How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency in London
With a population of around 9 million and approximately 1 million private sector businesses (as of Jan 2024), finding the right marketing agency in London may feel like searching for a needle in a hay stack. However when you do find the right digital marketing agency, it can transform your marketing efforts, boosting website traffic and improving search engine rankings. With so many digital marketing agencies offering everything from content creation, social media and website design to email marketing and conversion rate optimisation it can be hard to find true digital marketing experts, as everyone seems to be an expert with their own course to sell.
This means that finding the right digital marketing or advertising agency requires a structured approach to ensure you find a partner that’s familiar with your business landscape and aligned with your long term goals.
Ensuring you fully understand your own needs before expecting others to
Before you start your agency selection process or working on an agency onboarding plan, create your future scope of work and pinpoint your target audience, audience personas and key objectives. Simple factors, like whether you need a full-service marketing agency, a freelancer, or even a marketing team of channel specialists with experience in the niche B2B sector, will determine who you choose to shortlist.
Considerations for your agency selection process
To ensure you are comparing agencies or freelancers equally, structure is your best friend, consider:
- Chemistry checks – Are your values and communication styles aligned, write down what they are.
- Internal team structure – Do the most senior people in the marketing team do the pitch whilst the juniors manage everything once you’ve been onboarded.
- Scope of work clarity – How have they understood and interpreted your scope, can they define deliverables, performance standards expected campaign delivery.
- Affiliations – Look for a Google partner agency or a business affiliated with recognised marketing accreditations.
- Location, location, location – How conveniently are they located, do they have local offices? An office 30 mins bus ride from a tube station may not seem like a problem now but it could turn into one.
- Tool and analytics – A modern agency should leverage data-driven marketing, track website traffic, and provide customer insights.
- What does their online presence say about them – It’s common for agencies with high client churn to need to aggressively promote themselves. Do you like what you see of their own marketing?
Discipline expert or generalist
In lots of instances businesses are dependent on a few core marketing disciplines as they historically provide the best returns or they have an internal stakeholder who has a good understanding of the discipline in question. This can make your agency selection process easier as it allows you to pinpoint where you are in most need for support. The most common scenarios we see are:
- No marketing skills are inhouse and a full service marketing agency is required.
- A inhouse team member has junior experience in a core digital marketing discipline or skill and strategic senior support is required from an agency or freelancer.
- A inhouse team member already has lots of senior experience in a core digital marketing discipline or skill and requires either manager or exec level support from an agency or freelancer.
- All but a few digital marketing skills are inhoused and fully outsourced support is required for a few disciplines that may not already be inhouse and that would be too unprofitable to inhouse.
Why a specialist agency can offer more value
If one discipline drives the majority of your marketing performance then partnering with an experienced specialist might be the best way forward, especially if the best in the industry happens to be in London or in a close proximity to it. For instance if PPC drives most of your B2B lead flow, a dedicated Google ads agency in London with a large team of PPC specialists will most likely outperform a generalist marketing agency that offers PPC as a bolt on. So you would derive more value from selecting the specialist Google ads agency but then also using the same agency for any additional digital services you may need such as social media marketing or search engine optimisation.
Evaluating agency expertise
Now you’ve started agency selection, focus your efforts on agencies that can prove their track record with case studies and client testimonials. This gives you valuable insights into future campaign delivery, ROI measurement and performance reports.
Specifically you should seek agencies that can demonstrate results in the key focus disciplines within your brief. For example a reputable content marketing agency should be able to demonstrate their ability to create content strategy, increase organic traffic and execute link building campaigns. Whilst skilled a marketing agency should be able to showcase examples of brand marketing, brand positioning, brand identity and even branding and design.
Making the final decision
Once you’ve gathered all of the information available to you it’s time to make a decision. Whether you make a decision and the speed at which you make it is dependent on a number of factors. Very frequently the size and impact of the required investment is a key assessment criteria that either helps you to shorten your list of options and inevitably take the final leap of faith.
One more time
Having a penultimate call or meeting with the agency’s internal team can help you narrow your shortlist. The chemistry and vibe on this final call and even their willingness to participate in the call can tell you everything you need to know about what a future working relationship could look like.
- Accommodating and quiet confidence – This most likely means that this isn’t their first rodeo and they can deliver what they have claimed. It’s just another day for them and they don’t need to make any outlandish claims. They most likely have a healthy roster of clients and potentially even a waitlist.
- Accommodates and over promises – Probably the hardest to interpret as accommodating the call is positive but over promising is a tell tell sign of inexperience that can sometimes indicate high client churn or over promising and under delivering.
- Not willing to have a final call – This may reflect their willingness to meet your needs in the future and tell you everything you need to know about their customer services.
The underated skill of being easy to work with
Sadly this is one of the most intangible business skills known to human kind. With some people and teams everything seems to fit into place intuitively and things simply happen. So score each of the agencies on how easy you think it will be to work with them and use it as the clincher if you’re struggling to make a final decision.
