DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY TORONTO

How You Can Scale Your Business By Hiring A Digital Marketing Agency In Toronto

The number #1 secret that your competitors have over you that is limiting your ability to grow your company is the fact that you don’t work with a digital marketing agency in Toronto. Think about it for a second, how can you grow your business if you are not using the latest and greatest marketing strategies in the game right now. As a business owner you have 2 options when it comes to marketing your business. First is hiring a marketer full time to help with all of the day to day marketing actions that your business needs to attract a steady flow of new customers. Number 2 is hiring a digital marketing agency in Toronto. 

Let’s go over the pros and cons of both options, so number 1 let’s say you hire a full-time person in your company to handle your marketing . Did you know that there are so many different skills that can fall under the “digital marketing” umbrella and the odds of someone having all of those skills under their belt is very minimal, because schools don’t really teach these skills and the ones that have these skills, run their own digital marketing agencies. 

By hiring a full-time digital marketer, you have to be aware of the fact that they will need to know the basics of graphic design, web design, copywriting, Facebook advertising skills, Google advertising skills, remarketing skills, search engine optimization skills and the list goes on. The amount of people that have all of these skills under their belt are very small and hard to find, not to mention that you have to pay them a pretty decent salary, plus benefits, plus insurance, taxes and lots of other expenses that are going to eat away at your profits. 

This option is only viable for massive businesses that have huge revenues and want to be aggressive in their marketing game, however for the new businesses that are still in the growth phase, it’s better to hire a digital marketing agency in Toronto, have it as a business expense and start working with industry experts who are self accountable and have a proven track record of delivering results for businesses like yours on a daily basis. Now keep in mind that by working with a digital marketing agency in Toronto, as your business grows, your digital marketing agency team can grow with you and offer you more services to reach higher and higher levels in your marketing efforts. 

They are self accountable in the idea of creating clear processes to revenue for your business and work in a self-motivated manner to achieve mutually set goals, while if you were to have your own staff, it would be your job to motivated them and keep them accountable to deliver results. Best of all, you can always terminate your agreement with a digital marketing agency if they don’t perform on mutually set deliverables. But if your own personal marketing team doesn’t deliver, its often harder to “fire” them without minimizing the damage of letting go of employees that don’t keep up with your company standards. 

Another added benefit of working with a digital marketing agency is the fact that they have lots of people inside their organization that specialize in many different skills, however they have a good team structure to make sure that all of the different digital experts work together synergistically under one roof to deliver results for your business. 

What are some of the personal qualities to look for when hiring a digital marketing agency in Toronto?

Results oriented

When it comes to running a digital marketing agency in Toronto, our revenue and success is entirely based on the amount of value we generate for our clients not the amount of time being spent on any given project. So it’s important to find a digital marketing agency that is very results oriented, meaning that they have a proven track record of success with previous clients. Take the time to look through some of their success stories and see some real-life examples of businesses that they have helped in the Toronto area. By seeing proof, you can feel more confident that you are taking the right action when it comes to hiring a digital marketing agency to help your business grow.

Excellent communication skills

You are going to be spending a decent amount of time communicating back and forth with your personal consultant inside the digital marketing agency. So it’s important that you get paired with the right consultant that you feel like you get along with. You should be able to figure out within the first meeting if you have good rapport with them and this is important because you want to be completely comfortable with the agency you are dealing with. When you have those monthly phone meetings, you want to look forward to those strategy sessions and not avoid them

Self Accountability

Apart from the digital marketing agency that you hire to help you get customers, lead and online sales, you are also obligated to do your best efforts to be available within a reasonable amount of time to ensure that you or someone on your team is able to communicate with the digital agency reps in a timely manner, as the lack of communication can slow down the processes and the results that could be generated for you. It’s also important that you and your company do your absolute best to protect your own company reputation by making sure customers aren’t dissatisfied with your products or services and they are not leaving you bad reviews online, as this can impact the effectiveness of your marketers efforts for your business. Keep in mind that a lot of digital marketing agencies in Toronto will evaluate you and your company to see if you are the right type of client to work with long term.

What are the essential must have skills and services any digital marketing agency should have?

Google Ads

Did you know that we have the ability to get your website to show up on the top 3 sponsored sections of the first page on Google? and guess what, any business can advertise there. However, it’s important to know how to advertise their effectively in order to get customers and not blow your entire marketing budget on irrelevant clicks. The way it works is during our strategy sessions inside our digital marketing agency in Toronto, we learn about your business in-depth, then our team performs keyword research to figure out which keywords your future ideal customers are more likely to use to find a business like yours. 

We organize these keywords into a campaign and design highly relevant pages on your website that act as “landing pages” whose sole purpose is to convert those people who google a particular phrase into an online sale, lead or phone call for your business. The costs for this type of marketing can range anywhere from $0.50/click, $2/click and even as high as $10/click depending on how competitive your industry is and how many of your competitors are advertising on Google. We have run many Google ad campaigns for our clients and it’s one of the best methods to funneling high quality and motivated customers to your business.

SEO

This form of marketing is similar to Google ads except it's free! Well not really… so the way it works is the top 4 links on the first page of Google are paid, anything below that is “free” also known as the organic results or SEO section. While in this section you don’t “pay-per-click” and the traffic is essentially free, the process of getting your site to be ranked in the free section does cost resources. Such as time, money, expertise and people. So what you want to do is prove to Google that your website is more worthy of ranking for a specific term than your competitor that is around the corner. You can do this by adding lots of quality content to your website, such as text, blogs and videos. Be active on your social media and get lots and lots of good reviews. 

You also need to be geographically located to the searcher, for example, if you type in the term “digital marketing agency Toronto” Google is most likely going to show you relevant businesses in the Toronto area and not show you agencies that are in New York for example. The best strategy is to do Google ads first and then scale with SEO. What this means is, start doing Google ads, once you figure out which keywords actually give you quality customers then you maximize and scale by doing SEO for your top priority keywords.

Facebook & Instagram ads

Social media ads are huge right now for businesses of all sizes and now we have the power to reach any customer we want on your behalf, we can target people based on location, gender, relationship status, language, job positions, education level and many other advanced targeting criteria. Social media advertising is quite sophisticated now but the good news is, most of your competitors are probably not using it yet, so before they catch up, take advantage and start doing paid ads on Facebook or Instagram and watch your business acquire lots of customers at a much lower cost.

Web design

This is by far one of the most important services any digital marketing agency in Toronto should offer, your website will always serve as the core of your online presence, after all it is the first piece of “digital real estate” your customers will see and evaluate you on before they transact with you, so you want to make sure that you get a website that makes your brand look great and does a great job at converting your website traffic into phone calls, emails and online sales.

Analytics

The role of a digital marketer is to look at data on a daily basis and make improvements to your funnels, website, landing pages and your ad copy in order to optimize and improve your campaign performance. If the digital marketing agency you hire isn’t running tests regularly to improve performance of your digital assets, you may want to reconsider finding a better agency. Make sure you actively encourage your digital marketing agency to run tests because the only way to get better results on your marketing spend overtime is to run A/B tests on your landing pages, funnels, ad copy and every other element that is needed to improve your performance. 

How to make sure you are the perfect client for a digital marketing agency to work with

Being a digital marketing agency owner, I have worked with lots of different types of clients and by now I have a solid understanding as to what kinds of clients to take on and what kinds of clients to avoid as to make sure we are both successful and have a win-win relationship that will last for many years.

Here are some things you will get evaluated on:

Do you have a good reputation?

Digital marketing agencies don’t want to take on bad clients, because the relationship will be short lived and won’t be profitable for both the agency and the business owner involved. So, we look for your current reviews online and get a feel for what some customers are saying about your business along with how you respond to the feedback. Now we all know and understand that there are crazy customers from time to time, but this should be at a minimum and we want to see if you were able to respond to it in a respectful manner and do your best efforts to minimize the damage. 

Punctuality

If you are running late to meetings and missing our scheduled phone meetings early on during the strategy session before you become a client, that is a clear indicator that you do not respect our time and that this kind of behaviour will continue throughout the life of the relationship. Now, we are human and things do happen from time to time that prevent us from making our meetings on time, however if this is a recurring behaviour then it is a lack of respect for the other person’s time and you will have a hard time finding an agency that is willing to take you on as a client, so be mindful of that. 

Communication

When it comes to managing your marketing dollars and working hard to get our clients results, we want to make sure that clients are available to us when and if needed to provide us with feedback with the current actions that we are taking. Clients that take forever to respond back are usually not a good fit and proves the fact that they are not taking their marketing seriously and because of that, they usually aren’t good clients to take on. 

Self improvement

Our favourite type of customers to take on inside our digital marketing agency in Toronto is the client that is always self educating themselves and staying current with their industry changes. We want our entrepreneur clients to have the entrepreneur mindset, and that is to “always be learning”. This could include taking industry specific workshops, seminars, courses, improving on current skill sets. This ensures us that you are very committed to your business and are passionate about the work that you do. So, when we generate clients for your business we know that you are highly capable of delivering value to the clients we generate for you.

Sales skills

This is by far one of the most important skills we look for when taking on new clients in our digital marketing agency in Toronto. When we create marketing campaigns for you and send you warm clients to your business, we want to make sure that you are fully prepared to close those sales appointments. It’s not enough to just have customers coming into your store, you need to know how to present your products and services, you need to know every detail about your products and services and be as knowledgeable as possible to ensure that you have a high closing rate. This includes your sales team as well. 

Do you invest in sales training courses for your staff, to make sure that they are getting the most usage from the marketing campaigns that we run for you? In the past we noticed that our customers that had amazing sales skills were able to get more value out of all the leads we generate for them and had the ability to close deals very consistently. Sales skills is very important to any business, so you as a client should always make a point of constantly taking courses and training yourselves on how to be the best closers for your products and services. This will help you get more usage out of your digital marketing agency and help you outcompete all your competitors.