Choosing the right digital marketing agency to work with your small business isn’t about finding the company who has experience in your industry.

It’s about finding the creatives who thoughtfully highlight and leverage your business’s uniqueness to beat out your competition.

Embrace What Makes Your Business Your Business

The best digital marketing agencies to work with aren’t the ones with boilerplate solutions who’ve worked with similar brands. The best digital marketing agencies are the ones who know how to create successful businesses in many industries and are experts at becoming experts — or at least experts at recognizing the status-quo and being able to move forward to the next level.

Do you like Doritos?

Think about this… if Doritos wanted to hire a new marketing agency, do you think they’d only consider agencies who have worked with other chip companies?

Of course not. That’s silly.

Doritos would be considering marketing agencies who think uniquely and produce exceptional work, so they could stand out from the competition rather than join some sort of chip industry status quo — they’re Doritos, for Pete-sake, not Sam’s Choice brand.

The Best Digital Agencies Have a Process

The best digital marketing agencies have developed a process. And, they are fine-tuning a strategic online marketing strategy that’s proven successful for a broad range of interesting clients.

Great Marketing is Seeing the Vision

Great digital marketing agencies may not be experts about your business or industry at the beginning of your project, but they’ll be experts at conducting an initial and ongoing discovery process that is focused on asking questions, actively listening, and comprehensively understanding your business, your industry, and your goals throughout the entire time you’re working together.

Boilerplates Are Boring *meh*

Marketing agencies who specialize in a niche often do so because they feel they’ve discovered a silver bullet for success within a specific industry.

When they get new business they’re probably repeating a similar process they’ve done for others. That leads to reusable boilerplate systems that help your business do the opposite of stand out.

Cookie-cutter-success is good for the marketing agency’s ROI, but not always good for your business.

Sometimes Cookie-cutter Makes Sense

That said, sometimes a boilerplate approach is the right choice. It might be the right choice to meet a speedy deadline, to test the waters, to fit your budget or just to get something up and running.

Knowing Your Digital Agency is Actually Good

You’ll know if the marketing agency you choose to represent your business is is really a good digital agency because they’ll take the time to get to know you and what your business is all about.

You want the company you partner with to leverage your best parts. The right marketing company for your business is the one that works for you as if your business was their own business.

You need your marketing company to care about helping you more than helping themselves.

If they’re using the unique information you’ve provided them about your business to start conversations about boosting your search rankings for your most important keywords, creating top-quality content that draws visitors and drives an increase in website traffic, sharing your brand’s story with targeted audiences, and tracking the ROI then they’re doing you a solid.

Using advanced analytics to optimize and improve customer acquisition, brand awareness campaigns, and learning new insights about your business helps you generate more leads, sales, and customers.

Industries Differ, but Success is Always at the Top

Different industries are different industries. Plumbing isn’t selling real estate and a bakery isn’t a digital marketing agency, but regardless of your chosen market, most industries have 2 things in common.

They want to increase sales and get more customers — and they all rely on increasing website traffic to facilitate the generation of new — and qualified — leads.

What that means to you is even though your company might operate in a niche industry, your goals are pretty universal — and ought to be quite familiar to any top-notch digital marketer whose quest is helping companies like yours achieve goals like these.