What Do Digital Marketing Agencies Do?

The goal of any digital marketing agency is to get the right audience to your website and to make sure your website guides them to your goal. Sometimes, you might want to increase brand or product awareness. Other times, you could be looking for active shoppers who are ready to buy.

Whatever your aim, there are digital marketing strategies and services that can help you achieve your goals. Often these online marketing, lead generation tactics are part of an overall inbound marketing approach.

Reaching Your Audience through Digital Marketing

There are two main ways to get more traffic for your business. Online marketing includes both “organic” (non-paid) traffic and “paid” traffic.

1. Organic Traffic – Social Media Posting and SEO

Organic traffic aims to bring people to your website through means other than digital advertising. Usually, this happens through Search Engine Optimization that’s supplemented by a strong social media posting strategy.

SEO

Search Engine Journal reported that 28% of clicks go to the top search result on Google while around 90% of clicks happen on the first page of the search results. How do websites get to the first page? Search engine optimization.

The problem? These days every keyword is up against more than 1,000,000 competing sites trying to rank for the same thing.

Search engine optimization used to be easy. You could purchase thousands of links to your website, hide a ton of keywords in your content or design, and WHAMO. You’d rank.

Not anymore.

Today, Google has between 200 and 300 ranking considerations outlined in the very long and exciting Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Today’s SEOs have to consider site architecture, navigation, keyword targeting and content, video optimization, UX, website health, and much much more.

We have lots of other content that’s out or coming out about search engine optimization. The big things to know are that it’s a long-term investment, it takes time, it takes effort and if it’s done right, it can significantly improve your website traffic, giving your sales team more opportunities to convert.

Why is SEO Worth It?

Working together with a paid strategy you can bring more people to your site than ever before. People who want to see your product or service. Even though results aren’t instantaneous, the same organic strategy that will help your search rankings can also reduce bounce rates, improve web visitors’ time on site, and answer common questions so your customer service department and sales teams have powerful resources to point people to.

It is worth it. If you’re willing to put in the time.

Social Media Posting

A good social presence is great for brand awareness, customer interaction, and capturing leads. We’re making a distinction here between social posting and social ads. Social posting is part of your organic strategy. It’s where you can fill people in on your brand personality, helpful resources, product and business news, etc.

Mastering social posting takes real dedication and skill. Each platform attracts a different audience, has a different algorithm, and requires different posting and content fulfillment.

A social media specialist will work to create the post copy, visuals, and targeted strategy for each post and platform.

In general, Momentum Marketing Consultants focuses on social media advertising as we believe the most organic content comes from your business. However, we supplement our clients’ social pages with some social posts every month that utilize our creative skills in copywriting, videography, photography, and graphic design.

About Organic Traffic – It’s Not Actually “Free”

One thing to get out of the way right now is the idea that organic traffic is free. It’s not. It takes a lot of work to get started and to maintain. Someone (or, more often, a team) has to do that work.

As Bruce Clay, the Father of SEO says in his training courses, “Don’t be upset by the results you didn’t get for the work you didn’t do.”

Building up your organic traffic (via SEO or social) will take time and labor, but by not doing it your website is likely hidden among 1,000,000+ search results for any given term, unlikely to be found.

2. Paid Traffic – Social Ads and Search Ads

Paid traffic refers to online advertising. Most often, it follows a “PPC” or “pay per click” model, meaning you only pay for the traffic your ad brings to your site (this varies, as some options include pay per impression or pay per call options…..among others). Digital ads also utilize keyword and demographic targeting to present your ads in front of the right people.

Google Ads

Google has an entire suite of advertising options, including search, display, and shopping ads as well as youtube advertising.

Search

Search ads are text ads that appear above and below the organic search engine results on a page. Usually, there between 2 and 4 ad results at the top and bottom of the search engine results page (SERP).

Display

Display ads are visual ads that include an image or graphic. They appear as banners or box ads on the top, bottom, or side of a page as well as within page content of ad-partnering websites (there are millions).

Shopping

Google shopping ads appear as a carousel of ads at the top or side of the SERP, showing pictures of products, prices, and occasionally stars from customer reviews.

Youtube

Other types of ads can appear on the Youtube website, but youtube video ads play before or during a watched Youtube video.

In Summary

These are oversimplified descriptions of Google Ads. Here’s the bigger picture. Google Ads allow you to reach audiences who are searching for your products or services in numerous ways, across numerous platforms.

Developing A Google Ad Strategy

Google Ads are a great way to get traffic to your site now. Thanks to different targeting options, you can implement a number of ad strategies that yield opposing, but helpful results.

– A Reach Strategy can help you increase brand awareness and get the attention of people who have never heard of you before, but who fit the broad demographic that fits your products and services.
– A Warm Lead Strategy focuses on only targeting people who are actively researching what you have to offer, or who closely match your customer demographics.
– A Hot Lead or Retargeting Strategy serves ads to people who are in the buying phase by presenting ads to people who have visited your site, abandoned items in their cart, or searched for buying terms like “shop” “hire” “buy” among others.

What Targeting Really Means

If digital marketing has a “secret sauce” it’s targeting. Without targeting, your ads or website will appear in front of the wrong crowd.

Bad targeting is like if someone bought concert tickets for Beyoncé and Keith Urban showed up. Both are great musicians, but you better believe if this happened, the crowd would be upset. Similarly, if you sell car parts, you don’t want to show up on search engines for hiking boots. Sounds far fetched right? No one with a car part website would write content about hiking boots.

You’d be surprised.

The reality is that words come with lots of ambiguity that search engines don’t always understand. For example, one of our clients in the manufacturing industry has a product for agricultural equipment with a name that’s a high volume keyword. The problem is, when you put that keyword into a search engine, a whole set of kids’ cars shows up. So do we want to put all our targeting efforts on that keyword?

No. No we do not. But without researching, we wouldn’t know that, and a lot of seven-year-old girls’ moms would be getting wacky ads for agricultural equipment when all they wanted was a toy car.

It happens more often than you think. And keywords aren’t the only thing that can come into play here.

Location, interests, income, ad engagement, previous website visits, language, time of day and so much more can be used to bring the right or wrong audience to you.

What Services Digital Marketing Agencies Offer To Bring You Traffic

So we’ve spent a long time looking at the ways digital marketing agencies can help get you traffic, but now it’s time to talk about what they actually do to get the job done. The simplest description is that digital marketing companies use strategy, content development, and tracking to get results for clients.

Develop Strategy

Strategies aren’t one-time deals, because the digital space is always changing. Both SEO, social, and ad strategies rely on keyword and competitive research to start crafting a plan. In addition, agencies usually rely on clients to provide some company goals and key dates for product sales or knowledge about seasonal fluctuations. At the same time, audience research comes into play. In the end, you can expect a good digital marketing company to mix up their strategies from time to time. The consulting side of Momentum Marketing Consultants focuses heavily on researching and developing strategies for internal marketing teams to implement.

Create Content

Content is an umbrella term that covers everything from building a website to shooting videos, writing ad copy, developing graphics and much much more.

Both organic and paid traffic depend heavily on creative services. Digital agencies can partner with your internal marketing team to capture visuals, write new content, or implement ad strategies.

Tracking Results

These days, you can get data on just about anything. You can also make data look how you want it to (not a good practice).

We’re focused on presenting authentic results and adjusting our strategies to dive deeper into what’s working and move away from what isn’t. Digital marketing requires some testing to find success.

During our monthly client meetings, we walk through our monthly reports and outline what we’re working on for the next cycle.

Tracking isn’t always about conversions. Usually, converting is up to the sales team. Our job is to bring sales teams traffic, which means we’re focused on things like reach, engagement, bounce rates, time on site, ad rankings, watch through rates, search engine results and rankings, website performance, and other things that might prevent your audience from learning about what you have to offer.

Digital Agencies Do A Lot – So You Don’t Have To

Your relationship with your digital marketing agency is often a customized plan. Whether you need the strategy, the creative services, the tracking, or a mix of all three, a digital marketing company can help you reach your goals and offload work from your internal staff. This allows you to hit your goals faster, to use specialists for different services, and to have a team working to advance your company with proven results.

If you’re looking to hire a digital marketing agency, Momentum Marketing Consultants can help you with all things online. Set up a meeting to explore our services and get a customized plan for your business.