want to hire an in-house marketing team that can do the work to scale up online marketing. That way, you can have control over marketing strategies, save time on strategy implementation and ideate cost-effective solutions.
For instance, instead of hiring freelance consultants or agencies, you can simply recruit a copywriter and a designer full-time to promote your branded content on platforms targeting your audience, or build a website on WordPress for online identity by yourself. You can apply cost-effective plans on these strategies.
Medium-sized and Large Businesses:
If you’re reading this, you’re already a medium-sized or large business, which means you’re way ahead of a startup or small business.
This means you already have a strong sales flow going on and strong investment opportunities in marketing. Now, you can go for Omnichannel marketing strategies, for which you can hire a digital agency.
On the contrary, you can scale up particular areas while your in-house team works on the rest. For example, Tesla, one of the world’s finest EV car producers, relies on a low-budget approach that focuses on brand storytelling, referral marketing and user-generated content, rather than traditional integrated marketing. Even they focus on PR stunts more than improving on SEO.
Set Your business goals /Define your needs and goals
It’s important to have a clear understanding of business needs and goals. For example, if you are looking for sales from social media, then you have options for media buying and boosting services. On the contrary, if you want a quick surge of traffic and conversion on your website from search engines, PPC campaigns like Google ads are the best option you can go for.
It’s better to explore the current situations of your business and see where your target market is, what kind of audience you are looking to convert, and which channel is the best option-that’s what defines your business goals which ultimately will help you scale up.
Here’s what you can do:
- Explore all the channels (Facebook meta insights, website analytics like GA4, Google campaign manager, email marketing analytics) and see the reports of how the content is performing and how audiences are connecting with your product or service.
- Note down the channels you need to improve (for example, email marketing channel or Google Business Profile)
- List out the services you need from a marketing agency (such as copywriting, SEO, marketing automation, email marketing campaigns etc.)
- Explore and filter out top 10 marketing agencies near your business and their profiles (such as portfolios, case studies, clients they have served, testimonials received from other clients.
Set your marketing agency budget
After finding out business goals and areas to improve, the next step is to set out your budget. It’s important to define the budget, set the timeline for the marketing agency services, and how much you are expecting the return on investment.
It’s recommended not to go for a large-scale budget at first, but allocate a sustainable amount that covers all the components of marketing. For example, your marketing budget should include:
- Digital Marketing Budget
- Advertisement Budget
- Market Research
- Digital Marketing Tools & Analytics
- Campaign Execution budget
Research Your Target Audience
As you’re willing to step your marketing with an ad agency, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the total market. Not just the existing customers, but finding out potential customers, niches and opportunities to convert them will be the cornerstone to rich targeting.
Apart from that, you should study the right channels and strategies to pull in a pool of customers from where they are most active, such as on social media platforms, organic searches, paid searches etc.
How to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency in 2026?
Hiring a digital marketing agency requires a bit of research before you decide to choose the right one for your business. Here is a step-by-step process to how you can make it happen:
A. Research Marketing Agencies:
Start your research by searching “Top 20 digital marketing agencies in the USA”. Most agencies or publications publish listicles about the top agencies that are well-known in the country.
Here’s what you can do on a quick call:
- Explore their website, see how they communicate with organic visitors.
- See their business case studies, showing the strategies they used, campaigns they implemented, and how their success rate was. Look for similar areas you need to improve, and see they worked on those projects. Note down their success rate calculation and pricing.
- Explore niche-based social sites such as Quora and Reddit. Subreddits like r/digital_marketing post contents related to hiring agencies where both clients and agencies lurk around and share opinions on the comments.
- To narrow down your search, search “Top 10 digital marketing agencies in (your location)” and look for local directories and referral contents.
- Gather peer or industry reviews about these agencies. Ask a colleague or check reviews from Google, and other platforms such as GlassDoor, Indeed etc.
- Finally filter the shortlist and prepare for a call with them.
B. Interview with Marketing Agencies:
Once you’re done with the research and the shortlist, contact the marketing agencies for a short or long interview. Most agencies offer Free Consultation or Free 30-min Strategy Session to potential clients which you can grab, without commitment.
Here’s what to do during the interview sessions:
Request their portfolios: Even though you already have seen them online, kindly ask for their portfolios so they can present and share expressions or ideas about their work on different projects. You can also glance through them and ask questions if there’s any.
Ask Critical Questions: During the interview sessions, ask crucial questions to understand how they plan to approach your brand. Popular questions would be:
- How do you measure the campaign success?
- How do you adhere to challenges in organic campaigns?
- How do you build up brand awareness?
- Is there any opportunity to expand my brand’s market?
- How do you optimize the ad budget costs, increase ROAS and AOV?
- How do you plan to increase our monthly recurring revenue?
Even though most of these questions are quite generic, it’s better to ask questions from certain areas that you need marketing services for. For instance, you can ask questions related to SEO, social media content, PPC ads, content creation etc.
C. Make Post-Interview Decisions
After the interview, consider making decisions to further proceed if you think the search engine marketing agency is aligning to your needs. If yes, do the following:
Ask for a detailed proposal: Once you’re done with the interview sessions, close the session by asking for a clear, detailed brand proposal which covers their research, planning, strategies and execution steps to improve your brand areas. Review and evaluate the proposals you receive from multiple marketing agencies and see which proposal fits well.
Make a short-term Contract: Once you evaluate the detailed proposal sent from different agencies, choose your desired online marketing agency and contact them to proceed with a short-term contract. On this agreement, mention a pilot project to initiate their marketing programs, in order to review their performance before going for a long-term commitment. If the agency succeeds, you can shake hands for a greater collaboration ahead.
Why should I hire a digital marketing agency?
Hiring a marketing agency is beneficial, but also offers risks and collateral. It’s not guaranteed to know which digital agency can bring success to your campaigns or fail to the ground.
Then why should you hire a digital marketing agency?
Well, hiring the right digital marketing agency for your business has a lot of benefits. Such as:
- Cheaper than In-house Team: Marketing Agencies are cost-effective compared to in-house marketing teams. You don’t have to pay for health benefits, insurance, or tools and resources for the agencies just like you do for each of the in-house team members.
- Flexible to Dismiss: Unlike in-house teams, marketing agencies are flexible to dismiss. You can set out a contract with a digital agency and abolish the contract at your convenience, following an ethical code of conduct.
- Experts in their own craft: You will find suitable experts in different areas that you might find it hard to find somewhere else. For example, digital agencies offer specialized services like email marketing, market outreach, data analysis and more.
- Data-focused Results: Marketing agencies rely on retaining their clients on delivering data-focused results. Instead of just generic reports, agencies produce well-structured data results from testing that can impact on the recurring revenues and return on investment.
- No Content Creation Hassles: The most fun yet hectic part of digital marketing is content creation. Agencies can offer you to take up the ownership of these sweaty tasks at hand and create engaging contents to reach your market better.
- Money Saving: Digital marketing agencies often offer optimization strategies to save you a lot of budgets on different areas. For example, it might be optimizing the advertising costs, cost per acquisition, ROAS, or transition into organic campaigns rather than paid campaigns.
- Focus on other aspects: While marketing agencies take up the loads, you can focus on other business aspects and save time spending on your marketing, without stress.
Final Words: Let’s hire the Right Marketing Agency for Small Businesses
That’s it, folks!
This is about pretty much everything you need to hire a marketing agency that suits your business needs. Whether you’re a startup, small or large business: hiring the right marketing agency is beneficial to your budget, cost-effectiveness, production rate, growth rate and all the other KPIs you stress about.
However, if you’re having trouble finding the right agency, Techabyte.xyz can help. We’re an Omnichannel service provider offering all aspects of Digital Marketing from website development, email marketing, SEO to content creation; growing small and large businesses to stand out from the crowd.
FAQ:
1. What key criteria should I use to evaluate a digital marketing agency in 2026?
Answer: In order to evaluate a digital marketing agency in 2026, look for their portfolio, reviews they received from previous clients, and how data-driven they are instead of being based on the content creation only.
2. How do I know if an agency’s experience matches my industry or business size?
Answer: Most digital marketing agencies share their services on their website, highlighting the industries and business size they have previously worked with. You can also ask them if they have any experience in the industry and business sizes matching your needs.
3. What questions should I ask a digital marketing agency during the initial consultation?
Answer: You can ask several key questions that include: a. Previous experience in the similar industry b. Pricing packages for each service c. how the creative agency can improve your concerned KPIs such as ARR, MRR, AOV, CLV etc.
4. How important is transparency in reporting, pricing, and deliverables from the agency?
Answer: When it comes to hiring a marketing agency, Transparency is paramount in reporting, pricing and deliverables. As marketing agencies are not an integral part of a company, rather a third-party; it’s crucial to work with a trusted agency, have clear communication, and monitor activities from your end.
5. Should I choose a full-service agency or one that specializes in specific channels (SEO, PPC, social)?
Answer: It depends on what your business goals & needs are, and if you actually need a full-service digital agency for a full-service package. If you need improvement on certain areas such as PPC ads, Content Creation or Social Media Marketing, it’s better to choose a marketing agency that specializes in specific channels and areas.
6. What is the typical onboarding process and timeline to see results with a new agency?
Answer: It should be about 3-4 months to cover the onboarding, run campaigns and see the results, although different channels require different timeline to bring results. For instance, you can see the social media campaign results in 2-3 months whereas it takes a blog 3-6 months to rank on Google.
7. How do I assess an agency’s ability to use AI, analytics, and modern tools to optimize my campaigns?
Answer: You can see the business case studies offered by the agency to overview the challenges they faced, the tools they used to analyze, and the strategies they created to bring optimum results for the client.
8. What sign-posts indicate an agency is aligned with my business goals rather than its own agenda?
Answer: It typically focuses on their market research, strategy documents and the content plan that will make a difference. A great creative agency will often come along with proper market research, customized strategies, and focus on setting KPIs such as CAC, CPC, Growth Rate, ROI, ROAS, CLV etc. before coming up with content creation or running marketing campaigns.
9. How can I ensure the agency’s contract terms protect my data, ownership, and exit options?
Answer: In order to protect your data, ownership and exit options, include specific clauses in the contract that covers data management, protection and exit option policy. You can include DPA (Data Protection Agreement), NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) etc. to have security measures and keep your data protected all the time during the collaboration.
10. What benchmarks and KPIs should I expect from an agency to measure success, and how often should I review them?
Answer: Metrics such as CAC, CPC, Growth Rate, ROI, ROAS, CLV, Net Promoter Score are crucial to measure success KPIs from a digital agency, and it’s recommended to check on them after specific campaigns or month-wise.
