Hong Kong Digital Marketing Agency

Step One: Define your marketing goals

It’s impossible to measure your marketing success if you don’t start with well-thought goals, so your first step in selecting channels is to determine what you want to achieve. Ask yourself this: if you could paint the picture of excellent results from your marketing efforts, what would that look like? Once you have that in mind, you will have a clear idea of what you’re working towards – and what you’ll need to get there.

Step Two: Establish a budget for your marketing efforts

A basic part of running any business is sticking to a budget, and that includes the money spent on marketing efforts. You want to make sure you get a good return on your investment, and that means setting a realistic limit while still aiming to get the best bang for your buck. Setting a responsible budget doesn’t limit you; rather, it helps you make sure that you’re investing what you have where it counts.

Step Three: Research your audience and where they’re spending their time

It’s probably not surprising to learn that your target customers are bombarded with content every day of their lives, so you need to be smart about when and where you reach out to them. Learn more about your customers and where they hang out (both digitally and in-person), pinpointing when they’ll be most receptive. Then, use that to inform your process to choose marketing channels.

Step Four: Investigate your competition and reverse-engineer what’s working for them

One of the best ways to craft a successful marketing strategy is to scope out what’s already working for your direct competitors. Spend some time diving into the marketing channels where your competitors are most active, exploring how they’re using them and which ones they frequent most.

Step Five: Craft authentic strategies and messages for the channels that fit your company and resonate with your customers

Once you’ve selected  your marketing channels to start with, it’s time to begin creating content. Avoid taking the easy route with overly generic or bland messaging – today’s consumers are far too savvy to not see right through fluff. Instead, aim for authenticity and true connection with your  target audience

Here is our top 5 factors:

1. Specialisation – are they a one-size-fits all agency or are they specialists in particular channels such as SEO. It makes a world of difference!
2. Approach towards  campaigns – how data driven are they truly? Experienced digital marketing agencies often have a data-driven, performance marketing approach towards campaigns that are intelligence led and focus on growing revenue, not just traffic (unless that is the objective or course). Are they asking the right questions to understand your business, your customer journey, your historical campaign performance data, your pain points and talking about the big picture? These are all important tell-tale signs that point how invested any agency is in your campaign and ensuring they have all the data points to ensure a successful campaign for your brand.
3. Industry experience – having previous industry experience can be a distinct advantage for your campaign, even though it is important to keep in mind that your USPs may be different from your competitors so results will usually vary. Other things to consider are how well your landing pages are at converting traffic to leads – this can often hamper campaign performance and a good digital marketing company will be able to pick this up even before starting the campaign or in the very early stages of it.
4. Case Studies and Awards – these speak volumes about how good your potential new digital marketing agency really is. Always do your own research on the awards being claimed by agencies as there are numeros dud awards out there. Any agency that can confidently share at least 6 recent case studies within the last 12-24 months is ideal. 
5. Pricing structure – take your time to understand how your digital marketing agency is structuring its pricing and why it’s done that way. If it doesn’t make sense, then ask for clarification. Also ask about minimum contract periods. In our opinion, any agency that works on a month to month basis  is simply not committed to developing a long term, sustainable growth strategy for it’s client – let’s admit that it’s human nature and there is simply no rationale behind it. Secondly, avoid agencies that work on a percentage of ad spend basis – their primary objective is to increase customer ad spend so their commissions increase in line with that, with no real bearing on performance. Smarter agencies are adopting a retainer model and 6-12 month contracts which allow them to develop a long term growth strategy and front-load their own agency resources into client campaigns in the early months, as they’re able to recuperate these in later months. Their clients also benefit from better long term performance given more resources are invested upfront than what’s billed for on a monthly basis.

Pick the metrics that matter most and align with your campaign objectives . Keep your metrics practical and focussed and down to the ones that matter.

Common digital marketing metrics include:

• Goal conversion rates (sales, form submissions, white paper downloads)
• Website sessions
• Number of sessions from a certain source (social, organic, referral)
• Website sessions to specific pages (blog pages, landing pages)
• Advertising conversion rate (for social media advertising or search ads)
• Engagement with content (video views, gated content downloads, comments)
• Social media followers, engagement rates, impressions

Yours will be unique to your business, marketing campaign or specific product so talk to your digital marketing agency about what the right mights to track are.