Hi! Liza here from Content Maximiser. Welcome to another episode of the Content Maximiser podcast! I was reminiscing from the Social Media Marketing World Conference that I attended in San Diego earlier this year, and I remembered a conversation I had with one of the attendees, Kim, during one of the parties at the conference. She owns a large e-commerce store on Amazon, they actually specialise in selling women underwear online and her manufacturing is in Korea.

She was looking for a digital marketer to help her bring her business to the next level. She said to me, Liza, how do I find the right digital marketer for my business? What are the questions that I should be asking them? I thought these are great questions so I thought I’ll make an episode about it.

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How long have they been practicing?

The first question you want to ask is, how long have they been practicing digital marketing? Have they only done it for their clients? Or have they done it for their own business as well? Whilst not necessary, It is definitely a plus if they have implemented their own digital marketing strategies for their own business, because it shows they’ve put their money where their mouth is.

The other thing to consider is that like all things, you can only gain experience through time, and with time and experience you get to see what works, what doesn’t work, and build a solid foundation of time tested Digital Marketer Principles.

Their continuous professional development

Then the next question to ask is, how do they continuously develop their digital marketing skillsets? Who are the digital marketers they follow and learn from? Digital marketing changes so fast, so it is important to keep up-to-date with different digital marketing trends, and how to utilise different channels to get results.

For example, for myself, I invest tens of thousands of dollars each year to invest in our professional development for myself and our team, and my mentors are people such as Dean Jackson, Molly Pitman, James Schramko, Taki Moore, who are all legendary in a digital marketing industry, and they have made for themselves and their clients hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So you want to make sure that you’re working with a digital marketer who is always heavily investing in their professional development.

Their areas of expertise

The next question to ask is what is the area of expertise? Some digital marketers will specialise in one channel such as Facebook ads or Google ads or conversion optimisation on websites. With some other marketers, they are more well rounded in multi-disciplines.

So it depends on what you are after. Whether you want someone to oversee your whole digital marketing, or you want someone to specialise in a specific channel. If you are working with different experts in different channels, then what it means is that you will need to oversee the whole strategy and how they integrate together.

One issue we often see with that approach is that unless you are a digital marketer yourself, the marketing becomes very fragmented. Whereas if you get a holistic Digital Marketer to oversee all the channels for you, and they have specialists in their team who work in each separate areas, you will find that you get a much more holistic approach to your digital marketing, and they work more synergistically together.

Their philosophy

The next question you might want to ask is, what is the philosophy they approach to help their clients generate leads. For example, some digital marketers love to do launches and run deals campaigns, and do free consultations, and free giveaways, and run competitions, and that’s how they like to generate leads and enquiries for the clients.

Whereas other Digital Marketers like ourselves, very similar to brands such as Apple or Mercedes, we don’t run any deals or campaigns at all for our clients. Our approach is about building the authority of our clients and make them the go to people for the product or service that they offer.

We have a strong focus on content marketing, we focus on helping them add value to the audience, so that when the audience sees their content, and they have a need for their service, our clients naturally become the provider of choice for them.

Whilst content marketing is a lot more work, we believe that it satisfies what all channels want all at once. Content Marketing is great for your audience on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whilst it is also great for the search engines such as Google for SEO. Most importantly, it helps you build connection, relationship and authority with your prospective clients. So you want to understand the philosophy of your digital marketer.

Their results

The last one that you can ask which I think is the most important one is, can you show me some results that you have generated for your clients. And when I say results, it doesn’t necessarily means how many views they got someone to watch a video, how many hits to the website. But what I mean is how many enquiries and phone calls have they generated for a specific client, and how much in revenue the client has made through the digital marketing efforts.

So here Content Maximiser, we are heavily focused on conversions and enquiries. In addition, we are also very revenue-focused. Now you might be wondering, why aren’t you profit-focused. Well, that’s because profit has got to do with operational efficiencies, which is beyond the scope of our offerings. So we are more focused on the top line rather than the bottom line.

For example, one of our clients shared with us during of our monthly catch up that he has increased his revenue by 50% from August 2020 compared to September 2020, and he could not believe it, all during Covid!

So you want to ask them the results that they got for one or two of their clients to get an idea of the results, and not just the visuals, of what they created.

So, in summary, the five things I think you can ask a potential Digital Marketer are: one, how long they’ve been in business. Two, how do they continuously keep up to date with digital marketing. Three, their areas of expertise. four, their philosophy and their approach to their digital marketing strategy. And five, the results that they have generated for a couple of their clients.

A good way to get started with a digital marketer without jumping all in is actually commission them to do a strategy for you. It might cost you a few thousand dollars, but that is a small investment so they will invest some time to go through your website, go through your content, go through your platforms to know where you’re at, where are the gaps, evaluate your competitors, and put a comprehensive strategy together for you.

From this exercise, it will give you a really good understanding of how they think, whether you resonate with their strategy, and whether you can see if it will work for your business. This will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

I hope you found this video useful, and if you are looking for a digital marketing agency to help you bring your business to the next level, we would love to help.

We offer a complimentary marketing audit, where we will jump on a video zoom call for around 60 minutes, and have a look through your marketing together to identify where are your gaps, why aren’t you getting the results, and where are your lowest hanging fruits to get the quickest return for your marketing dollars. We will also share with you our Market Leaders Blueprints, which is the exact strategy we use in our Market Leaders Program that is designed to help our clients double their revenue in 3 years or less.

So if this sounds like what you are looking for, just head over to our website, fill in the enquiry form, or direct messages us in social media, and we’ll be in touch to organise a time with you.

By the way, If you enjoyed the show, give it a rating or share it with someone who needs to hear this message today. I’ll catch you in the next episode.

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