Three Major Considerations to Make When Choosing a Marketing Partner

Choosing the right marketing partner can make or break your business’ financial, cultural, and long term growth goals. This is especially true due to the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing and the endless revolving door of “specialists” that amount to being a barely justifiable expense.

Native Rank has helped small and midsized businesses (SMBs) across the nation optimize their marketing dollar for about a decade — meaning we’ve been in the game long enough to have demonstrable results to back up our claims. Our unique approach has helped dozens of customers rank well for terms that are relevant to their local market.

We would love to share our hard-earned knowledge with you in an effort to help you spend your marketing resources more wisely in the upcoming fiscal year.

Here are three major considerations when choosing a marketing partner:

1) Are they Data-Driven?

In our current internet age, in-depth analytics tools are not only pervasive, but they’re also continuously being optimized as well as expanding their features and technology suites. What this means for you, is unparalleled access to how your core audience thinks, reacts, and feels about the products and services you provide in your area. You don’t have to have an astronomical marketing budget to utilize data-driven analytics for actionable insight into your customers. Before spending a dime on a third party, don’t be afraid to ask how they go about optimizing their services before and after the analytics roll in.

2) What Type of Insight Do They Bring to the Table?

When comparing various marketing services, it’s just as critical to finding a company that can teach you something, as it is to find a partner empowered by technology and utilizing data in actionable ways. For example, if your goals are to generate more qualified leads, choosing a company with a track record of maintaining the status quo won’t get you very far, regardless of the technology and level of granular insight. Can your marketing partner teach you something new about your audience? Can they provide data to back up these insights and collaborate with you to determine the best course moving forward? Are the insights they provide aligned with your specific goals? Don’t be stiff-armed into a service that is diametrically opposed to your via fancy marketing jargon.

3) Are they Adaptable?

We saved the best one for last. The ability for a marketing partner to adapt to current and future trends is a critical consideration. Regardless of what they promise you with the tech, they have now, to ensure your Return on Investment ((RIO), you have to think a few years down the road. We aren’t talking about hiring a fortune teller, we simply mean a company that can plan for what they don’t know and isn’t afraid to get into the weeds to learn and continually optimize their strategy. One of the only constants in the digital marketing space is that Google changes. So what you must discern is whether the company you’re hiring pretends they have the “greatest solution ever”, or do they have a proven track record of clients who have continuously ranked on the first page for numerous terms despite the fluctuating nature of Google’s algorithms?

This isn’t a comprehensive list of considerations for choosing a marketing partner, but it’s a good start. The short and skinny of it is, when you’re looking to maximize your marketing dollar, you need to choose a partner with data-driven analytics, the insight you don’t already have, and a future proof strategy that keeps you and on the first page, regardless of Google’s algorithm uncertainty.