Whether you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to partner with, kicking off with Armada Digital soon, or simply wanting to get organized, you’ll find today’s blog post helpful! Partnering with a marketing agency—like us!—can get more eyes on your business, drive a ton of new leads, and help your business scale. That being said, the more prepared you are to partner with an agency, the smoother the transition will be and the quicker you’ll see upticks in site traffic and leads. Today, we’re running through everything you need to start an engagement with a marketing agency like ours, while also running through a mini overview of each component, in case you’re not familiar. Let’s get started!
Website
First things first, if you don’t have a website for your business or personal brand, let’s talk! If you do, and you’re happy with it, then there are a few things you need to make sure you have, know, or have access to, to get started with a marketing agency like ours.
Site Build & Hosting
One of the first things you need to know is what your site is built on—is it WordPress? Elementor? Is it built on Wix or Squarespace? You should also know where your site is hosted—is it hosted on WP Engine? GoDaddy? Somewhere else? If you don’t have the answers to these questions handy, it’s time to do some digging!
Access To Your Site
Do you currently have access to the back end of your site? If not, who does? Our team would want to make sure we have access to your site to execute on our SEO strategy, ensure tracking is working correctly, and, at a high level, improve user experience.
Google Platforms
Google Analytics
Google Analytics measures nearly every important metric on your website, from where users are coming from (location or how they found your website), to how they’re behaving once on the site (time spent, pages visited, etc.), to the most important pieces: conversions and events (submitting forms, requesting a quote, or calling your business). If there’s nothing else that you take from this blog post, it’s to ensure that you have Google Analytics installed on your site! You can find instructions on how to install Google Analytics on your site here.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console serves as a counterpart to Google Analytics, with an exclusive focus on your site’s performance on Google. This platform generates vital data regarding the number of clicks to your site from Google, how many times your site showed up in searches, your average rankings, and much more. This is also a very important platform to have in place, especially if you have any plans to focus on SEO in any way now or in the future. You can find instructions on how to install Google Search Console on your site here.
Google Business Profile
If it doesn’t already, your business should have a configured Google Business Profile set up to ensure that when a potential customer searches for you (or what you do!), your contact information will populate. At a base level, this platform operates as a directory-type listing, but it can be so much more than that! Google continues to add functionalities, but some of the most important things to focus on building out would be:
- Your business’s hours
- Photos of your business’s location and team
- Reviews
- Multiple ways for people to contact you
- Links to social platforms
- FAQs
Google’s Business Profile has only increased in its importance over the past few years, so we highly encourage you to create or continue building out your business profile. You can find instructions on how to create/claim your business’s Google Business Profile here.
Access Points
Your business’s platforms, especially social platforms, are key to our team’s success! Making sure that you have access to these platforms is quite important, so let this serve as a gentle reminder to double-check that you have logins/access to the below:
Social Media Platforms
Facebook—access to business pages specifically is a bit more complicated than a username and password. Facebook business pages are “owned” by individual users connected to the business, and access is delegated to other users from these “owners.” We, as an agency, can request access to your business page, but someone on the business side still needs to be able to accept/approve that request. Ensure that you, or someone in your business, has ownership to give access to our team.
Instagram is much simpler than Facebook—access to Instagram can be given with a username and password!
LinkedIn is closer to Facebook than it is to Instagram in that the business page is owned by a selection of LinkedIn profiles. Access can be given to our team by those users by following these instructions.
X/Twitter—access can be shared with our team by sharing the username and password.
Other Tools
Email Marketing
Access to your business’s Mailchimp account can be delegated to our team by following the instructions below:
It’s important to note that our agency will have to send you a connection request before you can grant them access to your account. This agency user will not count as a user seat on your Marketing plan.
- In your Mailchimp account, open the agency access request email.
- Click “View Request.”
- Log in to the Mailchimp account you want the agency or freelancer to access.
- Choose a maximum level of access. Keep in mind that the level of access can limit what our team can do in your account. For example, a user with Manager level access can create and edit emails, but can’t access billing information.
- Click Grant Access.
You can find more information on sharing access with our team here.
Constant Contact operates very similarly, including the piece where our team will have to request access as the first step in the process. You can find more about sharing access to your Constant Contact account here.
CallRail
CallRail is an invaluable tool for tracking calls to your business, including where the user found you (organic search, direct traffic, email campaigns, etc.) as well as call duration, and even transcriptions or call recording. If you’re already using CallRail, you can follow these instructions on how to share access with our team. If you haven’t tried CallRail, we highly encourage it. As CallRail partners, we’re happy to walk you through the platform and can get you set up! You can learn more about CallRail here.
If there are any other tools your business uses, we’d love access to as many data sources as possible! Reach out to us, and we’d love to have a conversation about it.
Other Business Assets We’d Love To Have
Outside of the platforms listed above, there are a few other business assets we’d love to have. Some are tied more to your branding, and some are assets for us to use in advertising or content moving forward. The list below is by no means comprehensive, but is intended to give you an idea of what we’d love to have shared with us so that we can create the highest quality and most compelling content possible, all while staying within your branding!
- Logo Files
- Color Codes
- Fonts
- Visual Assets
- Photography
- Team Headshots
- Video Content, if possible
- Email Templates
- Branding/Usage Guides
If you have any questions about any of the items listed above, please reach out to our team—every client is different in their needs, what they already have, and the amount of experience working in any of the individual respective platforms above. We’re always here to support!
