Why You NOW Need a Digital Agency?

If you want to increase your sales leads, then you need a Digital Agency.

SEO is only part of your marketing equation. Nowadays you need a digital marketing agency working with you to compliment your SEO campaign.

WHY? Because SEO is only 1 strand or 1 part of your marketing mix. As a business owner, you need to start thinking about expanding your reach and this can only be done with the help of a digital marketing agency.

Let me elaborate on this as the digital marketing landscape has changed significantly over the last 12 months.

In years gone by (and I am talking well over 10 years now), if a business wanted to attract new customers, all it had to do was put an ad in the local paper of the Yellow Pages. This was a once a month or year activity and it was really set and forget.

HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED!

Let’s move forward say 3 years to the beginning of 2000 and businesses now look to Google for all their marketing. Google essentially put most print ads directories ( like the Yellow Pages) out of business as this became the ‘go to’ search engine. All businesses ever wanted for the last 10-15 years was to be on the first page of Google and this led to an absolute explosion of SEO companies. Some were good and most were bad, but the point here is that this is the only place consumers were searching when it came to goods or services.

The only issue with Google and being on page 1 was that there are only so many available spaces on page 1 if you want to rank organically. PLUS the price of AdWords was and is becoming out of reach for most small business owners. In some cases, people can be paying up to $50 per click for their Adwords and this simply does not stack up. It’s just way too pricey.

Like everything in the digital environment, websites were popping up all over the place as businesses looked at alternatives to advertise and get their message out there. Businesses without the budget for SEO or Adwords were starting to play around in the social media space on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linked In and Twitter. What they found was that these were working. Businesses had actually found other avenues to promote themselves online.

As these platforms became more and more popular, businesses started to realise that they also needed to be in this space as part of their mainstream marketing if they were going to be competitive. Now if you visit any of these social media sites you are going to see them jammed packed with information, ads and posts. It’s starting to become increasingly harder to stand out and be noticed here. Like Google, businesses are now looking for the next digital space to sell their wares.

This leads me to remarketing. Have you ever noticed ads following you around whilst you are browsing the net? Well, this is remarketing and is another marketing tool businesses are all starting to use to get noticed. A product introduced by Google to further help businesses get online is fast becoming extremely popular. Get on the Sydney Morning Herald website and you will see all these types of ads. The trend is growing and getting bigger.

For most businesses and I am including some mid to large companies all these new technologies are hard to quantify and measure. As a business, you need to measure a return on investment and this is where you need the help of a digital marketing agency. WHY? Because they can put together a digital marketing campaign that can cover all these new platforms. If you have a budget they should be able to customise a targeted strategy that will see you generate the maximum return on your investment dollar.

These new and evolving technologies are not easy to understand and if you go it alone, the chances are you are going to end up spending more money and ultimately missing your target audience. Having a digital agency as your online partner means that you are neatly covering off these main areas, which should form, at the very least, the cornerstone of your online marketing.

A digital agency should be able to provide the following services

Search Engine Optimisation

They need to know what keywords will have the highest amount of online traffic relevant to your business and be able to rank these for you. Only go with a proven SEO company – mistakes here will KILL your business as SEO is the most important marketing tool for your website.

Related post: 5 Golden Rules when Choosing your SEO Agency

Adwords

Whilst your SEO is being implemented, to drive some traffic and generate leads you should be targeting your consumers through a managed Adwords campaign. My advice is to not do this alone as it can get very expensive with costly mistakes if you do not have a thorough understanding of how it works. You don’t want to throw good money away here…believe me!

Social Media Marketing

Your business needs to be active on the most popular social media platforms. If you aren’t, your competition will be and this is disastrous for any business looking to capture new clients. This space is becoming more popular and your customers now expect that they can engage with your company on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. If you are not visible in this space this can damage your brand. Hence the need for a digital agency that can manage this effectively for you and provide you with measured results. DON’T AVOID THIS SPACE.

Blogs and Content Marketing

As I am doing right now by publishing content, you as a business owner need to be actively doing this on an ongoing basis. You need to be combining your blogs and content marketing with your social media to even further widen your reach.

Remarketing

You need a great ad designed and you need this to be very targeted

Web User Experience

What happens when someone lands on your website? Do they buy or make an inquiry or do they exit the site? You need to make sure that the user experience is seamless, extremely easy to use and above all entices them to buy or engage with you. In this highly competitive digital world, if your website isn’t converting browsers into buyers then all of your marketing will amount to nothing. Hence the need to work with a digital agency that has a design team that can look at your Google analytics, make recommendations to improve the conversion rates and in turn revenue. Crazy Egg elaborates on this further by telling us: How long do users stay on your website? Less than 15 seconds. That’s the average time spent on a website. And that’s how long you have to capture someone’s attention on your website. I’ve dubbed this “the 15 Second Rule.” Your website has to get their attention immediately if they are going to look elsewhere and this is a super-critical component of the web experience and part of the digital agencies job.

Finding a digital agency in Sydney is not as easy as it would seem – you must find an agency that can not only prove their expertise in SEO but be able to analyse all your web traffic and look at ways of improving this.