Before You Hire a Marketing Company

I had a call with a client today that ended in tears. And it prompted me to write this post today. This is the list of things to know and understand BEFORE you spend your hard earned dollars on a WordPress theme Designer or Marketing Company. Arm yourself with the information you need evaluate an enthusiastic and believable marketing sales person or the designer of a beautiful theme (on the outside).

What Services to Hire for a New Theme

Should you let your marketing company develop your new theme? Should your SEO team be allowed to change design stuff? Can the writers change the SEO settings? I’ll tell you!

Marketing companies

Marketing Companies should be broken into online (backlink profiles, social Media & Digital Marketing) and offline marketing. They should be experts in creating your email marketing campaigns and guiding the audience to a particular action. If they are big enough they might have social media management, photographers, designers, website people, videographers and reputation management experts. So when they say they will ‘create’ the website for you – ask to interview the actual developer or designer. Just because your project manager is a great person and seems knowledgeable doesn’t mean they aren’t using a dreaded page builder or outsourcing to a random coder.

SEO Contractors

SEO services are often a separate company from Marketing generalists because it requires such a highly skilled team. There are different theories in SEO. If they promise you immediate and drastic results, they are using “Black hat” techniques, even if they won’t admit it. If they refuse to make guarantees and give you a realistic estimate of 3-6 months they are using “White Hat” techniques.

White Hat means that they are working WITH Google, not tricking google. Black Hat folks, tend to trick google and use subjective ‘evidence’ to make sweeping changes. For example, that time that a blogger at BlogHer told the world to add an h2 right away under the title of the post, and include Key-words. It worked for a few months and then those people were penalized.

The people who know SEO will tell you honestly, that there are no guarantees, and that Google does not publish their algorithm. Great SEO’s will tell you it is a long process, (3 – 6months+), depends on the competition and how much time and energy you put into optimizing content, writing for your audience, doing keyword research and the off-page factors like guest posting, and offline marketing. 

Designers

Designers should consider and create the user experience (UX). They should be (UX and UI experts). Any designer should have an idea about calls-to-action, copywriting, and your customer profile. If they aren’t curious about your customer profile, they will not be very effective.

They should be able to create a great content map that leads your customer through a desired ‘journey’. This content map will then become the navigation when given to the developer.

Development/Back End

These people should know how to make WordPress easy to use. They take the designs and decide the easiest way for you to input the needed data only once and have it populate everywhere it is needed.

These folks ought to know all the SEO on-page factors and create something that passes all the SEO tests you can throw at it – including Accessibility and HTML tests too. If they are hesitant to run tests and have excuses how ‘Google doesn’t use that test’ then don’t use them. There are thousands of WP developers – find one who is transparent with their coding, lets you run any test you like and can explain the results openly and in plain English. Don’t let them use big words to shut you up! You ARE smart, just not a coder. And I know lots of coders that aren’t that smart!

By the way – a ‘test’ is not asking your Mother in Law. What someone thinks about your site is not really relevant. If you’ve described your audience well, and your brand is done well, and your designer did her research, don’t undo their work by adding your own ‘tweaks’. Give it 3 months and see if you get higher click through rates. See if the theme is good for you, before you start changing it. Trust the experts! </end rant>

Design & Development need to work hand in hand, if something is pretty but is too costly to do or isn’t SEO friendly, then the design and copy need tweaking – not the development. The internet has come a long way but it isn’t perfect yet! 

Reputation Management

The Reputation Management team (usually hired by enterprise level companies) needs to understand brand voice, tone and representation as well as an intimate knowledge of your customers/readers. These people put together the social media guidelines and keep everyone accountable to represent you well and intentionally.