In recent years, the ‘digital’ in digital marketing has all but become redundant - almost all marketing is done online. If your business isn’t taking its online presence and outreach seriously, you are at a serious disadvantage compared to your competition.
The world of online marketing can be confusing. Daunting. Harrowing. So many platforms, algorithms, search engines, social media accounts, metrics, ad dimensions… Overwhelming!
This is where hiring a digital marketing agency can be your saving grace. A professional will know exactly how to promote your business on the internet and bring you profits far beyond the fees they charge.
Let’s take a closer look at exactly which aspects of your business a digital marketing expert can improve.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for various aspects of building an online presence for a business. Among other things, digital marketing includes:
- Website building
- Search engine optimization
- Lead acquisition
- Ad campaign planning and deployment
- Social media management
- Videography
- Market research
Let’s take a closer look at some of the core services a digital marketing agency can provide.
Website building
Your landing page is your online storefront. You want things to be tidy, organized, and stimulating to the visitor.Why would an online shopper trust a business with a shoddy website that takes dozens of seconds to load and doesn’t work intuitively?
Ecommerce website building is one of the key services a digital marketing agency can offer. Digital marketers are tuned in to current trends and the latest developments in website building. This includes website design, development, and maintenance.
While you may have your own ideas about what your landing page should look like, leave room for the digital marketer to open your eyes to features and aspects you didn’t even know about. Try not to be a ‘client from hell’ that thinks they can lecture professionals about their jobs.
Find a trustworthy online marketer and let them show you what’s possible.
Search engine optimization
You type in ‘dentist’s office’ in Google. It shows you hundreds of dentist’s offices in your area. However, you rarely click on any link below the third one from the top, right?That means it’s very important to be on the first result page on Google. There are techniques on how to do that. Those techniques are collectively known as Search engine optimization.
The technical aspect of SEO includes ordering the website in such a way that Google’s crawlers find it easy to recognize what the site is trying to communicate. The easier and faster Google can ‘index’ your website, the better its rankings will be.
Technical SEO includes, among many other things:
- Writing proper meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are the small snippets of text beneath the page title in the results pages on Google.
- Optimizing header tags in text based content. Google likes articles that have a clearly organized structure, and headings play a huge part in helping Google understand what the page is about.
- URL architecture structuring. Google dislikes chaotic websites that don’t have a clearly outlined page structure.
‘Talking about you’ in search engine terms means - other websites link to your website. So, the biggest part of authority building comes down to acquiring links from other websites. This can be done in a variety of ways, but be careful - some of them are frowned upon by Google and can actually lead to getting your website penalized and bringing it down in ranking.
Keyword research is arguably the most important feature of SEO. It is a complex and too often misunderstood topic. Keyword research has to do with which queries you want to appear in. To ‘mine’ these keywords, SEO specialists use a variety of techniques and specialized software tools.
There are many more aspects to SEO technique, and one thing’s for sure - if you want to appear in people’s searches and drive up your website traffic, you will need the help of a professional.
Ad campaign planning and deployment
The digital age has transformed the way advertisement works. Instead of pitching your product to a mostly random consumer base on a TV commercial slot, digital ad metrics now allow you to narrow down your target audience to exactly the type of person your product will interest.It is still a controversial topic, with privacy violations rampant and information leaks happening left and right. One thing’s for sure, though - a thoroughly planned out and well executed digital ad campaign can bring you an unimaginable ROI.
Instead of just blindly paying for random Google Adwords, a digital marketer can carefully pick out the very best platforms to advertise you to your target audience directly.
There is not a better lead acquisition tool than a successful ad campaign.
In addition to that, the market research a digital marketer can do is second to none. With an abundance of tools, data, and metrics at their disposal, a professional marketer will be able to provide you with insights you won’t even know were possible.
Social media management
Running your own social media accounts is a bad idea across the board.First of all, it takes up a lot more time than you’d think. Making posts, scheduling posts, interacting with the community are all relatively easy but are definitely time consuming tasks.
Second of all, social media can be pretty tricky to figure out. Every platform has its own vibe and post type, and it doesn’t take a lot for a clumsy post to actually tarnish your brand’s image.
A good social media manager will know exactly what to post, when, and on which platform. You can save yourself a lot of stress and raise your profits considerably if you delegate running your social media accounts to a professional.
For example, some types of social media content involve videography. Now, you could film your own footage with a camera phone in poor lighting conditions and a reverberating warehouse. That won’t get you far. Instead, you should let a digital marketing agency use its professional equipment and expertise to create actual good, quality content.
Conclusion
We’ve established that digital marketing is a multi-faceted affair that requires the attention of a dedicated professional. Not only is it complex, but it is also constantly changing and evolving. A good strategy from just a couple of years ago could now actually harm your business.Just like in any other outsourcing situation, you could also build an in-house team to run your digital marketing for you. However, those types of efforts usually end up costing the company much more in time, effort and money.
Hiring a good digital marketing agency can be a huge boon for your business. The power of digital marketing cannot be overstated, and a return on investment is almost guaranteed.
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