How to hire a digital marketing professional

Every day, companies of every size throw away millions of reais on digital marketing strategies that don’t work. This guide is for business owners who don’t know much about marketing or the internet and are thinking about hiring the right professional for the job. The tips below will certainly help you keep your company out of the statistic in the first sentence of this article. Here we go:

The market is full of bad professionals

Digital marketing doesn’t require degrees or courses. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can call themselves a digital marketing expert. The lack of barriers to entry creates a landscape of big sales promises, low prices and terrible service quality.

Google itself recommends that small local businesses don’t hire a professional

You can do basic things yourself, such as registering your company on Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and your site on Google Search Console. It will take you an afternoon at most.

Think carefully about whether digital marketing makes sense for your business. Sometimes, building local partnerships or handing out flyers in your area are strategies that bring far better results.

Marketing agencies earn a percentage of what’s spent, not of the results generated

Unfortunately this is the industry standard, because the vast majority can’t generate real results or can’t measure them. That’s why the service is often priced on the amount invested, not on the results generated.

On the other hand, it’s understandable: it’s no use marketing doing excellent work if the company’s product is bad or out of step with what the market wants. It isn’t the marketer’s job to carry out that analysis. What matters is paying attention to how the professional prices their service, so you don’t fall for easy promises.

Ask the SEO agency to show the return on investment of a campaign

You can’t argue with facts. Ask for numbers! Google’s tools let you measure both the amount invested and the value delivered by each campaign. The value delivered can be financial or in number of leads attracted. Ask:

• Can you show me success stories, with numbers if possible?
• What results do you expect to see, and how soon?
• Can you show me how you measure the success of your campaigns?
• Have you worked with a company in the same field as mine? How did it go?

If the agency beats around the bush, walk away. If it couldn’t prove its value while selling to you, it will never be able to prove the results of any campaign it runs for you.

Learn to sniff out unethical marketing practices that can sink your company in search results

Google is a company, and companies have policies. If the professional uses unethical practices or has only a shallow knowledge of these policies, your site may be suspended or removed from the results.

Some expressly prohibited practices are:

• Using domains you don’t own;
• Pages stuffed with keywords;
• Excessive use of capital letters;
• Excessive use of scam-like terms, such as “FREE”, “NO COST”, “ZERO COST”;
• Plagiarized, slightly modified or automatically generated text.

It doesn’t stop there: watch out for false sales promises

No one can guarantee the top of the search results.

There’s no special relationship inside Google. No one knows the magic formula. There’s no priority. There simply isn’t.

Watch out for secret strategies and shallow explanations of the strategy.

If something isn’t clear, demand explanations. This is the professional who will look after YOUR company’s image to the outside world.

Check whether the company follows the principles and strategies it sells.

What can you say about a marketing company that applies none of its own strategies, has a bad site, or sometimes doesn’t even have one? Walk away…

See? In ways that aren’t technical at all, you can look for the right professional on the market for such an important role. Always remember: marketing is the face of your business. Don’t leave it in the hands of someone who’ll make faces at your customers.