If you don’t crawl, you will never learn to walk the Digital Marketing walk.

As the GroCurv marketplace succeeds in bringing more clients and agencies together in the pursuit of growth, we are learning about how to make the engagements more successful and fruitful. Here are some guidelines that young brands have found useful to keep in mind while engaging with their agencies.

Start small

A small start is a great start, especially if you are doing digital marketing for the first time and if you are working with the agency partner for the first time.

You don’t want to spend a lot of money and not see the right results. Such a situation lowers your confidence in your agency and in digital marketing, very quickly. Not a great place to be. Start with a 5k budget per week if you’re doing this for the first time. Should be good for a week on facebook or google ad words. See the early results and then decide the next steps.

Be regular

The GroCurv platform is very rigorous in maintaining the weekly project monitoring calls between client, agency and the platform. This call is a great opportunity for the client to understand progress on his digital marketing. The agency can share the campaigns run, the learnings and the way forward.

Being regular in terms of a formal discussion with your agency is a very big guarantor of success in any new project.

Review

Both sides discuss how to improve the return on investment. What new content is available, and what new customers should be targeted.

The questions to be asked here are:

• What are the customer profiles targeted?
• How can we do this better?
• What kind of content worked well?
• What more information from us (client) can help make better campaigns
• What’s the objective for the next week?
• What platforms should we try?
• What is working and what is not working.
• What should be our budget and what will be the return for the next week’s initiatives.

Be patient

Like any new skill, we learn by practicing, asking the right questions and often from the mistakes we make. For a young brand getting on the digital marketing platform, learning should not be hurried. Starting with small budgets allows you to try more experiments and judge better what works for your brand. Invest time more than money at the early stage of your journey and give the process 6-10 weeks.

Experiment

Never hesitate to try new types of content new customer segments, new platforms, new brand messages.

The objective of starting your digital marketing initiative is not to get the best answer on the first try, but find a path of continuous improvement over time. This path will depend on your reaching the right customers, with the right message, on the right social media platform, at the right time of the day. And much more.

These answers will not present themselves all together. And over time, these variables and their impact on your campaign and returns will keep changing.

Staying vigilant on your campaigns, staying regular with your agency calls and looking at data will all be helpful in ensuring your experiments are purposeful and lead you to success.

To know more about digital marketing, visit our blog and free resources for digital marketing.