4 things to consider before firing your digital agency

Your design assets

Before firing your digital marketing agency make sure to obtain all copies of logos or any other files related to design or branding in vector format. Make sure that you get the open design files with no restrictions so that the new design team can access all your relative design assets without having to spend their time (and your money) reinventing the wheel. Alongside this, find out what plans, in-progress items and ideas were never acted on so that you can brief your new agency.

Make sure that you have the final version or your company’s CI guide, which should include detailed information about your branding, your colour palette and your typography. This document should also define how to use your logo, and how not to use it. This will come in handy as part of the briefing/handover document for your new agency.

Your developed assets

Do you know when last your website was redesigned? If your website is in need of a refresh, that could be the perfect first task for your incoming agency.

Make sure that you know what company is hosting your domain and that you have all the web hosting details, the original code, and the DNS hosting details. You also need to have access to the CPanel and get hold of the FTP and CMS logins for you to manage your web content.

Your SEO

Find out what tools the agency used to do your search engine optimisation. Do you have an SEO plugin on your website that you need to familiarise yourself with? Did any of the tools that they used, for example, Yoast, come with a monthly cost if you want to keep those services running, and does your new agency have access to these tools? In dealing with your agency, you should have a good idea about their process, for example, do they regularly submit new web and landing pages to Google for indexing? Ask for an account of the previous SEO company activities, such as off-site and on-site optimisation, content creation and frequency, link-building and technical SEO.

Your content strategy

You should have a pretty good picture of what channels were used to distribute your businesses content across the internet, for example, social media, email marketing, referrals etc. Make sure that you have access to all your accounts, by way of logins, and make sure that you have been assigned the highest level of permissions across all your accounts so that you can take back the reins.

Ask for any spreadsheets and slide decks related to your digital marketing programmes, such as targeted keywords lists, content strategy, competitor research and reports.

Once you have these four things in hand, you can be fairly sure of a smooth transition. Make sure that you don’t burn any bridges with the outgoing agency because there will inevitably be some overlap and the two agencies may even need to get in touch to hand over some last items or sort our any last nagging issues.

Firing your agency is never easy. Good luck!