Jewelry ECOMM Tech
5 Simple Ways To Empower Your Digital Agency June 27, 2019 (0 comments)
More and more jewelers and jewelry brands are working with digital agencies to stay competitive in the marketplace. If you’re one of these companies, there are a few things you can do to empower your agency to be more effective for you.
Clearly-defined duties
The first step is making sure that you and your agency both know exactly what their duties are. The easiest way to solve this is with a clear contract or terms sheet, signed by both parties.
Are they handling social media? SEO? Website maintenance? These broad duties should be clearly defined. Additionally, you should have a broad idea of the actual work they’ll be doing. If you’re hiring them for Search Engine Optimization, will they be creating content for you? Managing link building campaigns? Performing structural fixes to your site? All these things are considered Search Engine Optimization, so it would be important to outline - at least in a broad sense - the actual work they’ll be doing.
Clearly-defined monthly goals
Every agency works differently, but we like to outline a monthly plan of attack for our clients at the end of the month. This wind-down phase helps us review how the client’s campaigns performed that month and enables us to constructively alter our goals and tactics month to month. We can decide to continue attacking the same objectives the next month or go for a completely different gameplan.
These types of regular check-ins and game planning meetings are crucial to help your agency manage your campaigns as successfully as possible.
Be Accessible… and Use Project Management Software
There is a misconception that hiring a digital agency means you can dump everything on them and not be very involved. However, this is very backwards thinking. Working with a digital agency is a collaborative process. Not only will you need to be accessible to supply feedback and various company files, but nobody knows your business like you do - so you’ll need to be very involved.
Any easy way to solve all the key points I’ve mentioned so far in this article - being accessible, having clearly defined goals, etc - is by using project management software. Businesses like Asana, Trello, and Basecamp offer an easy way to collaborate and share files with your agency in a single organized location. Your agency may even use one of these programs already.
Use A Dropbox Account
Another tool you should invest in is Dropbox - or any other file sharing program. It may not even cost you anything - you may get enough storage with a free membership level.
Keeping your files in a single organized location for your agency to access will make things much easier when it comes time for them to build your campaigns.
Fewer Chefs
A major problem that agencies sometimes face with businesses is when the business has multiple decision makers directing the agency what to do.
Speaking from personal experience, this usually leads to the agency having to redo lots of work. Or, worse yet, launching something that the decision makers weren’t all agreed on.
Your agency needs to know who to get final approval on for their tasks. This is often a business owner, but companies will often designate a single employee to be the laison between the business and their agency. This way, the agency has a single point of contact and there is not chance of miscommunication.