How to Choose a Marketing Agency

How to Choose a Marketing Agency

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here and that you’re considering taking the next steps to hire a marketing agency for your business. 

Here at Root & Roam, we understand that this can be a big step to take and often feel intimidating and overwhelming. Let’s talk through some of the basics. 

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Why Hire a Marketing Agency?

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Types of Marketing Agencies

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Find the Marketing Agency of your Dreams

Why Hire a Marketing Agency?

Marketing agencies are here to help businesses of all sizes, from teams of one up to the biggest corporations. There are many reasons to hire an agency. There may be that one task that keeps falling off your plate, a skill set that you don’t currently have on your in-house team, or you’re in need of fresh ideas. Hiring a marketing agency is the perfect way to feel confident that the work will be completed by a team of experts who are focused on helping you reach your goals. 

To choose an agency, you must first know the problem you are trying to solve as a company. 

  • Do you need to clarify your “why” or market differentiator? 
  • Do you need help telling your story
  • Do you need help with social media
  • Do you need to fix your website
  • Is your trouble a lack of brand awareness? 
  • Are you needing to design or refresh a logo? 
  • Are you focused on getting more sales, email addresses, or other leads? 

Types of Marketing Agencies

Once you have determined your goals, you must then decide what kind of agency you want to work with. There are many different types of marketing agencies and specialties, including: 

  • Storytelling 
  • Design 
  • Inbound Marketing 
  • Digital Advertising 
  • Social Media 
  • Growth Marketing 

The key to your search is that you should be able to find an agency that possesses all the competencies needed for your business. This is ideal because your agency will be able to align all aspects of your marketing to the same goals and campaigns.

Another option is to build a group of agencies (preferably independents) who complement each other.  You can have one group of people doing their stuff on the front-end (designing a website, for example) while another group is doing their stuff on the backend (like writing blog posts). That way everyone chips in with their specialties without competing with the others. A team of designers, a team of copywriters, and a team of inbound marketers can all achieve the same results while still working in their own spaces.

Skills Needed to Solve a Problem

The answer may be apparent in your situation, but each scenario is unique with different fits for businesses. Finding an agency that has the skills needed to solve the problem within your business and fits with your team is vital. When you find one, consider speaking with their current clients, inhouse designers and web builders, and view their website and portfolio (if they have one). Then decide if they are the right fit for your business.

If yes, it’s time to reach out!  But remember—there are plenty of agencies out there who specialize in creative design, inbound marketing, and digital advertising, so don’t be afraid to look around. It’s a common practice to meet with a few agencies and get pitches from a few places to see which agency has solutions or campaign concepts that resonate with your business. Finding the right fit for your company – financially and creatively – is key. 

Helpful Recommendation

A good partner helps navigate the changing landscape and set realistic goals and performance indicators. Consumer behavior is constantly changing for a combination of psychological, social, cultural, personal, and economic factors. There are industry and platform benchmarks that are used to help determine these for you if you don’t have any historical data. Be cautious if an agency guarantees you a certain return on investment (ROI) or promises a specific amount of impressions.

For example, if you are an ecommerce business using Shopify, make sure to consider what the industry benchmarks are for conversion rates. This may be a target to shoot for if you are below the benchmark, and then as you learn about your customer, you can fine-tune to exceed those benchmarks over time.

 Find the Marketing Agency of your Dreams

Congratulations on building your business, and here’s to finding a partner to help you grow it! So go ahead and find a marketing agency to partner up with—you really can’t go wrong with a good partnership! If you think that Root & Roam may be the agency for you, get in touch! 

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Email Marketing KPIs

Email Marketing KPIs

Are you sending emails for your business simply because you know you should? Are they converting? Do you know how to tell if they’re working for your company?

Emails are an important part of your digital marketing strategy! Your email marketing Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are an easy way to measure how many recipients read your emails, make purchases, enjoy your email content, and more. Your KPIs serve as a roadmap and help you to determine if you’re meeting your goals.

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WHY EMAIL MARKETING IS IMPORTANT

WHAT IS A KPI AND WHY DO I NEED IT?

EMAIL KPIs TO TRACK

DELIVERY RATE

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BOUNCE

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OPEN

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CTR

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CONVERSION RATE

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REVENUE / REVENUE PER SUBSCRIBER

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UNSUBSCRIBE

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ROI

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SUBSCRIBER ENGAGEMENT

WHY EMAIL MARKETING IS IMPORTANT

Email marketing helps your company to grow and is often an important factor in gaining new leads for your company. Emails are used for lead generation (85%), sales (84%), lead nurturing (78%), and customer retention (74%).

With those kinds of numbers, it’s impossible to say that email marketing doesn’t work or won’t help your company. Maybe you’re not seeing the sales that you’re hoping for yet, but tracking your KPIs will help! 

WHAT IS A KPI AND WHY DO I NEED IT?

Your KPIs are important tools for benchmarking your success and understanding exactly what happens when you click “send” on an email campaign. In 2022, 33.3 billion emails are expected to be sent and received each day. That’s a whole lot of emails. You may be thinking, “if that many emails are sent, how do I know if people are reading mine, and why would they?”

Your KPIs are your answer. Email Key Performance Indicators allow you to measure how many people are reading your emails, what links are being clicked, what kind of content your audience prefers, and what types of emails they like to receive, and you can A/B test content, subject lines, and more.

EMAIL KPIS TO TRACK

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of it. If you work with a marketing email provider like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or Constant Contact, many of these KPI insights will be provided to you through the software, but it’s important to know what the data means and how it may affect your goals. 

DELIVERY RATE

Your email delivery rate tells you how many of the email addresses that you intended to get your email campaign actually received it. Although you sent the email to your full email list, every recipient may not see it in their inbox. A number of factors can play into this that we’ll get into in your bounce rate. Your goal is to get your delivery rate as close to 100% as possible.

BOUNCE

When an email doesn’t make it to its intended inbox, that’s called a “bounce.”  Imagine you have a bouncy ball that you’re trying to throw through an open window to your friend inside. If you throw it through the window, that email is delivered. 

If you miss, that’s a bounce. You may miss the window for many reasons: the wind blew the ball off course; there was a screen in the window that you didn’t see; your friend wasn’t there to catch it; or maybe you’ve just got bad aim (No judgmentit happens!). The same is true for your emails. They may bounce for multiple reasons: a typo in the email address or getting sent to the “spam” folder are the most common culprits. But there could also be a network error, or the inbox could be full. 

Monitor this rate closely to learn why your emails aren’t getting through to their intended recipients. If there are a lot of blocks, you may need to change up your subject lines or authenticate your URL.

OPEN

This is the first KPI on your list that tells you something about your audience. Your email open rate tells how many people opened the email after seeing it in their inbox. Some of the questions that can be answered by your email open rate are: 

  • Was your subject line compelling?
  • Was the recipient familiar with the sender’s email address? (For example, a client may see an email come through from our company as “Root & Roam” or as “Stacy, Founder of Root & Roam,” depending on the digital strategy behind our campaign. If you’re testing this out, an A/B test can show you if your audience recognizes a person from your brand or the brand alone.) 

CTR

Your click-through rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email and proceeded to click a link in your email. You can use this as a good way to tell if the email contains copy, graphics, or discounts that your audience resonates with! Generally speaking, the higher your click-through rate, the more your audience likes the content in your email. If they’re not clicking your links, try changing up what’s inside your email!

CONVERSION RATE

So now you know how many people are receiving your email, opening your email, and clicking through to your website. These are great insights, but you might find yourself thinking, “but are they actually buying from me?” That’s what your conversion rate will tell you! There are many integrations (Klaviyo and Shopify play together very well!) that will pull this data for you right into your email platform. Conversion as a sale is typical for an eCommerce website, but if you’re in a service industry, a conversion may look like an appointment booking, the length of a page view, redeeming a code, or something else. If there isn’t a native integration to keep track of your conversion, Google Analytics and Google URL builder can track this as well. The higher your conversion rate, the more conversions you’re getting. 

REVENUE/REVENUE PER SUBSCRIBER

If you want to know exactly how much money you earned from an email campaign, this one’s for you. This will tell you the dollar amount (or associated dollar amount) your email brought to your business. Divide this by how many subscribers are on your email list to get an estimated value per person. 

If you’re tracking conversions differently, like the number of appointments made, you can associate a dollar amount with this. For example, if each appointment made brings in approximately $X of revenue for your company, multiply the number of conversions with your approximate value to get your revenue estimate. 

UNSUBSCRIBE

You’ll want to keep track of how many people are unsubscribing from your emails. If you find that one type of email is causing more recipients to unsubscribe, you can stop sending that type of content. A high unsubscribe rate signals to email providers, like Google, that the content is not something that should be sent. This can land your emails in spam folders or worseget your domain blacklisted from sending emails at all. 

ROI

Email marketing return on investment is highand it’s an exciting metric to see! This metric shows how much revenue was generated for your company compared to how much it cost you to develop the email. 

If your ROI is lower than you’d like, consider heading back to your digital strategy for some updates, or, if it’s within budget, hire a graphic designer!

SUBSCRIBER ENGAGEMENT

Knowing how often a subscriber engages with your company is important. With this info, you can “bucket” customers and send more targeted emails.

 If they’re a high engagement customer, they open, read, click, and potentially purchase through a high number of your emails. Consider an “insider sale” or “loyalty program” for these customers. 

If they’re a low-engagement customer, consider sending “win back” emails and/or removing them from your newsletter list.

SUMMARY

With all these metrics and KPIs, you can make sure that your company is meeting its goals and making adjustments as needed. As you begin to track your email marketing KPIs, you’ll see a shift in the content, conversions, revenue, and ROI. You’ll see customer loyalty soar as they become more familiar with the brand and get the content that resonates with them.

 If your email marketing campaigns and strategy need a boost, reach out to Root & Roam! We’re excited to help you develop something that helps build your company!

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Building your Brand

Building your Brand

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What is branding?

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Why does branding matter?

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What are the elements of branding?

When you hear the word, “brand,” what comes to mind? The name of a company? A logo? Many business owners spend very little time creating a meaningful brand and instead jump right into marketing and sales after naming their business and designing a logo. Unfortunately, most of these owners discover that they have a difficult time connecting with the actual market that could benefit the most from their products or services. Skimming through the branding process leads to inconsistencies within your brand, which makes it difficult for your target market to recognize you.

What is branding?

We’re not talking about cattle here, but we are talking about truly owning everything in your business, from the fonts you choose to the products or services you sell. ALL of it matters. Branding is essentially creating consistent, purposeful messages to connect you with your target market and to build a lasting impression within your industry. Every detail of imagery, every word you use, and everything you stand for—it all contributes to the strength of your brand.  

Why does branding matter?

Think of some of the most popular brands out there—Nike, Ford, Target, Hallmark, Amazon, just for starters. Now think of some of the unknown competition…you can’t! They’re unknown for a reason. That’s why branding matters. Companies with strong, consistent branding will build brand recognition with their target audiences. You want to be like these companies. You want to be known.

What are the elements of branding?

While much goes into branding, there are a few elements that absolutely must be incorporated into your branding strategy:

  1. Voice and tone
    Yes, this is a 2-for-1 special. All of your copy (your mission statement, company description, taglines, text on your website, or anything written by your company), both internal and external, needs to have a consistent voice. It should tell your audience who you are and who you’re not. Ask yourself, “whose voice do I hear when I think of my company as a person?” Maybe it’s Morgan Freeman or your Uncle Fred. Ideally, every bit of copy your company produces will sound as though written by the same person—and the right person. Your tone should attract the audience your brand is meant to serve. When creating your tone, determine how you want your brand to make people feel and what you want them to think of when they hear your company’s name.  
  2. Logo
    Your logo is essentially a visual symbol to represent your company. It can include images, copy, or both. It should match your voice and tone and convey the emotion of your choosing. Eventually, when a person hears the name of your company, this symbol will come to mind, so it’s important to already have a clear purpose behind your business (including voice and tone). Some logos that we like are Amazon and Tour de France. They have great symbols and messages hidden behind them! 
  3. Fonts
    While it’s fun to play around with fonts to convey specific emotions for each message, it’s more important that all of your materials, both print and digital, be consistent. Consistency helps people form connections and retrieve memories, even memories about companies they’ve encountered. Just as with a logo, the fonts you choose should add to the purpose of your business and the emotions you are trying to elicit from your target audience.
  4. Colors
    Again—consistency and emotions can’t be stressed enough. Our design experts understand how colors work together to convey specific emotions, and we’re happy to help you choose the best combinations for your company. 
  5. Styleguide
    Your brand styleguide is literally a document that outlines your company’s voice and tone, logo, fonts, colors, and anything else you choose to add. This document can be shared with your entire team and should be referenced and followed for every marketing effort. If you outsource your marketing (like maybe to Root & Roam), be sure to share your styleguide. This is how you achieve consistency and, ultimately, brand recognition. 

 

If you’re interested in making lasting connections sooner rather than later, let our experts here at Root & Roam walk you through a structured process of building your brand from the ground up. Already have a business but need help rebranding? We’ve got you covered, too. Contact us today, and let’s get your brand on.