What Is a Digital Marketing Agency and How They Help Businesses?
The days when newspaper, radio, and television advertisements were the main ways that businesses reached new customers are long gone. These traditional marketing methods certainly still exist, but the way most companies today prefer to market their products and services is via the Internet. The use of web-based marketing channels such as search engine results, social media, and email is known as ‘digital’ marketing.
One of the key differences between digital marketing and traditional marketing is that the former is a lot more targeted. Traditional marketing methods rely on casting as wide a net as possible to capture the interest of potential customers. If they are seen by a large enough audience then there will surely be some interested people who will buy their products. Digital marketing, on the other hand, tries to figure out who those interested people are first. It then tries to get ads in front of their eyes only, while also making the journey from interested person to paying customer as seamless as possible.
Done well, digital marketing can make the conversion rate higher than traditional marketing while keeping costs lower. But this requires a lot of expertise, especially as the industry is constantly changing. Many businesses choose to outsource either all of their digital marketing or certain aspects of it to an agency. This article takes a look at why they do it and whether it could be a good choice for your business too.
What do digital marketing agencies do?
As we briefly outlined above, one of the basic aims of digital marketing is to get your business proposition seen by people who have a real potential to become your customers.
When you advertise using traditional methods, your business is shown to many people, but only a fraction of them will actually be interested. For example, if you’re selling a product that’s designed for women and advertise it nationwide with a TV commercial, you would expect around 50% of the people who see it to be men with no interest in buying it. This is inefficient. In effect, half of the money you spent is being wasted. Good digital marketing helps get your ads in front of the right people at the right time. This means that you can attract a similar number of customers using fewer ads.
Digital marketing agencies are firms that specialize in achieving this. They are experts in a variety of different tactics, including content marketing, SEO, influencer marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and more.
The types of digital marketing agencies
Some agencies specialize in one of the above tactics, while others can do them all. In fact, there are several different types of digital marketing agencies. Here are the main ones and what they do to help businesses:
Full-service agencies
Full-service digital marketing agencies offer the full range of online marketing tactics and they can help your business figure out the most effective ways in which to use them. They can also come up with online strategies that complement any traditional marketing materials your company is using.
Full-service agencies then deliver the agreed strategy on your behalf, tweaking it and adapting it if necessary along the way.
Inbound marketing agency
Most of what we think of as marketing can be described as “outbound.” This is when you are trying to convince customers to buy what you are selling by showing it to them, pointing out its benefits, explaining how it solves their problem, etc.
The term “inbound” describes trying to reach customers who reject this approach. Today, many consumers don’t want you to convince them – they want to convince themselves. Rather than having you sell to them, they want to do their own research and discover the benefits of what you have to offer on their own.
Making sure that this sort of customer sees your offerings and learns about the benefits requires a different kind of approach. This is where inbound marketing agencies come in.
SEO agency
Search engine optimization is one of the cornerstones of digital marketing. Simple to understand but difficult to implement, SEO is the process of trying to appear higher in the results when your possible customers conduct a web search for certain phrases. To do this, you essentially need to convince the algorithms that rank search results that your company’s website is trustworthy and useful.
This is a strategy which takes a lot of time and effort to pay off, but the results can be long lasting. Because of the research and continual content creation required, there are agencies that specialise in just SEO or which offer it as a separate service. One example can be found at: kingkong.co/seo-agency/
PPC / Digital ad agency
SEO is one way to appear higher in search results, but another is pay to be there. Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is when you agree to pay a search provider each time a customer clicks on your result in return for a higher ranking on the results pages for specific search words and phrases.
PPC ads can also be placed on other websites, such as blogs and social media. The key here is not just to make sure that the ads are appealing enough that lots of people click them, but to make sure that those who do also become paying customers. Digital ad agencies employ experts who know how to craft effective ads and how to design your webpage and copy to ensure that visitors follow through with a transaction.
Web design agency
How your business website looks is not just a matter of taste. It actually makes a difference to how likely customers are to buy from you, and therefore it is an important feature of your digital marketing strategy.
Some agencies specialize in designing websites. They know how to make it easy for customers to navigate and make a purchase.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is a great way to attract customers to your business, but it is also multi-faceted, complex, and often time-consuming and tedious too. This is why many businesses work with agencies on their digital marketing strategies, along with the fact that agencies have greater experience and expertise in the field, and their costs are often lower than it would be to directly employ an expert.
