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Digital Marketing Agencies Buyer's Guide
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What is the importance of digital marketing?
Digital marketing is much more than just having an online (including social media) presence. Digital marketing means promoting your products, services, and other propositions through digital channels using carefully designed strategies, which are optimized for your business goals. These digital channels can be search engines, websites, social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Whatsapp, Pinterest), Email and Mobile applications.
Digital marketing companies make use of strategies like Search engine optimization, Pay-per-Click advertising, online reputation management, Content marketing, video marketing, Website design, Guest Posts, Public relations, and Blogging, etc.
Digital marketing is extremely beneficial for businesses, be it large, small or medium. Effectively crafted strategies keeping in mind your objectives, nature of the business, spends, etc. go a long way in making your business profitable and sustainable. Some of the benefits of digital marketing are:
› A better understanding of your intended audiences:
Businesses and brands have to not only deal with competition from other brands but also short attention spans of consumers. Digital marketing makes this very simple. Businesses can use metrics to understand the demographics of the current and intended audiences- Age, Location, Income, Interests, Purchasing behaviour, etc. These tools also enable businesses to track and analyze the behaviour of consumers for them to predict their preferences in the future and change them accordingly.
› Direct engagement with your audiences:
Unlike traditional media that is uni-directional, digital media is interactive and two-way. Through the content that you push through digital marketing, you can encourage your audiences to comment, like, and share your posts. You can create contests, roll out deals and promotions that encourage audiences to find out about your business and engage with it.
Digital marketing can help you enhance customer loyalty by incentivizing the audiences thereby making them feel rewarded and ensuring that they remain loyal towards your brand for a long time to come.
› Better brand visibility:
The more you share informative and educational content about your brand, a larger number of people get to know about your business. Better the audiences get to know you; more is the probability of them becoming familiar with your brand and sharing the content with their peers.
This leads to more traffic being driven to your website and an increase in the possibility of lead generation and conversion into sales.
› More online conversions:
Once the audiences get to know you after you build your digital marketing, start engaging with your brand and begin trusting you, they are more likely to make a favourable purchase decision quickly.
› Track performance and Returns on Investment:
For small businesses, every rupee of monetary investment in digital marketing matters. Therefore, it becomes even more important for them to track the performance of their strategies. It is important to understand what is working and what is not and take corrective action, if required. This helps in avoiding the smaller mistakes turning into larger problems later on.
How to choose the best digital marketing agency?
› Establish your objectives:
Before you start looking for a digital marketing agency, understand your business needs and objectives clearly. By knowing exactly what you want will help you in giving the correct brief to the agency. This is extremely important so as to avoid gaps, which might result in miscommunication and wastage of precious monetary investments.
Your objectives can range from information and education of visitors about your brand, lead conversion, informing about a product launch, increasing your sales, exploring new territories, etc.
› Understand their synergies:
It is very important for the digital marketing agency to be synergized with your business objectives and work as partners and not just as vendors. Unless they are open to listening and understanding, they won’t be in sync with your needs and objectives of your business.
Likewise, you as a business should also be open-minded to listen to suggestions from the digital marketing company and implementing them.
If the agency has worked with clients in your industry, they are more likely to be synergized with you since they would understand the way your industry actually function, the challenges, and the trends.
› Study their portfolio:
This is one of the best ways to assess the work of the digital marketing agency. By seeing their work portfolio and the kind of clients that they have been working, you can understand the level of creativity that they possess. You can also ask for testimonials and reference from their clients as further proof of their credibility, expertise, and capability.
Assessing compatibility between you and the agency’s teams is very critical to ensure a long-term, smooth, and fruitful partnership that results in the best for both the parties.
Which Questions to Ask Digital Marketing Team Before You Hire Them?
There are some questions that you need to ask the shortlisted digital marketing agencies before you shortlist and finalize the most suitable agency. We are listing some of such questions, which will help you in making an informed decision:
- What is their company history i.e. who constitutes the leadership and the executing teams?
2. How many years of experience do they have?
3. Do they themselves enjoy good rankings and ratings from their customers for the work done for them?
4. Do they have a search engine optimization mindset?
5. What is the list of services provided? What do they actually specialize in?
6. What is their pricing structure and how do they justify what they are charging.
7. Do they use analytics and insights while measuring the impact of the strategies?
8. What is their capacity in terms of support services? Creating strategies is one thing and effectively managing them for the best returns on investment is another.
More Questions to Ask Digital Marketing Agencies Before You Hire Them
- What kind of digital marketing strategies have you implemented for your agency?
2. How do you stay updated with all the latest trends and practices in this rapidly changing industry?
3. What kind of communication channels would we use during our association?
4. Will you assign a dedicated team to handle my project? Will, there be a single point of contact for prompt assistance and to avoid confusion?
5. Do you have hands-on experience in my industry? How successful were those projects for your clients in terms of ROIs?
6. Can I talk to any of your previous clients?
7. What type of digital marketing tools do you rely on?
8. How would you help me improve my conversion rates?
9. Could you help me understand your process thoroughly to fulfill my marketing objectives?
10. What would you rate yourself when it comes to content marketing?
11. Which kind of content will your team produce?
12. Do you have accreditation from major search engines like Google and Bing?
13. What would be the percentage of our organic and paid search efforts?
14. How do you go about creating a strong social media presence?
15. How much time does it take in general to see the expected results out of our digital marketing efforts?
16. What kind of reports should I expect from you on a regular basis? What would be the KPIs behind these reports?
17. What all things do you require from my end?
18. How frequently would we be creating new campaigns?
19. Will we make distinct strategies for different search engines and platforms?
20. What happens if we realize that some of our strategies are simply not working?
21. How do you ensure compliance with the set SEO standards?
22. What would you do to link all our different digital marketing efforts to achieve a channelized output?
23. What is the process to end the contract if things don’t work out?
What is the average cost of Digital Marketing?
Marketing a business on the freely available social media platforms still requires some amount of investments if you are to gain the maximum ROI. You need to invest in an experienced, professional, and credible digital marketing company. These companies will ensure that your digital marketing plans are integrated with your brand’s goals and result in their achievement.
Depending on the kind and scale of strategies that you have initiated along with the agency, the cost will vary. Every digital marketing strategy, be it guest posts, blogging, pay-per-click advertising requires different monetary investment levels depending on the number of consumers that you intend to reach out to and how frequently do you want to do that.