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. It’s even more true right now – yes, in this COVID19 pandemic and economic crunch. 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.
What an Internet Marketing Service Does
An internet marketing company, at a basic level, 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.
1. Online Presence
Your online presence is the digital front door to your business.
An internet marketing service will:
- help you create or update your business website with a compelling landing page
- develop web design that calls customers to take an action
- provide a welcoming and purposeful place for your target audience to find you
2. 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.
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 or an international strategy.
3. 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 information they need and engage with them, often asking for an email address in exchange for free and valuable content.
And then you build a relationship with them where you position yourself as a trusted expert until they make a purchase and become a customer.
An online marketing service can:
- provide guidance on what kind of content to create
- suggest the best way to offer it
- often even create the content for you
4. Social Media
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
- about your site and content’s analytics to tell if your social campaigns are working
5. 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 paid ad campaigns? Or maybe they originate from blog content or search engine traffic.
It can help you track where those prospects are in the sales funnel as well, and provide valuable high-level analytics that give you insight into your marketing success.
Why You Need an Internet Marketing Service
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.
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.
Expert Guidance
Sure, you could spend weeks becoming an SEO expert and a content-writing guru. But you need to focus on running your business, as it’s your main job. Hiring experts allows you to focus on what you do best while making sure your digital marketing efforts are in line with or exceeding what your competition is doing.
How to Choose an Internet Marketing Service
Hiring the right internet marketing service can seem tricky. There are a lot of companies out there promising big results quickly, and many of them use confusing jargon to describe what they offer and how they operate.
But there are three critical things to look for when it’s time to hire an internet marketing company.
1. 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. Rather, 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?
If you can’t find examples of success stories with companies like yours, you need to look somewhere else.
2. They Understand Your Priorities
Even though you want an agency to have experience in serving your industry, they need to understand your company is unique.
Your internet marketing service should understand what makes your company different and what you value and prioritize, and come up with a plan customized for you. If you value excellent customer service over quick and efficient sales, they should develop a plan that takes that into account and holds it up as a key value.
3. They Get You 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.
Why Now?
It might not seem like a great time to hire an internet marketing company. With the coronavirus crisis and the economic crunch, you might think it’s a better time to cut back on marketing. But if you stop all your marketing efforts now, the brand awareness you’ve worked so hard to build will be gone by the time the economy bounces back.
And 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 once the crisis is over.
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
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.
