Whatever size business you are, it’s common to have a desire to reach new people and grow awareness of your business. One of the most effective ways of doing this is using digital marketing techniques. The number of ways to express your message in front of new people is always growing.
You may want to reach people through social media, placing adverts in front of scrolling users. Potentially you would like to capture email or SMS data so you can send email campaigns and workflows. You may also want to study the analytics of what users are doing on your website to see what you might be able to improve. In a nutshell, this is what digital marketing agencies do – they remove the hassle and stress of operating these many platforms and have expertise in the best ways to use them.
WHAT IS AN ONLINE MARKETING AGENCY?
Digital marketing agencies have teams of marketers, designers and developers. These individuals build websites, write content, program ads platforms and sites, manage and execute campaigns and form digital marketing strategies to achieve their clients’ goals.
A digital marketing agency might be specialised in one or two particular areas of digital marketing. Or, it may be a full-service agency.
Some agencies focus on different aspects of digital marketing, like data analytics and tracking, PPC (pay per click) or SEO (search engine optimisation). Others are full-service agencies, meaning the offer every kind of digital marketing service.
What is digital marketing and what does an agency do?
Digital marketing explained
Before we head into what a digital marketing agency does, we’ll first explore what digital marketing is. You’ll find lots of variations of the term depending on the site it came from. We liked Hubspot’s definition the most:
“Digital marketing, also called online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. This also includes communication through text or multimedia messages.”
Connecting a brand with current and prospective customers is one the main aims of digital marketing. Digital marketing is often focussed around reaching new users, generating leads and cultivating sales.
How leads and sales are generated could come from a range of marketing specialisms and here are some examples:
- Content marketing, such as blog posts, eBooks or videos.
- Paid social media ads, such as videos or text ads on channels like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
- Email & SMS marketing campaigns which nudge a prospective customer towards a conversion.
The above techniques often aim to drive engagement with a brand and move a prospective customer along a marketing funnel towards a conversion. Marketers track user behaviour with data and analytics metrics.
You could choose to do all of your digital marketing yourself. This is referred to as in-house marketing. Or, you could hire a digital marketing agency to do it on your behalf.
Why use an online marketing agency?
Many organisations may lack the necessary in-house expertise of a marketing team that’s required to achieve their marketing and business objectives. Hiring a digital marketing agency can save time and make spending on marketing more effective.
There are a number of other benefits to working with a digital marketing agency.
Benefits of working with an agency
- Access to a team of digital marketing specialists: digital marketing agencies can be an extension of your business or in-house marketing team. You benefit from having access to a team of experts with knowledge and expertise in PPC, SEO, SEM social media marketing and more. Platforms change all the time and they develop quickly. It can be a challenge for business owners to keep up to date with these changes, and keep using the platforms effectively as dated practices can cost money.
- Cost effectiveness and higher ROI: hiring a digital marketing agency can be more cost-effective than recruiting and managing a team of marketers. Digital marketing agencies are specialists who can deliver campaigns with high rates of efficacy and conversion levels. This ultimately gives you a higher ROI as opposed to hiring and training an internal team of marketers.
- Create digital marketing strategies: when you hire an online marketing agency, they have access to all the necessary tools, tech and talent to implement creative online marketing strategies to boost your brand online. They likely have a number of other projects that they can compare results with. This increases the development of campaign accuracy and being experienced with solving problems or making improvements on other projects that can benefit yours.
- Time-saving: one of the main reasons organisations hire agencies is because they don’t have the time and resources to carry out digital marketing effectively. When you hire an agency, they can execute and manage all of your digital marketing for you. That can free up time to focus on what you’re best at – i.e. running your business!
A good agency can save you time and get you the results you need
There are many different online marketing agencies to choose from. Finding the right one for your business may involve having a number of consultations.
It might be that you would like an agency to work on specific areas of digital marketing, while you work on the ones you have expertise in. Or, you might want them to do everything for you.
To conclude this post, here’s a list of questions to ask an agency to help you decide which agency to work with or whether an agency is right for you:
- Which of your services do you think I can benefit from?
- What results can I expect and in what time period?
- Can you help me define goals and objectives so we can compare what we have spent to what we have achieved?
- Could you outline your strategy on how you would approach this if it were your business?
- How much do your services cost?
- Who will be handling my projects and are they dedicated long term to my campaigns?
- How will you measure results and communicate them?
- How long will the retainer be for?
- Which metrics will we use to decide whether our efforts are gaining results that are worthwhile?
Good luck!
We are TDS, a digital and social media marketing agency. We specialise in data tracking and analytics, and leverage data to power ads on social media. Contact us today for a consultation.