6 Things To Consider Before Hiring A Digital Agency For Luxury Brands

You are a luxury brand owner who seeks the ways to grow your business, and you are looking for a digital agency to hire. Hiring a digital agency for luxury brands is an important decision to make. Before you make up your mind, you need to be precise and selective.

First of all, you should determine your needs, set your goals and then carefully choose the right digital agency. If you’re on the right track, the digital agency you’ll choose can help you to drive qualified traffic to your online assets, increase your website’s conversion rate, help you improve the back-end process and also create long-term successful strategies.

On the other hand, choosing the wrong agency can cause your budget to run dry and leave you worse than your previous condition.

How can you make sure you choose the right agency that fits your brand’s goals? In this blog post we’ll give you tips about the things you should consider before hiring a digital agency for your luxury brand.

Make a choice between bigger or boutique agency

You can choose either a bigger or boutique agency to partner with. The budget you spare will be the determent at this point. Bigger agencies come with a bigger price tag. But boutique agencies’ price is more accessible. You should care about culture and try to choose an agency that your company’s culture and views align with. Find an advocate for your company and people you will enjoy working together.

When you search for “digital agencies” you can reach agencies that categorize themselves as “full service” or “360”. Full service may seem right if you are looking for something all-in-one place. But you should keep that in mind, digital marketing requires hundreds of subspecialties and each of them has specific complexities of its own that need expertise.

Facebook ad creation, social media marketing, content marketing, conversion optimization (CRO), search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) are only a few of them. If you hire “360” or a “full service” digital agency, you’ll be hiring a team of people that’s good at a lot of things but not great at any specific field. So, you need to decide on what field you need the expertise of a specialist.

Decide your main goal and what you want to accomplish to eliminate the agencies. If you want to improve social media marketing ROI, hire a social media agency. But if you want to drive more traffic to your site, hire a SEO or content marketing agency.

Learn the difference between luxury-focused agencies and the others

A digital agency for luxury brands needs to specialize in high-end commerce. Only this type of agency can provide solutions for luxury brands and make a difference in the brand’s image and the entire digital strategy.

In the 1990s, Ford Motor Company decided to expand into luxury and created a division called the Premier Automotive Group (PAG). Through this group, it purchased Aston Martin and Jaguar and premium automobile brands like Volvo and Land Rover.

Ford thought it would have the same success with PAG. They applied the Ford methodologies for marketing, manufacturing, operations, and management to PAG. Unfortunately, Ford failed to apply its mass-market approach to PAG. Around 2007 it had to dismantle the division. Keep that in mind, regular mass-market and mid-market strategies don’t work for premium brands.

Decide what differences need to be done to increase sales

A website is the digital storefront of a brand. Removing, adding or changing elements to a website can make either positive or negative impact. The site analytics should examine by the agency team to understand which areas need support.

A/B testing, usability tests, session recordings, mouse tracking, and qualitative survey research should also be conducted to make the necessary improvements. Otherwise, the changes can negatively affect your conversions.

Understand your target audience better

You should be able to understand your visitors’ wants, needs, questions, and objections to effectively communicate and convert them into customers. Don’t overlook the significance of the insights. Customer research is important to learn what your customers are talking about your products, brand and industry.

A digital agency for luxury brands can do polls and qualitative surveys. They also should analyze your chat logs and even interview with customers to understand them better and to find out what triggers them to buy from you. And don’t forget, data-driven customer personas are incredibly useful to understand opinions about your brand.

Choose an agency that knows which tools and channels might be useful for you

Many agencies work variety of certain premium tools. Your agency should be your partner in finding the best technology. So choose an agency that can understand your need from them and happy to work with multiple tools.

Burberry is the first fashion brand that experiences digital tools. Its success lies in product customization, collaboration with tech companies, Snapchat usage to deliver exclusive content, using Word-of-mouth marketing, and combining online and in-store shopping.

One of the most memorable digital campaigns for this brand dates back to 2013. Burberry’s partnered with Google and Grow agency. They created a remarkable experience of tech usage.

Evaluate the process to grow your online sales

The primary aim of every digital agency for luxury brands should be listening to your goals. If they don’t understand what you want to achieve, they can’t help you. For instance, if you want to increase your e-commerce sales, your agency should determine whether you need to invest more in ads or increase website conversions before offering a solution.

They need to come up with a process. Having a process means, they have checklists to make sure A/B tests are launched correctly. Every project may be different, but best luxury marketing agencies have standard procedures to follow that don’t limit creativity or ideas.

To sum up, bigger brings more levels of authority, more processes, and more approvals. Working with a bigger digital agency for luxury brands means you may encounter more obstacles in the way. All the companies often want to move fast and make sure they’re investing their money wisely. You must choose an agile partner. But you should stay away from agencies that guarantee results.

No agency can guarantee you unconditional success. Social media channels’ algorithms are changing rapidly. Google also changes its algorithm, too. These changes undoubtedly impact so many metrics like conversion rate, bounce rate, revenue per user and sales.

So many outside factors such as market demand, negative press, and even politics can also impact the success of a digital marketing process. Strategic marketing efforts rather than tactical execution and high-level of talent can bring you success. You can also check our 7 Things To Consider Before Hiring An Agencyarticle for further reading.