If you own a business, you probably know a bit about digital marketing. And maybe you’ve tried to run your own digital marketing efforts in the past. But one thing is certain: digital marketing is a tricky thing to get right. You can’t afford to waste your time or your marketing budget on efforts that don’t grow your business.
And this is why you should hire an internet marketing service today.
But the first step to hiring the right internet marketing company to help your business grow is knowing exactly what these kinds of companies do.
What services do they offer?
How can they help you build your bottom line?
And what should you look for when you want to hire one?
We’ll cover all of this and more in today’s blog post.
What Does an Internet Marketing Service Do?
At a basic level, an internet marketing company will help your business handle all your digital marketing services. They will help you optimize your content for search engines, direct your content marketing, and often provide a software tool to manage your customer relationships.
An internet marketing company should also tie all of these different services together into a single thoughtful strategy so that each piece supports your marketing success as a whole.
An internet marketing company will help you with the following services:
Create an Online Presence
Your online presence is the digital front door to your business. Having a website designed to be visually attractive, consistent with your overall branding, and provides a great user experience for your website visitors.
An internet marketing service will:
- Help you create or update your business website with compelling landing pages.
- Develop web design that calls customers to take action.
- Provide a welcoming and purposeful place for your target audience to find you.
Help You Rank Highly Online with Search Engine Optimization
Making sure your website, content, and products or services rank highly in online search results is what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. And it’s critical to growing your business for the long term because your potential customers need to be able to find you online.
SEO services are about creating a pipeline of sustained leads, which will bring in traffic over the long term without costing you money in ads. This is one of the best ways to build your business sustainably. But you need to know all the ins and outs and updates on SEO best practices.
An internet marketing service will help you ensure all the elements of your online presence and content are optimized for the latest SEO best practices, whether you need local SEO help, link-building strategies, or an international plan to get traffic.
Attract Customers to Your Website with Content Marketing
Content marketing is the art of using content creation – usually writing articles, blog posts, case studies, ebooks, or more – to attract your target customers to your website. You give them the information they need and engage with them, often asking for an email address in exchange for free and valuable content. It’s a very effective lead-generating strategy.
And then you build a relationship with your them where you position yourself as a trusted expert until they make a purchase and become a customer.
An online marketing service can:
- Guide you on what kind of content to create
- Suggest the best way to offer it
- And often even create the content for you
Connect with Potential and Current Customers with Social Media
It’s not just a passing trend: social media is undoubtedly here to stay as a powerful business tool. And in fact, people are now spending more time than ever on social media. So, it’s a great way to connect with your potential and current customers on an ongoing basis.
A social media strategy could be all about organic content or involve some paid social ads as well. The science of social media marketing changes frequently – this is where an internet marketing service can be a valuable guide.
They can tell you:
- What the best social media platforms are to share your content
- What kind of content resonates with your target audience
- And about your site and content’s analytics to tell if your social campaigns are working
Provide Customer Relationship Management
One powerful feature that not every internet marketing company offers is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
This can help you determine where your prospects are coming from. For example: do they come from social networks or PPC ad campaigns? Or maybe they originate from blog content or search engine traffic. Knowing which digital marketing strategies are effective for your business and which ones need work helps you avoid wasting money in your marketing budget.
A CRM can help you track where those prospects are in the sales funnel. And provide valuable high-level analytics that gives you insight into your marketing success. While not all companies offer a CRM tool, it is highly valuable to find one that does so you know you’re getting the most out of your marketing budget.
Why You Need an Internet Marketing Service
You may be asking yourself why you need an internet marketing service? Working with an internet marketing company will provide a host of benefits for you and your business. Here’s why.
It will Allow You to Excel in Every Area
As a business owner, you wear a lot of hats. It’s difficult to be an expert in every single area of your business. And it’s difficult to grow without deep subject matter expertise.
That’s what an internet marketing service can offer you if you think that your digital marketing services could be working harder for you. Instead of prioritizing creating blog content over SEO services, you could get both, plus social media expertise too. Excelling all-around in digital marketing will help your business grow faster.
It Provides Consistency
It can be hard to find the time to write blog posts, create social media content, update your website, and track your leads consistently. That’s a lot on the plate of a small but growing business.
Yet, consistency is also what drives results in digital marketing – you can’t just set it and forget it. You also need clear goals for content because writing whatever comes to mind won’t give you the same results.
Bringing in outside help that can guarantee consistent production. And make sure your efforts all have the same goal in mind can help you reap the rewards. The right digital marketing agency will keep you on schedule and on track for success, even in your busiest time of year.
You Recieve Expert Guidance
Sure, you could spend weeks becoming an SEO expert and a web designer, and a content-writing guru. But you need to focus on running your business, as it’s your primary job. Hiring experts allows you to focus on what you do best while ensuring your digital marketing efforts are in line with or exceeding what your competition is doing.
This is especially important because competition in digital marketing is pretty stiff these days – there’s a lot of marketing out there competing for your customers’ attention. Knowing exactly how to break through that noise, make a positive and lasting impression, and get people to take action is essential to succeeding.
How to Choose an Internet Marketing Service
Hiring the right internet marketing service can seem tricky. Many companies out there are promising big results quickly, and many of them use confusing jargon to describe what they offer and how they operate.
Anyone who sounds like they’re too good to be true probably is – that’s why doing your research thoroughly is so important. You can look at their portfolios of work, ask for case studies of previous clients to look at their results, and see if they have references from happy clients on their website. Then it’s time to talk to them and ask them thoughtful questions to see if they’re the right partner for your business.
There are three critical things to look for when it’s time to hire an internet marketing company.
Do They Have a Clear Strategy?
Beware of internet marketing services that make big and vague promises like “we’ll triple your traffic!” Getting additional website traffic isn’t a goal in itself. Instead, it needs to be tied to a larger strategy.
It’s important to ask: What’s the bigger picture in the services they offer? And do they offer a case study or other way of examining their strategies? Asking your potential agency partner these questions directly will help you see their vision for your marketing – is it murky or crystal clear?
If you can’t find examples of success stories with companies like yours, you need to look elsewhere.
Do They Understand Your Priorities?
Even though you want an agency to have experience in serving your industry, they need to understand that your company is unique.
Your internet marketing service should understand what makes your company different. And what you value and prioritize and develop a plan customized for you. If you value excellent customer service over quick and efficient sales, they should create a plan that considers and holds it up as a key value.
Can They Provide Measurable Results?
An internet marketing company should be able to offer you results you can measure from the time and effort you’ve put in with them. They should provide hard data – no vanity metrics – and help you understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Digital marketing isn’t a mystery – it’s a science, and science thrives on real data. You shouldn’t be left guessing if your digital marketing strategy returned real results for your business: your agency partner should be able to prove it clearly.
Why Now?
Digital and online marketing have been growing consistently as a share of the overall marketing world in the last decade. And that trend is only set to accelerate. While you might have hesitated in the past to invest in what might have seemed like a passing trend, it’s clearer now more than ever that digital marketing is here to stay. You should be investing in your internet marketing to build your brand awareness and prepare your business for whatever the future brings.
Digital marketing is more important now than ever. Consumers have never shopped for more products or services online than now. And they will likely continue to be avid online shoppers in the future.
If you’re investing in your internet marketing now, you’ll be ahead of the competition later and in the long term. And digital marketing strategies can get you increased ROI, whether you’re a small business or an established corporation.
We Can Help You with Internet Marketing
Looking for more personalized help on your digital marketing strategy right now? Schedule a free business review here to find out how we help businesses grow. You can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.
