Full Disclosure: 1Digital Agency is an eCommerce digital agency, so we have a pretty glaring bias when it comes to this topic. However, if you don’t mind taking interior design advice from the furniture salesman, these are tips I think our helpful across the board, and genuinely good advice for vetting potential digital agencies.
Hiring an eCommerce digital agency, whether it be for design, development, or digital marketing, is a tricky undertaking. You may have had a bad experience before, where you felt like your monthly payments were flushing money down the toilet. Maybe you’ve never worked with an agency, and have no clue what you should be looking for in an eCommerce team. The 10 tips below will help you make the right decision when hiring an eCommerce digital agency.
- Look for an agency that specializes
Some agencies claim to do everything, but usually, the broader the scope, the lower the quality of work. Look for an agency that, day in day out, handles the specific services that you’re in the market for. An agency that specializes will get good at one thing, while an agency that tries to do everything, get’s good at nothing.
- Love their portfolio
Don’t try to change a designer. You may see a portfolio that looks absolutely gorgeous, but isn’t the style you envision for your site. You might say to yourself, ‘they obviously have the capability, I’ll just explain what I want’. In reality, few things are harder than trying to describe the feeling that you want your website to evoke. Instead, look for a digital agency with a portfolio that already has work that matches up with the look you have in mind.
- Read into the small details
A lot of the early vetting process is going to rely on following your gut. Just like when you meet a new person, you’re going to be able to tell a lot about an agency from the first impression they make. Do they make you feel comfortable? Pay attention to how they treat you and others. Do they get back to you in a timely manner? How do their proposal materials look? Is it professional, or does it seem like someone vomited into Google docs? Just because you can’t quantify it, doesn’t mean your intuition isn’t one of the most important variables in a decision like this.
- Ask about their team
Unless you happen to live in the same area, chances are you may never meet the team you hire in person. It’s a good idea to get a feel for the people you’ll be working with up front. Ask about your project manager. Will it be the same person that sold you the project? Is the designer you’ll be working with going to be the same one who did the portfolio design that you liked in the first place? Make sure you have a firm idea of how communication will work. Can I email you anytime? How often will we meet on the phone? One of the biggest misunderstandings I see between agency and client is how communication time should be allocated.
- Be realistic about your budget
Agencies are expensive for a reason. They have an expertise, and an infrastructure to implement it. If you come into the process with unrealistic expectations about what you can get for how much, you’ll either waste both your time and theirs, or end up with a sub par end product. For marketing in particular, you want to be at a level where you’re spending enough to make it worthwhile. Too low a marketing budget just won’t achieve results.
- Make sure you understand how the payment structure relates to the value being delivered
In design and development, it’s easier to know what you’re buying. You pay a big lump sum, and you get a product in return. Marketing is tougher to judge. The bulk of work should come up front in keyword selection. This is the time consuming process of finding out which campaign direction is going to deliver a worthwhile ROI. Once this upfront work is done it can feel like a value mismatch, as you continue to pay the same rate while the campaign is going on. Not only that, but ROI calculations tend to encourage short term thinking. Remember that most modern online marketing techniques rely on accumulated payoffs that grow over time. The work your marketing does today isn’t limited to a one time pay off, but gains steam as you build on it.
- Find out what you need to do on your side
You pay an agency so you can outsource certain tasks that you don’t have the time or expertise to take care of yourself. But you can always be adding to your total ROI by finding out what you can be doing to aid their efforts. For example, active social media accounts are a big part of SEO, so if you’re paying a pretty penny for an SEO campaign, you can make that campaign more effective by keeping on top of your social media posts. A reputable agency won’t promise that all you need to do is lay back and let the money roll in. They’ll be very clear about what they expect from you, as well as what to expect from them.
- Be skeptical about lavish promises
This kind of thing tends to be more prevalent in SEO and PPC marketing than in design and development. Be wary of an agency that promises the ability to move heaven and earth. Really reputable firms will under promise and over deliver. Because they’re established, they can afford to be leery of making promises. Don’t look to an agency to be a miracle cure for your business. Hire an agency to do specialized tasks, which make more sense to outsource than to do in house.
- Make sure they practice what they preach
You can learn a lot about an agency by vetting their website for the exact qualities that you want yours to have. If you’re looking into an SEO campaign, make sure the agency’s homepage has a strong search presence. If you want a really user-friendly redesign, click around their site to see how useable it is.
- Make sure they have the right experience
A lot of digital agencies have had experience improving an eCommerce site’s search rankings, or developing custom solutions for an online store, but how many have had first hand experience running an eCommerce website. eCommerce web sites are entirely different animals than your average site. Very few firms are run and staffed by former eCommerce entrepreneurs, but it’s worth looking a little longer, and a little harder, for a team that will really understand your challenges.
So those are my tips, based on my experience, as to what you should look for when hiring an eCommerce digital agency. If you have any more tips for good ways to pick an eCommerce partner, hit us up @1digitalagency on Twitter, or post it in the comments below. To see how we stand up to these criteria, just give us a call.