How to Evaluate a Digital Marketing Agency

What You Need to Know BEFORE Hiring a Marketing Firm

by Chuck BankoffDigital Marketing Strategist

kreative webworks

What’s in Your Contract?

tip #7 – who owns what?

Not every Digital Marketing firm is as legitimate as they would have you believe. So how can you separate the charlatans, scammers and incompetents from the professionals?

With a little basic homework, and armed with the right questions, you stand a pretty good chance of partnering with the right firm.

Who actually owns your

your domain name?Who owns

Your Domain Name is the Center of your Online Brand

Who registered it for you?Your web designer?An x-Employee who disappeared?Do you even know?

Doesn’t really mater as long as YOUR

company is the registered owner and YOU have ACCESS to it.

Make sure that you are listed as the “Registrant”

Here’s how you find out

www.whois.com/whois

your social media?Who owns

Technically Social Media is not “ownable” in the traditional sense.

It’s about ACCESS

I’ve seen an Ex-employee who started a competing business hijack his former employer’s social media accounts and direct the traffic to his OWN business.

It doesn’t matter who set up your Social accounts as long as YOU haveAdministrative control

code & proprietary platforms?Who owns your

Sometimes it’s necessary to develop custom applications and functionality that is unique to YOUR business.

Unlike commercially available plug-ins & modules, ensure that any CUSTOM code that is developed on your behalfis transferable to YOU should you part ways with your agency.

Copy?

Images?

Graphics?

everything your visitors see?Who owns

You don’t want to find out after the fact that your agency will pull these elements as a special parting gift, claiming they own all work product.

And by the way, if your agency is providing imagery such as stock or custom photos, make sure the images are licensed properly and that license extends to YOU!

If not, you can get a nasty-o-gramattached with a bill that far exceeds the actual value of the image.

the actual website?Do you even own

Don’t ASSUME that you own your website.

If it’s a website that can be hostedanywhere, make sure you have access to the files should you ever move on from your agency.

If the website is built on a SAS

(Software As a System) platform, just make sure that you can have the hosting transferred to you.

Keep in mind that taking ownership

of the website may be contingent on you meeting YOUR contractual obligations. (this is totally ligit)

that doesn’t StinkHow to Hire an Agency

the digital marketing smell test

For the full eBook of questions to ask BEFORE hiring a Digital Marketing or Web Development firm, download that here for Free:

Download the Free eBook Here