In this era of technology, virtually all businesses have an online presence. This has increased competition. Not only that, but businesses also need to appear in search results by potential customers looking for a specific product or service. This is where digital marketing agencies come in. They help you grow your business using various marketing strategies and tools. Phew!! You must be glad digital marketing agencies exist, but how do you choose the right one?
The right agency will customize a plan of action tailored to your industry and business and effectively track and measure the results. The right firm will also develop an effective strategy for meeting your goals. With the right agency, a company will prosper with amazing results.
Choosing The Right Digital Marketing Agency
Are you confused as to which agency is the right one for you? Well, it is indeed a big decision and has its own sweet benefits too. Not only can a good digital marketing agency help generate revenue for you, but it can also transform your business. Take a look at some of the points below that can help you to choose the right agency for you and your business.
1- Budget:
The last thing you want to do is spend all your money on a marketing agency and marketing activities and receive no results. It is advisable to have your budget ready before you approach an agency. It’s all about how much you can afford.
2- Goals:
It is important first to determine what your need is. You must answer questions like: Why do I want to run digital campaigns? What do I need from a digital marketing agency? What is the goal of my business?
It is important for you to be clear about your business model, strategy, and objective. Digital marketing agencies promote your business across multiple channels, and there are different activities involved. However, these activities are completely based on your goals and requirements.
Take our advice: Sit back, relax, let’s go a little traditional with pen and a paper (or tablet) and start to jot down what your business is about, who your customers are, what your expectations are, and more.
3- Credibility
Once you’ve shortlisted the agency, it is now essential to check how advanced and worthy they are to run your marketing. Be aware to check reviews and vet them fully. There are a number of ways to check the credibility of an agency. A few of them are:
- Team
- Awards
- Client List
- Media Presence
- Testimonials
- Footprints in the industry
4-Technology
This is ideally another supreme aspect. Advanced tools and technology for marketing help an agency to promote, manage, and grow your business. A digital agency must be equipped to handle your business type, and if a problem occurs, they must be updated with the latest technology to resolve the issue.
5-Marketing Tools
As mentioned in the above point, there are a number of tools that the agency must be updated with. You must ask the agency to demonstrate the list of tools which will be used to help you with your requirements. For campaigns like inbound campaigns, it requires an end-to-end experience and, having the right tools is extremely important. You can check:
- Are they using Mailchimp or SendInBlue or something else for email marketing?
- Are they using MOZ or Ahref for tracking keywords?
- What are the communications tools used within the agency? One popular communication tool is Slack.
- How much access will you have to the agency in terms of calls and support?
- What are the tools or project management software used to track the progress of the work?
- What are the tools used for graphic related tasks?
- What are the tools used to handle social media?
Common Marketing Tactics Used
Now that we’ve gone over tips on how to choose the right digital agency, are you on the verge of making a jump to hire a digital marketing agency? There are plenty of tactics used by digital marketing agencies to boost the business of their clients. Let’s take a look at some commonly used tactics used by agencies.
1-Paid Advertising
Paid ads can be expensive. Chances are, you can end up spending a lot of money on paid ads like Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube. There are numerous ad platforms for your business; however, before you decide on any platform, it’s important to understand more about them.
Google Adwords: This type of advertisement appears on Google search. Businesses pay to get their ad shown on Google. Ads show as sponsored search results; versus organic listings.
A Word About Ad Extensions:
This option adds additional information about the business, like the contact details, about the company. Clicking on these links will lead the users to the specific page on the website for further details. This helps to improve visibility and get more clicks.
Important!! The type of advertisement chosen to promote your business will be based on your business type and goal.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook ads have become one of the easiest and fastest ways to reach the desired audience.
First things first, you should know what the goal is for using this type of paid advertising. Facebook offers various objective options, from brand awareness to lead generation, and more.
Secondly, It’s important to narrow down your audience over a broad one. There are billions of users on Facebook, and choosing your audience is critical. This can be done based on audience interest, age, demographic, behavior, and much more.
Last but not least, Facebook gives you an option to set a budget for your ads daily or on a lifetime budget. There’s also an option to optimize the price by opting for bidding for clicks or impressions.
YouTube Advertising
This platform is the second most popular and widely preferred media platform because it has a huge audience. However, the truth is that it takes a lot of time, effort, and money to run ads here. It takes time to learn the various features and how to utilize them in order to get good returns. You have the option to choose from the below types of ads:
- Skippable ads: Viewers have the opportunity to skip this ad after 5 seconds. This ad is usually played before or during a video.
- Non-skippable ads: Viewers will not have the option to skip these ads. There is no skip button available. The duration of this type of ad can vary from country to country. Depending on the country, the limit is 15 seconds to 20 seconds.
- Video discovery ads: Viewers will be able to see these ads in the search results. It consists of text ads and thumbnails. When these ads are clicked, it redirects the user to the YouTube channel.
- Overlays and banners: These just display ads that occur on the right sidebar on YouTube. They are not videos however as the ad has a website link.
With YouTube having billions of views every day, it opens the gate for businesses to reach a maximum amount of people nationwide and all around the world.
2-SEO
After all, everyone wants to rank on Google. Here comes another tactic to help you rank.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process used to improve your website ranking on Google and to increase quality traffic to the website through organic(non paid) search results.
SEO factors to make the website rank:
On-Page SEO (Technical)
The technical SEO aims to:
- Improve the crawling of the website so that Google can rank it
- Speed up website response in terms of the load time of the pages. It includes all the activities except the content of the website.
- Make the website look visually pleasing
- Introduce a neat URL structure of the website
In a nutshell, technical SEO is everything but the content of the website.
On-Page SEO (Content)
The process of On-Page SEO includes:
- Improving the content of the website
- Develop new content
- Remove any irrelevant content of links
On-page has a pretty straight forward goal where if the content on the page is bad or irrelevant, the website will not rank.
Off-Page SEO
This activity makes a major impact on whether the website will have better authority in terms of ranking. It includes:
- Relevant and quality inbound links
- High-quality citations
- Brand mention in media or press
This process includes all the activities carried on to improve the website authority by getting quality links and backlinks from other websites.
Final Thoughts
Last but not least, once you’ve moved ahead to sign and close the deal, carefully go through the contract and ask questions if you have any before you commit to the terms. You should collect all the necessary information about the digital marketing agency’s policies, its do’s and don’ts to avoid problems down the line. If any of the agencies are not clear about their terms and conditions, it might be troublesome in the future.
References:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/07/02/how-to-choose-the-right-digital-agency-for-your-business/#131a7fdbe120
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/digital-marketing-tools
- https://www.singlegrain.com/res/digital-marketing-agency/
- https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-paid-ad-checklist