When it comes to marketing, we are way past the age of newspaper ads, radio ads, TV commercials, Magazines, Flyers, etc. Enter the new marketplace, the digital media, mastering, and maneuvering through which is not everyone’s cup of tea, and thus arises the need to hire a digital agency for your business.
In this day and age of the internet, your average consumer will conduct online research first before making a purchase decision. Furthermore, the pandemic has propelled more and more people to the confines of digital media, replacing social interactions with digital interactions. There are a number of channels and platforms where one can reach out, express, and learn things. Thus, for any business looking to make a mark of its own, it becomes a must to have a robust online presence that engages and nurtures customers online, thereby making the hiring of digital agency services imperative.
A digital agency has the expertise and the technical know-how to engage and nourish your online customers by knowing which audience to reach out to and where, how to build long-term relationships with them and to keep them interested in your brand in the long term.
STATS
Blogging alone has helped brands bring in 67% more leads compared to those who never post
SEO also leads to a conversion rate of 14.6% as compared to the 1.7% conversion rate of the traditional methods
4.3 billion of the world’s population make use of some sort of social media
Approximately 2 billion people are online shoppers
There are over 2.5 billion email users around the world
An average American spends a minimum of 2 hours online up to 10 hours for a wide variety of activities and tasks
What is a Digital Agency?
It is a creative agency that helps with a digital marketing strategy in the highly digitized world of today. It is simply an advertising agency that has advanced with the evolving marketing needs in the digital age to which you have outsourced your company’s marketing efforts. Their specialization lies in their in-depth understanding of the latest marketing trends and implementing the best practices and strategies to help grow your business stand out from your competitors.
What does a digital agency do?
Digital agency services entail providing businesses with a customized digital marketing strategy based upon the needs and goals they have set for themselves. They provide a wide range of services to build your brand and increase your sales. Their strategies are all data-driven and are backed with technical, technological, and creative expertise. Some of the best digital agency services include:
Website design and development
Brand building and development
Paid Per Click Marketing
Graphic Designing
Copywriting
SEO
Social Media marketing
E-mail marketing and retargeting
E-commerce marketing
Mobile App Development
1. It levels the playing field for small and medium-sized businesses against the e-commerce stalwarts. By creating high-quality, relevant content and improving your ranking on the Search Engine’s results page, they help your business stay on par with large companies with big marketing budgets.
2. Digital agency services help yield a high ROI on the account of them being very cost-effective. Even with a limited budget, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and other methods that require a minimal cost can be leveraged for excellent returns in your investment, rather than stagnation. Your marketing strategies are constantly analyzed and optimized to handle every change in the market. Everything is engineered towards generating more leads to your website. Leads convert to sales, and the more leads are generated, the more long-term benefits are attained.
3. They help you connect with the people interested in your business based on their interests and online behavior. Having access to tools that keep a track of people’s online activities and demographic information, they can target a specific audience and push content accordingly. The audience can be approached at different buying stages through engaging content, thereby creating credibility which eventually leads to conversion.
4. Unlike traditional marketing strategies, there are different metrics that enable you to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns in real-time. Metrics called KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are the most important data based on the goals and objectives outlined in a digital marketing strategy. Some basic KPIs include Cost-Per-Click, ROI, Customer Acquisition Cost, etc. The effectiveness of your marketing efforts can also be measured in terms of impressions, traffic, clicks, conversions, dwell time, etc.
5. A digital agency helps you get organic traffic, i.e. the leads which have a higher probability of converting through various digital marketing strategies at a low cost. With the right knowledge of SEO algorithms, customers journeys, and inbound marketing, which enables them to draw organic traffic to your business.
6. They have the expertise to understand your business, your goals, and objectives, your target audience, and implement marketing tactics accordingly. They help put across the right message, through the right channels, at the right time, thereby generating sales-ready leads.
7. They increase your online presence and visibility by creating credible content. They help clear doubts, provide important information, and present you as an authority over your niche. Blogging is one of the many techniques used to establish you as an industry expert and help you gain the trust of your audience.
How to choose the best digital agency?
Choosing the right digital agency is not an easy task. For any brand, it means an investment of money and trust. There is no dearth of digital agency services but the idea is to ensure that your marketing is entrusted in the right hands. So, here are a few key factors to keep in mind while looking for the right digital agency to hire.
1. What kind of services are they offering:
Some digital agencies offer the full range of digital marketing services while some offer specific, targeted services. Thus, it is essential to understand what services they provide and are those services that are being offered in alignment with your goals. An important factor to keep in mind is what they truly specialize in. As in, are they going to be able to find the solution to your existing problems? Have they encountered similar pain points as yours before? Is there a genuine connection between their services and your business goals? At the end of the day, they need to have an understanding of the services you need, have the ability to deliver results, and help you meet your goals.
2. How well are they able to understand your business:
A good digital agency will understand your business and will be familiar with the challenges and landscape of your niche. But apart from having industry experience, they should be open to knowing details that are an exception or specific to your business. There is never a set pattern to approach things, and each business needs a customized strategy tailored to the company’s unique needs and these can be done through metrics like KPIs. A good creative agency will analyze your current marketing strategy and determine what needs to be done and develop new and powerful strategies accordingly.
3. Good Communication:
Communication is key. A good digital agency is responsive to emergencies, time-sensitive matters, and your sentiments. Also, it is also important to see how they respond when you reach out to them. How willing they are to solve your problems, how flexible are they and do you enjoy working with them? They will also simplify things for you especially when it comes to jargon and technical terms. They also need to keep you in the loop with the tactics and strategies they are implementing to achieve your business goals.
4. Reviews and testimonials:
It is needless to say that reading Reviews and Testimonials are in general one of the best ways to find out about a product or service. Statistics reveal that 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase. Thus, as with any other product or service, reading reviews and testimonials from clients of a digital agency will be a great way to find out how has the creative agency benefitted a business, what has their experience with them been like, and what kind of customer-client relationship exists between the two.
5. Do they set realistic expectations or make unexpected claims:
If a digital agency offers something that is over the top or too good to be true, that should definitely be a red flag for you. Setting up unrealistic expectations, being vague about the results that you can expect from them and the way they operate, should be deterrent enough for you. There are no quick fixes in marketing and a promise of anything to this end would only imply deceptive and unethical practices. On the contrary, you should be looking for a sustainable, long-term, strong, and viable partnership. Manipulative and deceptive practices in digital agency branding may lead to your website being banned from google. A good digital marketing agency will follow the laws and will avoid technical mistakes like keyword stuffing, cloaking, and other black-hat marketing tactics.
A good digital agency will speak of honest results and not quick results. We at Pravaah Consulting are well equipped to cover all the aspects of your digital marketing needs through our multi-channel approach. We value your time and money and the effort that you have put into establishing your business and we are here to help you reach your goals. We help your business adapt to the changing landscape and build a strong online digital marketing campaign that will help your company obtain valuable leads and sales. Digital marketing is always evolving and changing and we are going to be with you every step of the way.