Whether you are in the planning stages, ready to launch or to look to grow your small business, enlisting the help of a professional digital marketing agency can help you achieve your goals at a much quicker pace, with fewer headaches and often less out of pocket cost to you.
Over the last several decades, the modern marketplace has been transformed from a world of primarily brick and mortar, person to person transactions to an increasingly web-based business model. This means that in order to remain competitive and thrive in today's marketplace, business owners must create, execute, and manage multi-faceted digital marketing plans that engage, inform, and ultimately convert web surfers into paying customers.
The level of expertise and knowledge required to pull off a successful digital marketing campaign is generally far beyond the scope of what the average small business owner has the time, patience, or budget to handle on their own, and employing a team of in-house specialists to handle each unique aspect of the digital marketing process would usually mean keeping several highly specialized employees on the payroll which would test the limits of even the most generous small business budget plan.
A digital marketing agency, like Dexterous Media Group, offers the solution to implementing, managing, and monitoring a high-quality digital marketing strategy without the expense of hiring a team of in-house specialists to manage all of the moving parts of your digital marketing strategy.
A digital marketing agency is generally made up of a team of professionals all working in tandem to provide your company or brand with all of the digital marketing tools and services that you need so that you can concentrate on the business of running and growing your company.
Depending on the unique needs of your company, a digital marketing agency will generally provide a range of different digital marketing services, including social media marketing, search engine optimization, direct email marketing, consumer research, competitor analysis, brand management, and content curation, and much more.
The specific services provided will vary depending on the digital marketing agency that you choose and the specific needs of your particular company. When choosing the right digital marketing service provider to partner with your company, it is important to consider whether the digital marketing agency you choose is able to provide a full-service digital marketing plan or whether they specialize in just one specific type of digital marketing.
Let's take a better look at the most common services provided by most digital marketing agencies and the important role each service plays in executing a successful digital marketing strategy that generates real results for your business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most talked-about and most important aspects of digital marketing. SEO is a vital part of the foundation of any successful digital marketing agency service plan because a successful SEO strategy will ultimately determine whether the rest of your digital marketing efforts are ever seen by potential customers.
SEO makes use of a variety of knowledge, expertise, and tools to ensure that every aspect of your digital marketing strategy is tailored to align with the search engine algorithms that will ultimately determine which websites, businesses, and brands are shown to internet surfers when they search for information on a specific topic.
When most people think of SEO techniques, the first thing that comes to mind is keyword research and keyword-optimized content. There is good reason for this; solid research to determine the precise words, a combination of words or phrases that people tend to use when searching for a specific topic is key to ensuring that your content, your website, and your business or brand will be discovered and presented by the search engine algorithm. Solid keyword research and digital marketing efforts that focus on optimizing your content and digital marketing materials to incorporate those specific keywords and phrases are still the gold standards when it comes to achieving high search engine ranking results.
However, there is far more to a successful SEO strategy than keyword research and content optimization. As the internet has evolved and users have grown ever more discerning in their expectations, search engines have had to evolve as well to satisfy the needs of the modern web shopper or information seeker. Today's search engine ranking algorithms are looking for more than just a specific set of words or phrases; they are also taking into consideration the overall quality of the information presented on the site and how the keywords are used in context to the other website content. Modern SEO practices must determine the most relevant keywords for a given topic, and they must carefully weave those keywords into high-quality content in an organic way that provides value to the consumer.
Executing a high-quality SEO strategy requires a deep understanding of how search engines function and the ability to execute a multi-layered digital marketing plan that matches the search engine ranking criteria in order to ensure that a business is able to stand out as a high-quality source of information for a specific set of topics.
A digital marketing agency possesses the deep industry knowledge and expertise required to keep your business or brand at the top of the search engine results page and to keep the traffic flowing to your company.
Now that we have discussed the importance of SEO as the foundation of any digital marketing agency service strategy, it is time to discuss the important role that the overall quality, design, and functionality of your business website play in the success of your SEO efforts, and how a digital marketing agency can help ensure that website design or performance issues are not undermining your digital marketing efforts.
As we mentioned in the previous section, search engine ranking algorithms take many factors into consideration when determining which websites, businesses, and brands to present on the first page of results when a user searches for more information on a specific topic. In addition to proper use of keywords and phrases, search engine ranking algorithms will also factor in the overall quality and function of the website. What may seem like a relatively insignificant error or website flaw can cost your business website a coveted spot on the first page of search results.
A digital marketing agency will carefully analyze your entire website to make sure that every feature is functioning as intended and ensure that small details like proper use of H1 tags, properly loading images, and speedy page load times are fully optimized to ensure that your website does not lose points in the view of the search engine ranking powers that be.
Of course, there is more to quality website design than simply achieving a high search engine ranking position. A high-quality website design and smooth user interface will help increase the likelihood that visitors to your website will stay to explore your content, interact with your website, and ultimately make a choice to purchase your product or service. A digital market agency can help you create an aesthetically pleasing and efficient website that is easy for users to navigate, increasing the overall confidence in your brand and helping to convert casual visitors into paying customers.
As of 2022, there were close to 4 billion reported social network subscribers worldwide. That is a massive audience of potential consumers for your business or brand. Of course, not all of those social media subscribers will have an interest in your particular product or a need for your service, so it is important to have a strategy in place to be able to concentrate your social media outreach to find and engage the specific set of social media users who are likely to find value in what you are offering.
In order to reach the specific groups of social media users most likely to have an interest in your company or brand, a digital marketing agency will first identify both the primary and secondary target audience groups for your particular product or service. For example, if your company produces a product that is intended for adolescents and teens, these would be your primary target audience groups, while the parents, caregivers, teachers, and other adults may be the secondary target audience as these groups often exert some degree of control over the final purchasing decisions of the primary group.
Once your primary and secondary target audience groups have been identified, your digital marketing agency will apply their knowledge of the many different social media platforms to create targeted marketing campaigns, content, interactive posts, and other forms of social media specifically designed to drive engagement with your company or brand.
Because each social media platform has its own set of format and style rules, which are both formal and informal, it is important that your digital marketing agency has a thorough knowledge of the latest social media marketing trends and what type of content works best for each platform. The most effective social media marketing campaigns will create individualized content specifically tailored to reach the targeted audience on each unique social media platform where they are most likely to be subscribers.
Email outreach is an often overlooked but still incredibly useful digital marketing tool. Email outreach, or email marketing, provides a way to reach out to a targeted audience directly with precise messaging that is not constrained by word count limitations or platform style rules.
Like most aspects of digital marketing, modern email outreach has come a long way from the days of cookie-cutter mass email campaigns, which were inevitably shuttled right to the recipient's spam folder. While today's email marketing plans are far more targeted and sophisticated than the mass mailings of yesterday, this means that executing a successful email outreach strategy is also far more time-consuming and complicated than it once was.
A digital marketing agency will help you to compile, update, and maintain a list of qualified email contacts, and create high-quality content with personalized subject lines that will not wind up being shuttled to the spam or trash folder unread. Your digital marketing agency should also provide a means of measuring the success of your email outreach strategy by tracking the number of emails that were opened and read, as well as the click-through and conversion rates from each email marketing campaign.
Remarketing also referred to as retargeting, is a passive digital marketing strategy that makes use of a tiny snippet of code commonly referred to as a cookie to identify users who have visited your business website but have yet to make a purchase.
When a web user visits your site for the first time, a cookie is generated that creates a unique identifier linked to the specific user. As the user continues to browse the web, your digital marketing agency, or remarketing service provider, is able to prompt the display of targeted advertisements suggesting products or services that they have shown an interest in while browsing your website.
This acts as a subtle reminder to return to your website or company when they are ready to purchase the product or service that they were browsing for. Remarketing also helps to ensure that your brand stays at the forefront of the consumer's minds as they browse the web.
Content generation and content optimization are two must-have tools for any digital marketing strategy. Content generation focuses on the curation, or creation, of high-quality information, packed content that provides value to the reader or viewer. This content can take the form of informational blog posts, educational articles, entertaining videos, DIY guides, infographics, or any other form of media that is able to engage the target audience.
The most effective content will be highly engaging, able to hold the viewers, or readers' attention, and provide a significant value to the viewer in terms of information. The idea is to grab the attention of as many viewers as possible and provide such high-value information that the viewer is encouraged to engage further with your website, business, or brand and share your content with others so that they might do the same.
A digital marketing agency is able to craft the type of high-quality content that drives engagement with your company or brand and encourages sharing across multiple platforms to expand your digital marketing outreach.
As an added benefit, high quality, high-value content increases the likelihood that the search engine ranking algorithms will see your website, company, or brand as a valuable resource or expert in your specific field, which will increase the likelihood that your website or company will be featured prominently on the first page of search results related to your industry.
As discussed in the previous section, high-quality, high-value content has the ability to present your company or brand as an expert resource on a particular topic which helps improve overall search engine ranking.
Quality link building is a separate but related digital marketing agency service, which uses web links built into other high quality, high-value content featured on other websites or built into the informative content on your own website to further position your company as an industry or topic expert.
Search engine algorithms factor in the number of web links leading back to your website or brand when considering the quality of your site for search engine ranking. Websites that are linked to most frequently or by multiple other sources are considered to be of a higher value than websites that are not referenced or featured on other sites.
Additionally, by building quality web links into high-quality, high-value content, you increase the likelihood that your website will be shared with other web users, generating more traffic to your company or brand.
Link building is not for the inexperienced or novice marketer, as the search engine algorithms are wise to those who create spammy content that has no other purpose but to create web links to a third-party website. The algorithms are quick to recognize, downgrade, or block any websites that are found to be spamming web links.
A digital marketing agency will be able to execute a quality link building strategy that makes use of press releases, partnerships, collaborations, and other beneficial arrangements that allow web links to your company website to be organically built into the high quality, high-value content featured on other websites, increasing the traffic to your website, and boosting your search engine ranking.
Dexterous Media Group is a full-service digital marketing agency with a dedicated team of industry experts who are able to provide all of the important digital marketing services discussed in this article and so much more. When you are ready to learn more about all of the ways that a high-quality digital marketing strategy can help grow your small business, give us a call, or visit us on the web. We are here to help!
