HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT DIGITAL AGENCY

With the global crisis establishing digital transformation as an inevitable strategy, many companies are now being forced to digitize their operations, or suddenly need to dedicate everything they have to streamline their digital transformation.

Because of all this, we are also seeing an increasing demand for services provided by digital agencies through outsourcing or staff augmentation. Whether it's design, development or marketing, the ability to rely on the proven expertise of a digital agency is surely welcome. 

But with so many agencies now offering and advertising their services, how can you start looking for the right one for your project? And how can you know you've found the right partner before you work with your chosen agency?

This is exactly what this post will focus on: how to find a digital agency that will take care of your specific digital expertise needs. We'll define the three most important criteria to determine if you've found the right one:

How do you find the right digital agency for you?

So, let's say you've found some agencies that could meet your digital experience needs, and now you're faced with choosing one from this (probably large) selection.

Experience with the tool/technology.

The first thing you need to determine is, well, their experience, industry and/or technology, that is. If an agency doesn't specialize in the tool/technology you need or doesn't follow the desired methodologies, you can safely eliminate them at this early stage.

But things get a bit more complicated when you only know what you need, but not what technology to use to achieve that goal. It certainly helps if you are at least familiar with the capabilities and limitations of different tools and platforms.

The best agency/partner would ideally also help you make the right technology selection, in addition to helping you deliver the project. This also means that the agency will work closely with you, and not just execute the work on their own without any oversight and/or control from you.

Company Culture/Philosophy

Second, you should determine if the company culture of your potential partner/agency aligns with your own culture. What are their mission and vision? How do they treat their employees? If they are an agency that specializes in open-source software, how active are they in those respective communities?

Because of the remote nature of the work and its worldwide distribution, many cultural and physical barriers that used to get in the way of effective collaboration have been removed, cultural fit is much less important than company cultural fit. 

So, you'll want to look at their company culture, their communications (both internal and external), things like that. The agency blog will generally be a great resource for all of this. Blogs often contain posts on a variety of topics, ranging from technology tutorials and industry information to company-related posts and news.

For example, a great way to determine community engagement is social media. In tech communities, Twitter is probably the go-to platform, but other giants like Facebook and Instagram also come into play as more business-oriented platforms, while LinkedIn is a great place to learn about individual team members. These are all places where you can learn a lot about a company through content about their culture, events and contributions.

Some open-source projects like Drupal have a system set up that allows a company's contributions to the ecosystem to be recognized and displayed on their official website.

To give another example when talking specifically about Drupal, I myself have done a great deal of work contributing to Drupal.

Are they telling the truth?

Okay, so when you know that the agency you're looking for specializes in the technologies you need (or the agency offers to help you determine the right technology stack for your project) and also their values and culture align with yours, what's the last thing, what do you need to do?

Well, you have to find out if they really own and deliver what they offer. And how do you do that? You should look at customer reviews and testimonials.

On some platforms where you can contact freelancers or agencies, there are reviews and ratings that have been made by former clients who have hired them.

But perhaps the best bet would be to simply look at the agency's website, as most of them will feature case studies and client testimonials right there. 

You can get information about the types of companies they've worked with, the types of projects they've worked on, and even more specific information, such as details about the developer's diligence, for example, or a testimonial about the timeliness and/or efficiency of their potential partner.

It can be especially useful if you discover that the agency has previously worked with companies and on projects similar to yours, for example, if you are a non-profit educational organization in Barcelona, and you discover that the agency has worked successfully with a higher education institution in, say, Madrid.

Also, to give specific examples, if you are looking for someone to make you an e-commerce in Drupal, it is logical to think that the agency or freelancer you hire must have in its portfolio some (or several) e-commerce websites made in Drupal, and if they are in your sector (for example clothing or computers), so much the better. It would not make much sense to hire someone who has only made "blog" type websites to make you an e-commerce or a data management intranet. It would be the same as going to a sushi restaurant to order Mexican food, they both make food, but it is not the same.

Conclusion

If you manage to find a company that meets all three criteria, so technology expertise , company culture and proof of success , you can be sure that you have found the right partner, either for your next project where you only need to scale temporarily, or a long term digital partner that you know you can rely on for all your future digital needs.

Finding the right agency partner among a plethora of options can be a difficult task. We hope this blog post has armed you with the right set of tips to at least make the selection process easier.

If you've visited our blog and social media and found that we would be the best fit for your development needs, get in touch with us (from our contact form) and we can start talking about how we can help you.