Digital marketing is becoming more important for businesses every year. Why? Because customers are spending more time online, and getting used to doing more research and purchasing online too. A good digital marketing plan meets your customers where they are. But traditional marketing and creative agencies often focus much more on offline avenues for marketing, and leave the online parts as an afterthought. Want a different approach? Then you should hire a digital agency. In this week’s blog, we’ll be talking all about digital agencies: what they do, who needs one, and how to hire the right one for your company.
What Does a Digital Agency Do?
Digital agencies are more focused than traditional creative agencies in several ways. They focus more on the technical aspects of online marketing, because that’s their area of expertise. They may also be more focused on a specific business niche, because digital marketing looks different for every industry.
If you look at a traditional creative agency, they excel in more traditional marketing avenues: creating a cohesive and creative image for a company across print, tv, radio, and some online channels. Their focus is on the creative product, and getting it seen by big numbers of viewers. This approach works well for many large companies in traditional industries. But it’s an expensive approach that doesn’t work for many businesses.
These days, digital marketing is a growing field. If you’d like to focus specifically on online marketing, and you’re a smaller business, you could benefit from using one of the full-service digital agencies.
Digital Marketing
Successful marketing these days is about more than just creating a brand image. It’s about cultivating a compelling digital presence for your brand, and creating a great online user experience. Your company’s digital presence isn’t just being compared to your competitors anymore – users are stacking your website and online shopping experience against the giants like Amazon and Uber.
A digital agency makes sure that not only does your website look great, but that everything works smoothly and efficiently to attract visitors and convert them to a sale. They can handle everything from search engine optimization to UX/UI to email marketing. That’s the core of a digital marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing
Effective social media marketing is more than just creating beautiful images for your social media feeds. It’s about social media SEO – making sure the right users can find your content. It’s about paid marketing, and getting the maximum return on investment from your advertising dollars.
Your social strategy should be tied to what your customers want and need, and tailored to each platform. Digital agencies often specialize in a certain industry or niche so they can effectively target your ideal audience.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an area where digital agencies truly shine. Creating an effective content strategy and possibly creating the content for you, or giving you the tools to write it well yourself, lets you reap the benefits of content marketing. For many businesses, content marketing can be a powerful way to boost your SEO and get found by the right people.
Email Marketing
Talking directly to your customers and prospects in a personal way – that’s what email (and nurture) marketing is all about. And digital agencies are well-versed in the details that make an email marketing campaign successful. You can avoid these common email marketing mistakes with the experts on board to guide you to success.
Who Should Hire a Digital Agency?
Now that you know what a full-service digital marketing agency does, how do you know if you should hire one? This decision process comes from asking yourself a series of questions about your business goals and your marketing budget.
You’ll need to look at what you want to get out of your marketing efforts – are you looking for a presence across a wide variety of media? Are your target customers in an older or less tech-using demographic? Do you have a big marketing budget? Then a traditional advertising agency might be a good fit for your needs and goals.
On the other hand, if your marketing budget is smaller (see your video on creating an effective marketing budget) and your dollars need to stretch further, a digital agency might have a plan that will work for you.
If you’re in an industry where typical marketing efforts don’t get you very far (like healthcare), you might be able to find a specialized digital agency that knows your industry well. Or if you’ve tried traditional marketing techniques without much success, giving a digital agency a try could yield big results.
How to Hire a Digital Agency
When looking for a digital agency, you’ll find plenty of promises of success out there. But you need to be careful to look for an agency that measures the results of their marketing efforts in clear, quantifiable ways – and that show you the data too. Marketing isn’t cheap, and you want to be sure you’re getting a solid return on your investment.
Look for an agency that provides detailed analytics and reports to you on a regular basis. Things in digital marketing can shift quickly, so make sure your agency knows when a shift is needed. Also, ensure they have experience in navigating marketing best practices in your field, or can do the research to do so effectively.
Digital marketing is most effective when your efforts are truly targeted to the right group of people – the internet is a very large place, and you don’t want your marketing dollars to go to waste.
Your Full-Service Digital Agency
Looking for an agency that gets you real, measurable results with great writing and a strong strategy? We can help.
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.
