What can you Expect for an Inbound Marketing Agency?

During these years working as an Inbound Marketing Agency, hundreds of marketing directors and business owners have asked: What can I expect from my marketing/advertising company?

I think that you should first know which kind of agency are you working with:

Kinds of Agencies

(and things you can expect from each)

1. Traditional. They job is basically to take your order, carry it out and show you the results so you can later discuss their proposal.
2. Digital. Does the work "in-house" (just like traditional agencies). And they also deliver metrics, reports, data and statistics of the results. They are more focused on finding keywords that would match the followers standards, likes, etc. In my opinion, they may generate lots of clicks but we must understand that the job doesn't end there, it's just the beginning of a journey in which you want these followers to become clients.
3. Traditional Inbound Agency. They use an Inbound Marketing Strategy that focuses in delivering results:
1. Increase the number of visitors to your website
2. Increase the number of conversion rates, from prospects to clients, and from clients to leads
3. Supervise the closing of clients
4. In other words, they do same job as a digital agency but with a deeper analysis on the strategy in order to deliver better results.
4. Modern Inbound Agency. Same specialized methodology designed to deliver results but, it also works with the company, along its whole learning process, in order to help the company's internal workers learn this methodology themselves and together, both agency and company, can deliver a better job.

Kind of specific work you can ask for:

• Weekly meeting. Usually virtual, in which you may discuss, study and solve your tactical plan, together.
• Monthly meeting.
• Study visitors, prospects, clients: the strategies that brought them to the point at where they're at and ways to improve these numbers.
• Work on the next editorial calendar.
• Assign follow-ups, authors and delivery times.

If you work on an agency based on a monthly fee, focused on delivering results (attraction of visitors and prospects and helping the sales department close more deals) I recommend you:

• Don't cling on to the exact number of content that some agencies promise, for example: 12 blogs, 1 monthly eBook ... Usually, agencies also apply common sense and do what's necessary in order to get to the results that are expected or even exceed them. It requires a considerable amount of effort to improve online rankings.
• Don't get lost in numbers that make no sense for the strategy. Such as: amount of followers on social networks or clicks on your Google Ads or the CPC, etc. Those numbers matter only to experts and during meeting, they just show if they are indeed working or not. Although these numbers may seem important, they're not (and still, many marketing directors think that these numbers are the actual goals of a campaign and spend lots of energy and resources on it). When these numbers are discussed during a meeting, they only distract the attention from what really matters and or entertain (bore?) other participants with purposeless estimates.
• Don't spend time on useless discussions. Such as "Well, it's just that I don't like this", or "I'm not fond of this picture", or "I think this won't...". In other words, opinion-based comments that are not sustained with arguments and lead nowhere. Marketing has changed so much that we must behave more like scientists than like poets, that is, we must measure and optimize our strategy based on results rather than discuss personal perceptions and likes.

So, tu summarize it all, what you must ask for is:

• Strategies for improvement of conversion rates.
• Follow-up of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• The design and development of a marketing plan in order to achieve your company's goals.