What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a multichannel strategy that targets and builds relationships with customers online, leading them to make a purchase and become repeat customers.

Digital marketing services include:

• Paid Search
• Social Media marketing
• SEO (search engine optimisation)
• Content Marketing
• Display Marketing
• Web design
• Email marketing

Each of these activities works together to drive traffic to your website, qualified leads and sales. They can be run individually or in combination with each other to achieve a variety of results for your business. For example, 82% of marketers who regularly blog see positive ROI from inbound marketing in general. In addition, PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than organic visitors.

One of the key differences between digital marketing and traditional marketing is there is no guesswork involved in terms of knowing what does and doesn’t work. Strategies can be continually tested and tracked to find out which is more effective and results can be monitored to provide insights on return on investment.

What does a digital marketing agency do?

A digital marketing agency will work with your business to get to know your customers and your goals and will then implement a variety of strategies and online tools to help you meet your goals and promote your products and services online.

Every member of a digital marketing agency is skilled in their area of expertise so they can offer a strategy and results that you wouldn’t be able to achieve without a team of in house staff.

From managing your social media account and creating successful Facebook ads, to optimising your website for SEO and writing your monthly blog, a digital marketing agency will take care of all of your digital marketing needs.

A good digital marketing agency offers more than just basic tasks such as writing and publishing posts for your social media accounts or produce and publish a blog for your website every month. They will take care of results-based marketing that is measurable and provides ROI for your business. The agency you choose should also create the strategy behind the activities, track the progress of your campaigns, advise you on what is and isn’t working and provide regular reports.

This will take your time away from your marketing expertise and allow you to lean on their expertise to ensure activity and spend is as effective as possible.

What are the benefits of using a digital marketing agency?

Employing a good digital marketing agency will provide you with a huge number of benefits.

Grow organic traffic to your website

The main goal of any digital marketing activity is to drive as much organic traffic to your website as possible. Paid Search and SEO will ensure that your brand appears in the search results when people are searching for your products and services which can help with lead generation and, over the long term, will increase your sales.

A digital marketing agency will understand how inbound marketing works, the journeys your online customers take and search engine algorithms. When you ask a digital marketing agency to take care of your SEO strategy, you should start to see organic traffic (traffic from people who find your website through a search engine) increase.

As a result, your website will attract more leads with lower costs. Leads from organic search also tend to be higher quality which can help to increase the chances of converting them to buy from you.

Remember that it can take 3-6 months to see results from organic traffic so it’s important to be patient and allow your agency to take care of the activity for you.

Drive sales ready leads

Before undertaking any activities, your digital marketing agency should get to know your business, your customers, your sales funnel and your marketing goals and objectives. This will allow them to understand your sales funnel and the inbound marketing strategies that will be most effective for your business at various stages of the buyer’s journey.

Working with a digital marketing agency will allow you to reach the right customers, at the right time, at the right point in your sales funnel to generate sales ready leads. These activities should also be designed to move leads from the top of your sales funnel to the bottom, depending on the activities you choose to run.

In an ever changing digital landscape, these activities are key to acquiring repeat customers and driving traffic and sales for your business.

Grow your online presence

Over 75% of people are shopping online every month – your customers are online so you need to be online too. Working with an agency will help to grow your brand’s online presence and expand your reach online. By completing keyword research, creating the right content and growing your social presence, they can help you to grow your online presence across a range of channels and build awareness of your business.

Through developing content and sharing it through various channels, an agency will help to position your brand as a market leader and help to build trust with your customers. Agencies have the skills and expertise to provide the most modern and effective content strategies to help you get the best results.

Improve your business

A digital marketing agency can take over your digital marketing from top to bottom and analyse your brand’s need to create an effective strategy that will deliver the best ROI. A focus on data and specific targeting will help you to build a better idea of who your target buyers are which is often much more specific than the audience you are currently targeting.

Once you know exactly who your target audience is, you can better determine the messaging and benefits that will attract this audience. Specific targeting allows you to get more from your digital marketing budget.

Boost ROI

When done properly, your digital marketing strategy should provide a steady and reliable boost in ROI. Your digital marketing agency should constantly test and rework your strategy so that it continues to boost ROI and improve overall efficacy of your strategy throughout the period they’re looking after it for you.

They will evaluate your website traffic, keep evaluating the best online platforms for you to invest in and keep maintaining the balance between your marketing activities and the results they provide.

Digital marketing activities can be tracked using tools and software which will show you exactly where your leads and sales are coming from so your budget can be concentrated in the areas that work best for your business. Digital marketing agencies are trained in these tools so will be able to provide you with regular reports on your activities.

Save time and cost

Many agencies will bundle multiple services into one package and take care of them all for you. You can save time by taking all of your digital marketing activities to one agency to save you from having to communicate with multiple agencies. A full service digital marketing agency will take care of everything for you. This allows you to spend time on your most important tasks rather than day to day marketing activities.

What to look out for when choosing a digital marketing agency

When looking for a digital marketing agency, there are a few considerations to make to ensure they’re the right agency for your business and to make sure you get the best results from your activities.

Trustworthy

Before agreeing to work with an agency, meet up with the team and gauge their character. Are they a good fit for you and your team? It’s important to have a good relationship with the agency you choose so this is important to consider. Can this agency be trusted to care about your business and not share sensitive information with your competitors?

If you want to know more about them, ask to speak to previous customers who can give you their opinion and experience of working with the agency.

Willing to meet regularly

A good agency should have time to meet with you regularly to discuss the results and next steps in your strategy. A sign that they will dedicate time to optimising your activities and getting to know your business and customers is that they will be willing to meet regularly.

Define clear goals

At the start of your relationship, your agency should discuss your goals and objectives with you and set the goals both you and they want to achieve. This shows that they have standards for your success and will help you to set realistic goals based on your budget and objectives.

Easy to communicate with

If it’s hard to get a meeting with the team at your agency or they’re slow to respond, this could be a sign of what it might be like to work with. To be successful, open communication is important so make sure you choose an agency that is willing to communicate openly and regularly with you.

Is a digital marketing agency right for your business?

Before getting in touch with a digital marketing agency, it’s important to think about what you need from them. Then, when you have your first meeting, this makes it easier for them to think of the best strategy for you and provide you with a proposal. Think about whether you need help with SEO, PPC, social media or all of them and then evaluate the skills within your business to determine whether an agency could benefit your business.

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