Working with an ecommerce marketing agency can be just what you need to accelerate into your next phase of growth. When you’re making this big of a change, you might be curious about what to expect next. Onboarding, alignment, and so much more are in store for you! Let’s dive in and talk more about what to expect in your first month of working with a marketing agency like Stryde.
Marketing Strategy, Not a Sales Pitch
The best marketing firms should always approach you with a digital marketing strategy instead of a sales pitch. During the “sales” process (we hate that term), their team of marketing channel experts look over your website, social media accounts, and other marketing efforts before deciding to engage together on your journey. They do this for the following reasons:
- To feel confident in their ability to help you accomplish your goals. There’s nothing worse than getting 90 days into an engagement and deciding it was a bad idea to do business together.
- To build a rough plan of action and roadmap for success. It’s incredibliy stressful for both parties not knowing the WHAT and the WHY behind what we need to do.
- To help coach and guide you to the right solution and make you feel confident in what is being recommended.
Once the initial strategy has been set and signed off on, you move into the onboarding phase.
Onboarding Your Team
When you’ve decided to work with an agency, you can expect a lot of communication. There will be many Loom videos, emails, and meetings. It might seem like a lot, but this is so important for transparency and to keep the process moving. They will want to ensure that they understand your business and reach your goals as quickly as possible.
Your agency will explain the next steps and how the process will work. In addition, they’ll gather all of the important details such as your style guide and company information to incorporate into your plan. Expect to talk about your agency’s commitment to respond to you within a certain window of time. Usually plan to respond to them within 2-3 business days on all reviews and questions. The thing with marketing is that every day you wait is another day they could be getting you better results. So, communication between your agency and yourself is the lifeblood of achieving success for your business.
Strategy Realignment
You should expect that your agency will continue to re-align your marketing strategy at least once per month. Some of the things they should be looking at and speaking with you about are as follows:
- Industry trends
- Economic outlook
- Competitors
- Customer journeys
- Analytics data
- Search engine rankings
- Etc.
They’ll present your current data to you, and talk through all of the concerns and things they are seeing, how they are tracking towards goals, and things they need to accomplish. Continuously monitoring your accounts and data is part of the services you will receive with a steller ecommece marketing agency. They want to be transparent about what they see and make changes, if needed, to help you reach your marketing goals.
Focus On SEO
SEO work is a key element to success when you start working with any marketing agency that knows what they are doing. So, they’ll start by looking over your category pages and creating keyword research. They will want to make sure your website looks alluring to search engines so you pop up at the top of search results. Your agency will work out what they can do to get more views. Such as better content, more links, etc.
Once they have done their evaluations, they’ll put together a proposal for things to add to your website. Then they will build out an editorial calendar with ideas. They will need your approval on these so that they can get their team working on creating content for your website with all of the power of SEO behind it. In addition, they’ll start working on getting links in to the website which helps your authority and credibility. This will also help pull in search engines and build authority for your website.
Honing In On Paid Social
Your agency should focus on your paid social accounts. they’ll need to talk to you and define who you are targeting. They’ll zero in on your target audience, the problem they are trying to solve for the customer, what the messaging should be, and what will get their attention. Once they’ve nailed this down, they’ll present it to you and make sure that you love it.
When they receive your approval, they’ll pass the plan along to their team and have them write ad copy as well as put together matching images and content to reflect the ad copy. They will want to make sure your message is portrayed in the best and most attention-grabbing way. When all of this is ready, they’ll have you review everything and await your approval. They’ll launch your social media ads and wait for the results to roll in. You might see modest improvements in the first few weeks. It can take some time to get the full results of the campaign, but don’t worry! Your agency will continue to monitor the results every week to watch for KPIs.
Working On Your Paid Search Results
Paid search will also be a big priority. The agency will start by taking SEO keywords and reviewing all of the category content that exists on your website. Once they’ve got a good handle on what you have and what you need, they’ll set up ppc campaigns in Google Ads using Performance Max campaigns. They can use Google Merchant Center to display your company’s products available on Shopify or other eCommerce platforms. Then they’ll be able to set up campaigns to highlight your categories and products.
Another thing that some marketing firms like to do is to set up a brand campaign. They’ll bid on your brand keywords to help you rank higher in search results. They will do this if they feel that it’s a good fit. Typically, this is less expensive, and good when other competitors are bidding for your keywords. The ROI is great on-brand campaigns, but they only do it if that makes sense for your brand. They won’t do it just because it’s good for their numbers. You the most bang for your buck and your agency should be completely transparent with you.
They will continue to monitor paid searches with weekly account reviews and audits. They’ll also review your data feed monthly to ensure products are showing properly and make adjustments if needed. They should continue to communicate these results to your team.
Upping Your Email Marketing Game
The last thing they will get started on is an audit of your marketing emails. Once they do an evaluation, they’ll write the content, design the emails, get your approval, and then you are ready to launch!
Focus on the following email flows:
- Welcome series – These emails are trying to get new customers to purchase right away.
- Abandon cart – These emails focus on people who start checkout but don’t complete it! Your agency will try to encourage them to come back and check out since they are so close to purchasing.
These email flows can be a huge game-changer when it comes to getting more people to purchase!
It’s a busy first month, but don’t worry! It’s well worth it when you see the results. Something to keep in mind while you’re working with your new marketing agency is that while they’ll be doing many wonderful things for your brand, don’t stop doing what you were doing before you signed the contract. Don’t stop posting to social media, creating blogs, and providing the best customer service. While your marketing firm will help you take things to the next level, your efforts are a key part of the process too.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
