What can you expect from a digital marketing agency? – The Examiner

This is branded content.

As part of your company’s digital transformation drive, it’d help to hire a digital marketing agency to take care of your product and brand promotion needs. Remember, marketing is a crucial part of every business, and you ought to give it the special attention it deserves. While you can work with in-house marketing specialists, outsourcing a team of experts is a better option because of the associated cost savings and access to top talent.

It’d help to know what’s in the offing before signing a contract with a digital marketing agency. Read on below for details:

1. A myriad of digital marketing services

The primary role of any digital marketing agency is to promote your brand and products to your target audience. So, expect your chosen marketing firm to present you a comprehensive list of the services they offer. They include the following:

Content forms the heart of virtually every digital marketing strategy. With 82% of marketers investing in content marketing, you may want to follow suit in your business’s marketing strategy. Thus, your digital marketing agency should be able to write articles, shoot and compile videos, snap photos, and create graphics and infographics.

Content management also involves publishing posts on websites and social networks, modifying content to include the most recent ideas and stats, ensuring regulatory compliance, and distributing content to various platforms.

With 4.14 billion email users globally, email marketing is an effective option for delivering promotional messages to your target audience. Your digital marketing agency will build a comprehensive email list and regularly send newsletters to inform your prospects about your latest products and offers.

Acquiring leads is an essential part of marketing. A lead is someone interested in your products but hasn’t purchased anything yet. Digital marketing agencies hunt for contact details of such potential customers and persuade them to buy through a series of marketing messages.

SEO is a buzzword in the digital marketing lanes. As elaborated on the next page, it aims at improving your rank on search engines for specific keywords. The digital marketing company you hire will conduct comprehensive keyword research and create a content strategy to include most of these keywords in your blog posts and web pages. Besides, they’ll improve your site’s mobile-friendliness, increase page-loading speed, and boost your authoritativeness. All these are critical search engine ranking factors.

Your marketing agency will help you acquire links from other websites to your site. Search engines consider the number of backlinks to your site when ranking it. While other sites can link back to your website of their own volition, it’s not always easy. Sometimes, you must proactively request web publishers to link to your site. You may also guest post and hyperlink your site’s pages.

A Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults reveals 81% use YouTube and 69% use Facebook. Other social sites also enjoy significant following: Instagram 40%, Pinterest 31%, LinkedIn 28%, Snapchat 25%, Twitter 23%, WhatsApp 23%, TikTok 21%, and Reddit 18%.

And you know how prudent it is to hang out where your customers do. So, expect your selected digital marketing company to connect with your target audience on social networks through posts, comments, mentions, shares, contests, and polls.

This is among the first things a digital marketing firm will do once you bring them on board. They’ll conceptualise, design, and launch your website and populate it with content. A crucial aspect they should consider is user experience (UX). 88% of online shoppers never return to a site if their experience is terrible. Thus, your marketing experts must significantly improve your site’s UX to make lasting first impressions and encourage customers to return repeatedly.

Pay-per-click advertising is a shortcut to acquiring high-quality traffic to your site. SEO takes time, sometimes months or years, so you may want to run paid ads to attract prospects to your site. Marketing agencies will design your ad banner, compose the marketing message and optimise campaigns to reach people in specific areas with a certain age, income level, and spending habits.

Influencers are typically people with a substantial online following who you can use to endorse your products to the public. People trust their icons and thus would believe the products they recommend are worth the try. Your marketing gurus will create partnerships with high-potential influencers and mutually develop a content strategy that resonates with the target audience. They’ll also agree on compensation and other contract terms.

2021 witnessed 230 billion mobile app downloads. You wouldn’t want to close your eyes to this intriguing technological trend. Mobile apps offer an array of benefits for your business. Firstly, it centralises your business dealings on a single platform, making it easy for customers to shop, make inquiries, leave feedback, interact with other customers, and get frequent product updates. A reliable marketing company should be able to develop a robust mobile app to allow you to enjoy these benefits.

Besides, they should create other essential communication channels like Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots for non-human support assistance.

2. A pool of expertise

Expect to work with several digital marketing specialists. They include:

You may or may not interact with all of them. Possibly, you’ll communicate directly with a customer service agent, who’ll link you and these specialists.

3. Integration with your team

The digital marketing agency you hire won’t work in isolation. They’ll work hand in hand with the existing team at your business premises. Thus, it’s wise to inform your workers beforehand of the upcoming contract with a managed services provider. If possible, invite the firm’s representative to your periodical staff meetings, as they must keep tabs on your business’s objectives and developments. You can even set aside a corner in your office where the marketing team will sit whenever they come to your premises. Of course, they’ll operate remotely most of the time, but it’s sometimes necessary to hold one-on-one sessions for critical discussions.

4. Agility

Digital marketing is never a one-off venture. It involves a lot of changes to adapt to emerging needs. Typically, you’ll launch an initial campaign and track its performance. Depending on how targets receive it, you may need to tweak the message or other campaign parameters. Thus, don’t envision you’ll onboard the marketing experts and sit back. You’ll need frequent consultations to stay informed of your campaign’s performance.

Digital marketing agencies use sophisticated tools to track key metrics as they evaluate the effectiveness of a given marketing strategy. For instance, they’ll want to know the exact number of leads generated from a particular campaign and the conversion rate. If the system isn’t yielding the desired results, it may be time to drop or adjust it. Thus, frequent consultation will be commonplace once you bring the marketing firm on board.

5. Networking opportunities

Though it’s not part of their job description, a digital market agency may connect you with other local businesses from which you can mutually benefit. After all, their mandate is to promote your brand and products. Although their main specialisation is online marketing, they shouldn’t hesitate to connect you with businesses in the same industry. For instance, if they’re aware of an upcoming corporate event in your area of operation, they can invite you to attend and participate. Networking is a time-proven strategy to acquire high-potential leads.

6. Guaranteed results

A reliable digital marketing firm won’t sleep on its job. You pay them money for the services; thus, it’s only logical for them to perform excellently. Therefore, once you onboard them, expect increased calls and messages from customers inquiring about your products and higher web traffic.

You should be adequately prepared to manage the traffic influx. For instance, you must have enough customer service representatives to handle customers’ concerns. Likewise, you must increase production in anticipation of higher sales volumes. Failure to get ready beforehand may taint your brand’s image if customers order products and you fail to meet their requests.

7. Time and money savings

Time and money are valuable assets to any business. Perhaps you’ve tried traditional advertising channels like TV commercials, radio ads, billboards, fliers, or event hosting before trying digital marketing. With a reliable firm, your spending on marketing may reduce, leaving you with more cash in your pockets. You should plan how to redirect such finances to critical business aspects like product development and diversification.

Likewise, you’ll have more time to concentrate on more urgent business needs, especially if you spent several hours daily marketing your company.

Conclusion

Working with a digital marketing agency entails a lot. Once you hire the firm, they become part of your business, meaning you must foster a good working relationship to ensure you achieve the objectives and desired results. Take the marketing experts as part of your staff and communicate with them consistently and cordially to iron out issues. Ultimately, you’ll realise a significant return on investment through increased sales and profits.