Today, digital marketing is a firmly embedded component of every big company’s strategy, and if you are serious about your business succeeding, it should be a part of yours too. However, it is a multifaceted and complex field, and there is nothing wrong with partnering with an agency if you haven’t got the manpower or expertise to handle it in-house. In fact, this is a smart decision for many companies. This article explores what they do and why it’s valuable.
Strategic Planning
According to the founder of the global digital agency King Kong, the best marketing agencies approach strategic planning by putting themselves in their client’s position and figuring out how to remove risk. Using tools like SWOT analysis, audience segmentation, and funnels, these services will work with their clients to uncover the audiences and channels where their marketing materials are likely to have the greatest effect.
Forming an overall marketing strategy at the outset is a useful starting point. After all, few businesses have expanded successfully without a carefully thought-out strategy to point them in the right direction. Marketing campaigns are much the same.
Multi-Channel Execution
Most digital marketing strategies involve the use of several online channels for the promotion of your business, such as search engines, email, social media, paid ads, and more. The need to execute the strategy across several channels, often at the same time, is what makes it difficult to do digital marketing in-house. It is a whole department’s-worth of work.
The benefit of working with a digital marketing agency is that they have the manpower to do this for you. And, because they have other clients, the cost is typically lower than it would be to employ salaried in-house staff to do it.
Creative Development
Digital marketing is a lot more quantifiable and data-driven than the traditional marketing methods of the past, such as TV and magazine advertising. However, creativity is no less important. Creating helpful, engaging, and entertaining content that resonates with audiences is crucial to many online marketing strategies, but it takes time and expertise to research and produce.
Marketing firms work with copywriters, designers, video editors, and other creatives who can produce effective content quickly. They then track performance data in order to refine it, performing A/B tests on different headlines, images, and calls-to-action to find the most potent combination.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is one of those areas of digital marketing for which effective content is needed, and it is one of the central offerings of practically all digital firms. Getting your website to show up closer to the top of search engine results can significantly boost traffic to your site, as more people will see it in the results. They will also trust it more.
There’s more to SEO than just great content, however. Making sure your website is fast and user-friendly is also important, and there are many elements to websites that people cannot see but search engines can. These also need to be optimised. A considerable amount of technical knowledge is required for these tasks, which is what agencies provide.
Paid Media Management
Done properly, SEO offers a significant and lasting return on investment for relatively little cost. The only problem is that it takes time to have an effect. That’s why online agencies also offer paid ad services which can provide a short-term bump in sales. This is where they design ads and place them on large websites like Google and Facebook.
These ads are most effective when they are highly targeted, so the campaign will typically begin with the identification of a target audience and an action that the ad should prompt them to take. That could be buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or something else. Like with content, agencies will test ad variations to find the ones that perform best.
Customer Journey Mapping
Something that has not changed from older methods of marketing is the importance of thinking about the customer journey. This traces the steps a customer follows from first becoming aware of your product or service to eventually buying it. By tracking how potential customers behave at each stage of the journey, marketers can create content that helps guide them onto the next step.
For example, people who are interested in a new product but unsure whether they need it might want to gather more information. To do that, they might visit third-party sites, like a blog or news website that they trust. A marketing agency can then create an informative piece of content that addresses the customer’s concerns, and try to have it published on the sites they are likely to visit.
Localisation
Even if you have the ability to create great content for your company, chances are you would only be able to do so in your native language. This isn’t useful if you are trying to expand internationally. While you could pay someone to translate it, there’s no reason to think that the best headline, copy, and CTA combination in English will also be the best in another language. The translated content will have to be tested too.
Ultimately, that makes localising your content a lot of work. However, decent agencies are well-equipped to handle this, either because of the tools they use or because of partners or subsidiaries they have in the target location.
Team Collaboration and Project Management
As you can see, there are many different aspects to digital marketing campaigns. Running one means coordinating activities among many different stakeholders, including in-house experts, their teams, and potentially freelancers and local marketing agencies too.
Digital agencies handle this for you, and they have the experience and existing relationships to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible, no matter how complex.
Conclusion
Global digital agencies exist to help businesses meet their online marketing goals, and this doesn’t mean they just help out with time-consuming tasks like creating content. They offer a comprehensive service which covers everything from planning your strategy to coordinating each campaign.
