How to effectively collaborate with an agency

Whether you’ve set new lofty goals for your marketing team or you’re struggling to meet last year’s metrics, working with a marketing agency can help you achieve your goals. Partnering with an outside agency can provide you with new resources and expertise. Like any good partnership, it takes effort and communication from both sides to collaborate effectively. You can use these methods and steps to improve your collaboration skills with others.

Strategies for collaborating with others

Working with teams is essential to productivity across industries and departments. As a marketer, you understand how uniquely positioned you are to communicate with a wide range of personalities, from analytical types to creatives. The best leaders know how to work with multiple perspectives and create buy-in at every level.

Set and explain goals

  • Even as children, we always hated hearing ‘because I said so.’ While your mother was likely right, you resisted doing what she said because you didn’t know the why. As a leader, it’s essential to set and explain goals. Goals provide a direction and help everyone prioritize the same things. Defining goals also ensures individuals want the same things you do. If you lay out the why behind every plan, you’re more likely to create buy-in and successfully meet your goals.

Involve the right team members

  • It’s easy to default to two team strategies when starting a new campaign or project: include everyone or include only leadership. The problem with both of these approaches is they don’t involve the right team members. One has people who won’t understand or engage in the project. The other leaves out team members who will take on the day-to-day responsibilities. As you set specific goals or campaigns, it’s essential to include the right people from the beginning. It will save time and resources, as well as foster trust and responsibility from project members.

Keep open and honest communication

  • Transparency can feel like a buzzword in marketing today, but it should always be a core value of any company or team. It’s an essential element of building trust in any relationship, from coworkers to clients. Creating open and honest communication allows everyone to know where they stand and feel comfortable. It can be difficult to identify when trust is increasing productivity, but it’s easy to see how distrust hinders a team from reaching its full potential. Members are more apt to stay engaged and productive when they feel they are a valued part of the team and are informed regularly and honestly.

Collaborating with an experienced digital marketing agency

The techniques mentioned above can help you collaborate effectively with your new digital marketing agency, but the relationship between your marketing team and an agency can be unique. It’s normal to feel apprehensive about reaching out and letting someone new join your team. At Pure Visibility, we’ve found a few additional collaboration techniques that can help you better understand how to choose an SEO agency.

Be honest and upfront

  • Unlike your resume or dating profile, it’s best to be open and upfront about both your strengths and weaknesses when talking with your agency. If you’re proud of the improvements you’ve made to your website, brag about it. But don’t be afraid to admit you’re still struggling to get visibility on Google. Don’t worry. We understand the struggle of search engine optimization (SEO), and that’s where we can help. Using a strategy of SEO and digital advertising has helped our clients increase their visibility.

Understand each others KPIs and goals

  • Like setting goals for your internal team, you need to establish Key Performance Indicators with your agency. If you want more high-value leads, you’ll be disappointed if your agency shows you they simply increased traffic. For our clients, we develop advertising campaigns that focus on their specific goals, like a 200% increase in applications for the University of Michigan’s Health Infrastructures and Learning Systems.

Establish clear expectations (on both sides)

  • There are a variety of different types of marketing agencies. Are you looking for SEO, digital advertising, a complete website redesign, or a combination of services? Do you want just their advice, or do you want an agency to help generate content and implement campaigns? It’s a good idea to know what you want as you look for and choose an agency. One of the benefits of working with a digital agency is its ability to scale with your needs. The key is to establish expectations. If the agency provides a list of pages on your website with bad backlinks or poor title tags, are you fixing the issues before your next check-in or are they? These are the clear expectations that should be set during your first months together.

Reach your goals faster with a digital agency

Working with a digital agency provides you and your marketing team with new opportunities. It may provide access to new expertise and skills in the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape. It can also allow you to scale up your current efforts without adding full-time staff, or provide you with guidance to transform your current weaknesses into strengths. No matter your needs, an agency can help as long as they become reliable partners alongside your marketing team. This develops when using the methods above to foster effective collaboration between you and your new digital agency.

Check out our PPC Advertising and SEO plans to learn how we can help you bring in more qualified leads and sales.

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