What Is A Digital Marketing Agency?
Digital marketing agencies help expand your business and drive results in the form of conversions, web traffic, and retention rates. They help your brand connect with your audience and open up the door for new business relations.
In order to successfully promote brands and businesses, digital marketing agencies have to stay on top of growing trends, utilize top talent and tools and put creativity and ingenuity first.
These digital marketing agencies often combine a number of techniques — from digital to creative and traditional marketing efforts — to promote your brand identity across many channels, drive your business forward and reach goals.
These efforts include:
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Paid media and PPC
- Traditional marketing and advertising
- And more!
What Do Top Digital Marketing Agencies Do?
Internet Marketing & Advertising
Digital marketing agencies manage marketing and advertising across a wide variety of platforms. These tactics can include:
- Retargeting and remarketing
- Paid search
- Paid media
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Native advertising
- And more
These initiatives can be executing on many platforms, including:
- Google
- Bing
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Email
- Other publications
- And more!
Content & Social Media Marketing
Multimedia content and social media are steadily replacing outdated traditional advertising tactics, such as radio spots and expensive TV ads.
Top digital marketing agencies can conceptualize, create and publish all sorts of content, such as:
- Blog posts
- Articles
- Brand videos
- Social media posts and content
- Infographics
- User-generated content campaigns
- Digital newsletters
- Whitepapers
- Webinars
- And more!
This content is tailor-made for your brand goals and strategically crafted to reach your target demographic, promote your products or services, and increase revenue.
Search Engine Optimization
Digital marketing also encompasses search engine optimization (SEO).
This robust initiative is the act of technically optimizing your web design and corresponding content to rank higher on relevant search results. Unsurprisingly, most companies optimize for Google.
Some common (and helpful!) SEO tactics are:
- Improving website code
- Identifying keywords
- Writing content optimized for keywords
- Increasing site speed
- Mobile optimization
- And more!
Additional Digital Marketing Services
Digital marketing is so complex, which means that there is nearly an endless list of digital marketing campaigns that can be implemented to grow your business. Additional digital marketing services are:
- Email marketing
- Marketing automation
- Affiliate marketing
- Data and analytics
- Inbound marketing
- Digital public relations
- Conversion rate optimization
- And more!
How Much Does It Cost To Hire A Digital Marketing Company?
Top digital marketing companies commonly charge per hour per person. This allows you to only pay for the work an agency puts into your project and helps you get the best bang for your buck.
Expect to pay around $100-$175 per person per hour for digital marketing agencies that are based in the United States.
However, if you choose to partner with a digital marketing company that is overseas (such as an Eastern Europe digital marketing firm) hourly rates can drop to as low as $40 per person per hour.
Many companies also choose to hire digital marketing firms on a monthly retainer contract. This means that the digital marketing agency acts as more of an expert consultant that advises your company as opposed to the leader or major campaigns.
Depending on the type of project and amount of consulting you need, monthly retainer fees for U.S. based digital marketing agencies typically ranges from $1000 to $3000 or more.
Meanwhile, digital marketing agencies located overseas have less expensive monthly retainers that hover around $700 per month, give or take.
Digital marketing agencies can also charge per project or a results-based fee, although those invoice types are less common.
How To Choose The Best Digital Marketing Company
Understand The Marketing Services You Need & An Agency’s Area Of Expertise
Digital marketing encompasses many strategies and campaigns across dozens of platforms – if not more – and not every brand will benefit from every initiative.
Therefore, before you start searching for a digital marketing agency, you must first determine what services you think you’ll need.
For example, are you looking to rank higher on search engine listings? SEO is imperative. Do you want to reengage first-time visitors and transform them into brand loyalists? Perhaps you need a digital marketing agency that is an expert in retargeting.
Understanding the marketing services you need before you search for a digital marketing company is important because not every digital marketing agency will be an expert in every digital marketing strategy.
There will inevitably be tactics they are well-versed in and tactics they are less familiar with. And you obviously want to sign a contract with an agency that is knowledgeable in the services you actually need.
Not sure where to start? Take a look at your current marketing plan and research what your competitors are investing in. That will give you a baseline guide of what services you should be searching for in a digital marketing agency.
Learn How A Digital Marketing Agency Delivers Results
The best digital marketing agencies have a streamlined process from start to finish. This empowers them to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. This strategy comes complete with a point of contact, scheduled meetings, due dates, drafts, deliverables, and desired outcomes.
How a digital marketing agency creates a strategy, ensures deadlines are being met and facilitates follow-through is what takes a marketing company from good to great.
Thus, it’s imperative to find a marketing partner that delivers. They must give you the level of attention, organization, and communication you need to achieve your goals.
View A Digital Marketing Company’s Professional Portfolio
The best digital marketing agencies have detailed portfolios full of successful projects. These case studies are telling signs if an agency can deliver for you, too.
Do your own research and learn what you can about an agency’s prior campaigns. Then, ask the agency detailed questions about these projects, such as:
- Why was it successful?
- Did it go according to plan – why or why not?
- What did you learn from the project?
Plus, don’t forget to ask potential partner agencies about their missteps, too. The best digital marketing firms will recognize projects that didn’t meet expectations and will tell you what they learned and how they plan to avoid that in the future.
10 Questions To Ask A Top Digital Marketing Agency Before Hiring Them
Digital marketing agencies are a valuable resource for brands and businesses big and small. They provide a wealth of opportunity and put your business on the path to growth and success.
But choosing the best digital marketing agency that’s right for you can be challenging. There are a lot of factors to consider and a number of questions that can make the whole process seem like more of a nightmare than anything else.
But the value of these agencies far surpasses the stress of finding the digital marketing agency that’s right for you.
Ask the following questions to help you find the right digital marketing agency for your next project.
- What digital marketing tactics do you think are the most valuable and why?
- How often will we meet to discuss marketing strategy?
- Who will our point of contact be?
- How will you ensure the project is on track?
- Who will be working on our project and how many hours will they be dedicating to our project each week?
- What experience do you have in our industry?
- What experience do you have solving business growth or marketing problems that are similar to ours?
- What tools, programs or resources do you use and why?
- How do you determine key performance indicators, track results, and report on them? How often do you do this?
- What services are included in your fee? Are there any services, programs, etc. that may cost extra?
Top Digital Marketing Trends Of 2019
Each year, dozens of marketing trends infiltrate the market with the promise of increasing consumers, improving conversions, and boosting online revenue.
Some leave as quickly as they came and others (such as content marketing) become staples in business growth.
But the trends to watch are those that are innovative, proven to increase conversions, and not yet utilized by every brand -- like these 5 major digital marketing trends below!
What Are the Top Digital Marketing Agencies?
The best digital marketing agencies in the world exhibit several key qualities that prove that can help brands like you grow online effectively. These qualities are:
- The ability to understand and adapt to any brand.
- Strong company leadership and teams of qualified digital marketing experts.
- Access to top tools and resources that give them better management capabilities and access to real-time data.
- Experience in your industry and solving similar business growth problems to yours.
- Expertise in the digital marketing areas you’re looking to implement.
- A collaborative culture that will work with your brand.
- The ability to create a clear and organized roadmap to success – and stick to it.
- A history of successful marketing campaigns, strategies and initiatives.
DesignRush features the top digital marketing companies in the table above, where you can compare the each agency’s leadership, portfolio, expertise, reviews, rankings, average hourly rate and more to find the best digital marketing firm that will grow your brand.
