What Makes the Best Inbound Marketing Agency?

So you’re entertaining the idea of hiring an inbound marketing agency, but you want an agency who will deliver the best results for your money. This leaves you with the task of finding the right agency to deliver your company’s message, products and services to your potential and existing customers in the most efficient and effective way possible. At PatraCompany, we decided to take a deep dive into what you should expect from the “best inbound marketing agency. Here are a few aspects that we felt were the most important.

Content Sourcing

If you haven’t learned the Inbound Marketing process, you’ll come to know that an inbound strategy is driven by content that is geared toward engaging your buyers. The content can vary from blog posts, videos, e-books, white papers, guides, infographics and much more. All of these items need to be created. The big question is; who is creating each of these? If the agency isn’t creating these items in-house, you need to make sure that their outsourcing is legitimate. Hiring an agency that has yet to create content in your industry may lead to little to no ROI. One issue we’ve seen time and time again is locating a qualified content writer that understands your products and services. Make sure you know where your content is coming from before contracting an inbound agency.

Understanding Your Business

Your marketing agency should invest themselves within your company. They should become an extension of your business. A thorough understanding of your products and services is not enough to mold a lasting relationship that generates success over and over. For optimal performance, an agency needs to dive deeper than the basic monthly strategy meetings. They need to understand the mission, values, and character of your company and portray that image in everything they do on your behalf. Mismatched character traits will create brand confusion and less-than loyal customers. Be consistent with your brand position and your messaging to give your customers a reason to attach themselves to everything your business represents. When meeting with an inbound agency, ask how they will work with your clients. Only a rare few will have quality responses that mention your company’s mission and values.

The Bottle Cap

Most inbound marketing agencies are exactly that- an inbound agency. They focus on the inbound methodology alone and nothing else. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Well in most cases this is okay, but it certainly doesn’t make the agency “the best. The agency should look at the existing processes of your business and provide solutions to better manage those processes for the benefit of business efficiency as well as convenience for your customer. Repeat customers repeat buy for a couple of reasons. You’re the unique source of your product or service, or you’ve done a great job with your brand position and made it easy to purchase your products and service. Part of making it easy for your customers to buy starts with cleaning the behind the scenes systems by eliminating redundancies and out-of-date processes. Is paperwork still a big part of managing your business? How many different instances of software are currently being used to manage your day-to-day tasks? The best inbound agency will help you identify where your systems are redundant, and offer solutions to help you save time, money, and resources. They’ll help you with this because they know that it will have a positive impact on the success of your inbound marketing strategy. It’s a win-win for all parties involved.

There are a lot of “good inbound marketing agencies that will bring your business some success. You may have a hard time figuring out if one agency is better than the next. While you’ll hear very similar sales pitches and service offerings, now you’ll have some firing ammo when meeting with each agency. What questions will you ask? In the end, you’ll have to trust good old gut instinct when choosing the best inbound marketing agency.