{"id":1109,"date":"2017-12-20T07:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-12-20T07:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalstriked.wpengine.com\/?p=1109"},"modified":"2018-01-10T14:31:15","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T20:31:15","slug":"healthy-agency-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/healthy-agency-relationship\/","title":{"rendered":"Why It&#8217;s Important to Have a Healthy Relationship with Your Agency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just like any relationship you have, whether it be personal or otherwise, it&#8217;s extremely important to have a healthy relationship with your digital marketing agency. You hired them to make your life easier and to hopefully grow your business in ways you can&#8217;t do yourself.<\/p>\n<p>But sometimes the compatibility just isn&#8217;t there.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This might be a little odd coming from your friendly neighborhood digital marketing agency, but the hope is that by the end of this post, you&#8217;ll have a clearer perspective on your current agency relationship and have a better understanding of what to expect from one in the future.<\/p>\n<h2>Here are a few signs that your agency relationship is unhealthy:\u00a0<\/h2>\n<figure style=\"width: 245px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/britney-spears-pop-1RMcER49upjSE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/1RMcER49upjSE\/giphy.gif\" alt=\"Did your healthy agency relationship turn TOXIC?\" width=\"245\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Or maybe it&#8217;s&#8230;<strong>TOXIC<\/strong>? <a href=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/britney-spears-pop-1RMcER49upjSE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gif credit<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h3>1. The agency you have now isn&#8217;t transparent<\/h3>\n<p>Just like when your significant other is shifty about why they&#8217;re coming home from work late, sometimes an agency doesn&#8217;t tell you exactly what they&#8217;re doing.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe they&#8217;re promising things they can&#8217;t really deliver just to get you in the door.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re taking advantage of your lack of marketing knowledge and promising you the moon when the best they can give you is disappointment.<\/p>\n<p>But the whole reason you hired them was so that they&#8217;d make your life easier and your business more successful.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re just making your life harder and keeping you from achieving the goals you&#8217;ve set for your business.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s time to find an agency that will be transparent and that you can trust.<\/p>\n<h3>2. Your business has changed or the agency has<\/h3>\n<p>Sometimes a healthy agency relationship turns sour over time as you grow apart.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe your business has outgrown them or the agency has outgrown you and can&#8217;t give you the attention that they used to.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s okay to grow apart and then move on. Maintain a good relationship with them, because maybe they&#8217;ll still be able to help in the future.<\/p>\n<h3>3. The agency has consistent performance issues<\/h3>\n<p>Note the word &#8220;consistent.&#8221; Every agency will have a bad day, make errors, and that may disappoint you.<\/p>\n<p>Those things should be forgiven, especially if most of the time, they&#8217;re accurate, working hard for you, and producing results.<\/p>\n<p>But if the agency is\u00a0<em>consistently<\/em> not approaching projects with a clear strategy, doesn&#8217;t understand the digital space at all, or they rarely meet deadlines or budgets, the relationship isn&#8217;t a healthy one.<\/p>\n<h2>What a Healthy Agency Relationship Looks Like:<\/h2>\n<figure style=\"width: 480px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/reactionseditor-will-ferrell-best-friends-l1ughbsd9qXz2s9SE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/l1ughbsd9qXz2s9SE\/giphy.gif\" alt=\"Did we just become best friends? YUP.\" width=\"480\" height=\"204\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">What you say when you find a good digital marketing agency <a href=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/reactionseditor-will-ferrell-best-friends-l1ughbsd9qXz2s9SE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gif credit<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>If you have a healthy relationship with your digital marketing agency, you probably know it already.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re happy to work with them and they&#8217;re making your life easier. Before working with them, digital marketing was stressful to think about and your online conversions weren&#8217;t growing.<\/p>\n<p>But then you found the digital marketing agency of your dreams.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some of the things an agency should do to facilitate a healthy relationship:<\/p>\n<h3>1. They have your best interests at heart<\/h3>\n<p>Not every agency will care about your company. They won&#8217;t take the time to really get to know it and understand it the way you do.<\/p>\n<p>Find a digital marketing agency that will put in the time and effort. It&#8217;ll be better for you in the long run because you know that your company is in good hands.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll be able to focus on aspects of your business that are more important to you.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h3>2. They fill in the gaps of your internal team<\/h3>\n<p>The best thing about hiring a digital marketing agency rather than building your in-house team is that an agency lives and breathes marketing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They love SEO, PPC, and content strategy. Maybe they have an in-house designer and developer who will revamp your website.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h3>3. Their solutions are versatile and creative<\/h3>\n<p>One of the most crucial deciding factors can be the agency&#8217;s versatility. Marketing doesn&#8217;t work in a vacuum. Your marketing campaigns will thrive through different combinations of disciplines and capabilities.<\/p>\n<p>Digital Strike couldn&#8217;t do everything it does without its PPC and SEO specialists or our in-house creative team. We couldn&#8217;t be successful if we were just account managers.<\/p>\n<p>Our diverse skills and perspectives make us as versatile as the multi-tool every dad carries on their belt.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h3>The Bottom Line<\/h3>\n<p>It might be a little odd to talk about the health of a professional relationship as if it&#8217;s a personal one.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But if you&#8217;re a small business trying to grow, then a relationship with your digital marketing agency is a mix of personal and professional for you.<\/p>\n<p>If you enter a relationship with a new agency, give it time to ramp up. The onboarding process can take time and then it takes even more time for their hard work to have an effect.<\/p>\n<p>At Digital Strike, we can help you find the right solutions for your business. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/contact\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Contact us for a free consultation<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just like any relationship you have, whether it be personal or otherwise, it&#8217;s extremely important to have a healthy relationship with your digital marketing agency. You hired them to make your life easier and to hopefully grow your business in ways you can&#8217;t do yourself. But sometimes the compatibility just isn&#8217;t there.\u00a0 This might be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[42,43,41,40],"class_list":["post-1109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solution-partner","tag-business-agency-relationship","tag-choosing-a-new-marketing-agency","tag-healthy-agency-relationship","tag-solutions-partner"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalstrike.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}