As a business owner, growth is almost always your number one priority, but how to achieve it can provide more questions than answers. If you are focussed on product development, you might not know where best to find new users or retain previous ones; the internet can come across as a vast and unforgiving desert without hope of an oasis.
Luckily, digital marketing agencies are the ones cresting the dunes with a camel, a map and a bottle of water. These agencies dedicate their lives to knowing the most about brands and their customers, so can provide years of experience answering the questions you’re asking.
Digital marketing is a vast and complex industry with huge numbers of competing strategies, but the core function and goal of every digital marketing agency is the same: growing your business. Here are a few ways in which these agencies go about this, and why you might want to recruit their help.
The basics
Legitimate digital marketing agencies have a core set of basic functions they know they can deliver which will easily boost fledgling businesses. A lot of these are things you’ve heard of if you’re not doing them already, but involving digital marketing experts can shed some light on tweaks you might not know, and also shift some of the workloads off you so you can focus on the product or service your business provides.
The first step is all about learning. Digital marketing agencies will want to know as much as possible about you, your brand, your products, and your audience. Research should form the basis of all marketing decisions and should be an ongoing project that takes into account changing trends in both your company and your audience.
The last point is obviously particularly important, and likely something your company has already researched, but bringing on a digital marketing agency can often discover new facts about your target market you might not be aware of. By knowing the details and functionality of social media and market research, they can find specific demographic and psychographic details that will not only help them with marketing but might help you with product development.
At the very minimum, a digital marketing agency should provide you with a sleek and functional website that hones in on your brand message and company mission. Every page should benefit conversion and support the generation of new users. After that, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key for making sure your brand consistently reaches the top of Google search results. While you build this SEO success, pay-per-click advertising should be a no-brainer for most agencies, to give your brand a kick-start in the right direction.
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Concerted content planning
Another basic is content, but this one’s a little harder to implement successfully. Any marketer will know that content is the way to get your brand message out there, but the sign of a competent marketing agency is they have a dedicated content plan for you and your business.
Just as every business is different, so is every content plan (or at least they should be). Digital marketing agencies work closely with brands to figure out their product and their audience before developing a long-term content project. The best examples should have deadlines, estimates of costs, and predicted conversions at various stages, so you know what you’re getting into before you pull the trigger.
Analytics
In the marketing game, you’re only as strong as your last campaign, and that’s because of the importance of analytics. This covers everything from conversion and clicks rates to detailed user demographics, all-powerful marketing weapons in the right hands.
Analytics is another basic that, if handled correctly, can produce huge growth for your brand’s reach and user base. Different agencies may react to the same statistics differently, so it’s important to have them explain exactly what they’re seeing, what it inspires them to do next and why that is. A truly great agency will pull things out of the bag you never could have predicted.
Timing & consistency
A marketing agency is without a doubt the best and easiest way to make sure you reach your audience at the right time in the right way. If there’s one thing digital marketing agencies are excellent at, it’s knowing just when to reach out and just when to pull back, making user impact when it matters but not bombarding them when they least want it.
The keys to this are timing and consistency. By working with an agency, you can ensure your marketing is regular and timely without taking time away from developing your product or growing your business.
Automation
Another way digital marketing agencies effectively manage time is by operating campaigns around the clock. With billions of active users around the world, there will always be opportunities to convert new customers and broaden your market reach. Doing this is a full-time job, which is why marketing agencies exist in the first place.
By taking a cross-platform approach, any digital marketing agency worth its salt will be able to keep your brand message consistently promoted across all of your target markets at any time of day. They’ll know the benefit of capturing users in those Google micro-moments, placing your brand in the forefront of the customer’s mind.
Retention and loyalty
In an economy where brand loyalty is becoming harder and harder to maintain, digital marketing agencies are invaluable in how they create recognizable and persistent branding that encourages user retention. By engaging your customers effectively you can make sure they keep coming back for more.
This long-term customer engagement is partially achieved through legacy branding: maintaining a united brand image and voice across all platforms, in all digital (and even physical) environments. A digital marketing agency can help create a unique brand image and then become the guardians of it, making sure your company is engaging and relevant to your target audience.
New platforms
Another way digital marketing agencies promote user engagement is by staying abreast of developments in technology and social networking. Their whole operation depends on staying on the pulse of new platforms and ways of experiencing, from virtual reality to Tik Tok, so they are best placed to futureproof your brand for the next generation of consumers.
“With the rate of technological development, it’s not enough to keep up with the times. A good digital marketing agency is like a professional chess player, trying to stay one or two moves ahead of the competition at all times; looking into start-ups, Kickstarter and innovation to predict the newest trends in digital consumption,” says Angela Tereel, a marketer writer at Academic Brits.
Influencers
A buzzword in online marketing for years now, influencers are a great new way to reach audiences normally turned off against advertising. They are a great way to personalize your brand, making them more relatable for consumers and thus more engaging.
The most commonly known of these are social media influencers, particularly good at connecting to Millenial consumers, but an influencer is anyone with clout that can convince others to buy into a product or service. A dedicated influencer program will be able to identify the key individuals that will best promote your brand and products, based on their style, industry and following.
New mediums
With the way users consume media online, it’s not enough to stick to one way of getting your brand message out there. A good digital marketing agency will find innovative and engaging ways to use traditional and new media to promote your brand and its products.
Blogs, listicles and written tutorials are a standard form of branded content, but updating them to modern, tech-savvy users can be a challenge. Video and audio mediums like podcasts are a burgeoning industry amongst many consumers, particularly Millenials, so it pays to think of ways your brand can take advantage of them.
Be the tortoise, not the hare
Digital marketing agencies are prized not on their quick fixes, but on their long-term solutions. That’s why, when it comes to successful digital marketing strategies, those that win out focus on steady flows of incoming traffic and reliable month-by-month increase of new users.
Once you have the reliability you can afford to dream bigger and grow your business in leaps and bounds. Despite the rapid rate of change in the industry, in digital marketing it’s a marathon, not a sprint; don’t sacrifice long-term reliability for short term boosts.
Is a digital marketing agency for you?
The overall message of each of these points is that digital marketing agencies are great at digital marketing. Yes, this might seem obvious, but even so, plenty of businesses feel like they can do better without their help, and strike out alone in the marketing game.
Whether you follow in their footsteps or stick with the experts is a decision every company makes at some point. Hopefully, these points have given you some tools to decide, but the answer is still yours to give.
