The right digital marketing agency for your company

Good digital marketing is all about one thing: knowing your target audience. In order to create successful marketing, you need to know who your audience is, where they spend their time online and what they focus their attention on. Once you know that, you can create content in the right places with the right messages.

Before the internet and even in the earlier days, it was a lot easier. People’s attention is usually focused on radio, newspapers and other offline media. It was enough to simply display ads on those platforms and stand in front of the right people.

Now, it’s more complicated. People’s attention is divided across many different platforms, and it probably feels like more is coming online almost every week.

Challenge: Choosing the Right Platforms

Let’s say you’re trying to target manufacturing companies in Ohio, you might want to appear on LinkedIn. If you’re targeting B2C customers with a product that younger generations prefer, Snapchat and Instagram are the places you want to be. Maybe even TikTok. And almost everyone can see some ROI with a presence on Facebook and some strategically targeted advertising.

But how do you know the right platform or even what strategic targeting is? This is where hiring an agency can be beneficial to you and your business.

Hiring a team of experts to manage your digital marketing strategy allows you to focus your time and energy on the areas of your business that you enjoy and do best, and usually gives you access to a wide range of skill sets that you can’t get with just hiring one.

In this article, we’ll cover how to evaluate a full-service digital marketing agency, the questions you should ask and how to choose between outsourcing or dealing with in-house marketing.

What digital marketing agencies do

To keep things simple, marketing agencies help you get more sales by making use of a number of different marketing solutions to attract your ideal client. Digital agencies like TKG usually prefer to start with a digital marketing strategy. This includes learning about your business, who your audience is, and marketing tactics you’ve tried in the past, and then strategizing how you’ll move forward to achieve your goals. This strategy usually relies on a combination of these services:

digital advertising

Advertising with Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, for example, is a great way to engage your audience the moment they’re looking for a solution to their problem. With either platform, you can make several different types of ads and target them to your audience based on a variety of variables, allowing you to reach the right person at the right time.

Video ads are also very effective in reaching people. If the digital marketing company you work with isn’t talking to you about video, they should be.

social advertising

Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social platforms offer direct advertising opportunities on their platform that allow you to reach people where they spend their time. It is similar to other digital ads but also very different. Your digital marketing agency can help you choose which of these platforms best suits your audience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Marketing

Getting your website to rank high in search isn’t just about building brand awareness or increasing page views. There is more than that. You need to identify the keywords people use to find companies like yours and use those words naturally but strategically throughout your content.

There are also a plethora of technical SEO things that need to happen to ensure your site is better programmed for search engines to understand what you have to offer. When you do these things right, your content will rank higher in search results and you’ll be able to attract potential customers at the perfect stage in the buyer’s journey – right when they need help!

Marketing automation

Whether you are looking to send out monthly newsletters or emails based on user behavior, email marketing and marketing automation can still provide some of the biggest ROI for marketers. You can use platforms like MailChimp for a simpler email strategy or a powerful platform like HubSpot to increase your effectiveness. There are many opportunities to make email work for you!

Of course, there are many other digital marketing services available for the modern marketer but at the end of the day, the most important thing is to measure the return on investment. Are your visitors doing what you want them to do? For most of our customers, this means more leads or more sales. With a strategic combination of the right user experience on the website and the right digital marketing tactics, your agency can help you set and achieve goals.

Now, before you start choosing a digital marketing agency to work with, you need to ask yourself and your potential agency a few basic questions.

Ask the right questions

What are the marketing requirements for your company?

Before you start looking for an agency, you need to determine your company’s marketing requirements.

Do you need a website design? Email Marketing? seo?

If you already have an in-house marketing team, ask yourself what marketing tactics and strategies your team doesn’t have the necessary skills or capabilities for. Are there tactics you know you should do but haven’t learned yet?

Asking these questions to yourself will help shed some light on what you can outsource to an agency to get more results.

And don’t worry if you don’t really know. Your agency can also work with you to create comprehensive digital marketing strategies that will show you the greatest opportunities.

How do they run their own business?

Is it a one person shop where they wear all the hats or do they have a talented team of people who specialize in different fields? Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. A one-man shop might be cheaper, for example, but their skills might be more limited. You may feel that signing up with a larger digital agency costs more, but given the breadth of talent, you may be able to do more and see more results. Whatever route you take, make sure it looks like a partnership. You don’t want to be a number for your digital agency. You want them to act like an extension of your team.

How do they measure success?

Don’t be fooled by vanity metrics. Many companies track numbers that they may feel are important but do not provide a true view of how the business is actually doing. Make sure that whatever metrics you look at, you have an understanding of how they affect the bottom line.

Remember, you don’t pay your agency to help deliver likes, followers, or even visitors (although in fairness, these numbers can be good indicators of how performance is trending). To be successful, your digital marketing must generate leads and increase sales.

What results do they promise?

When you’re in an industry with relatively low barriers to entry, you’ll be dealing with people who claim they know what they’re doing but in reality, they have no clue.

Marketing is one of those industries.

There are a lot of digital marketing agencies that over-promise and under-deliver. In the worst case, they keep getting paid even knowing that their actions will never bring results. We hope this does not happen to you.

You can filter these agencies by asking them what makes them different and what their strategy is to achieve results. Ask to see examples of their ROI reports, see examples of their work (ie a case study related to your business and industry) or talk to existing clients. If they can’t or won’t produce this information, this is a red flag.

What do they ship?

You may have heard the saying “you get what you pay for” and this couldn’t be more true in marketing. Many companies want to save money, so price tends to be the first thing they ask for. However, if you find an agency that charges lower rates, they will likely provide lower quality results as well.

While one-person stores may be able to charge less because there are fewer overheads and staff, digital agencies like TKG with a team of more than 35 dedicated individuals may cost more. But keep in mind the skill sets you can access.

Should you go home or hire an agency?

If you’re running a small or medium-sized business, you’re probably asking yourself if you should stay at home or hire an agency.

Let’s start by thinking about what it takes to run a successful marketing campaign:

strategy

Before you can run a successful marketing campaign, you must have a deep insight into your customer’s behavior. If you don’t take the time to truly understand your customers and the stories behind their problems, you risk making your marketing messages seem generic and unconnectable. You also need to understand the proper tactics and platforms to use to meet your customers wherever they are.

skill sets

Any digital marketing campaign requires a strategic mix of tactics and platforms and knowing how to use them effectively usually requires a strategic mix of skill sets. Will you be able to find this in one job or will you get bits of it and end up needing to outsource it anyway?

Quality

It’s easy to write random bits of content but can you write a quality blog post that speaks to your specific target audience? This is what separates decent blog posts from great posts. Almost anyone can create a WordPress site these days but do you know how to get it to do what your audience needs while meeting your SEO requirements? This is what differentiates good websites from those that drive business.

expertise

Last but not least, you must have some experience in designing and running a portion of your inbound marketing campaigns.

If you choose to hire an agency, you’ll have a team of experts working with you every month to help you achieve your goals. You don’t have to worry about finding the right designer, the right blogger, and the right programmer. Instead, you will have a whole team of people behind you to help get results.

So, what should you do?

The right digital agency has the potential to generate millions of dollars in revenue for you, gives you peace of mind, and allows you to avoid the high cost of hiring and training an in-house team. Working with an agency can allow you to focus your time on what you love and perfect what you are already good at rather than worrying about what you need to improve. But, only you know what is best for your business.

Looking for a marketing agency to work with? We’d like to talk to see if we’d be a good fit.