Introduction
So what is a digital marketing agency? It is a group of people that create online campaigns to meet the needs of its clients, which could be individuals or businesses of any type or size.
They are organized to meet the standards of their clients, including ideation, creation, execution, and reporting of such campaigns.
There are agencies that have a physical address or they are completely remote, be aware that most of the time there will be virtual meetings with stakeholders and account managers.
There are many types of online channels that digital marketing agencies use to push those campaigns:
Content Creation
Creative agencies support the creation of content in different media types, these can be long-form articles, explainer videos, interactive pages, webinars, static images, 3D animation, guides, white papers, online resources, glossary, etc.
These types of digital content help your site to be relevant to your audience. You want an informed audience that can make decisions based on what you have provided through your site.
Your site must be easy to search for the content that the user wants to consume, this includes all of the above types of media so they can make the best decision moving forward.
The creative agency helping with multiple types of content, if done user experience research, can recommend what type of content is best to serve your audience. Some users like to read ebooks while others like to interact with the web page.
Agencies use Canva or Adobe Express to create ads and creatives in a very easy way. Try them out if you like! They are user-friendly. 🙂
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a great way of attracting users to your site and it is a process that takes time to build a reputation, remember the acronym EEAT(Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). These are signals for Google’s algorithm to place your website in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
The digital agency must create a thorough keyword research strategy to help the client’s website and build content around those keywords.
There are multiple steps to creating a great SEO strategy, and that includes creating articles that are understandable for the user and for search engines.
There are many keyword research tools out there that share information about keywords including monthly traffic and keyword difficulty.
Agencies must be experts with these tools and create relevant content for the target audience with clear calls to action.
One key aspect of SEO is link-building strategies. The digital marketing agency can develop such a strategy to increase relevant links to your site.
This refers to the ability to create and manage links that come from other sites that are relevant to your industry and this in turn increases the EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) of your site.
Video Advertising
One of the most relevant ways of communicating information is through video advertising. Creating quality videos for your goals can have a huge impact on your bottom line. These could be animated or testimonial videos, they offer a sense of trustworthiness to the user watching the video.
You can publish the video in many outlets such as on YouTube, Vimeo, or on your own server.
The video can be optimized as well by generating closed captions, breaking down the video into small snippets, and making it easy to understand.
Did you know that YouTube is the second most used search engine? It is interesting to know that people want to view an informational or how-to video. There are many types of videos and doing one that serves a purpose to your site can greatly be a converting machine.
There are millions of videos out there and doing one that is relevant to your audience is key to showing up on top of the search results on YouTube.
Search Engine Marketing
Google, Bing, and Yahoo! are the most common search engines that provide an advertising platform so you can leverage their technology to convert users and generate revenue.
Most of the time the ads show up first on the Search engine results pages (most of the time there are four positions available) and you, as an advertiser, must bid on keywords that people input as a query on the search bar in order to trigger an auction of advertisers competing with top positions on the results pages.
This allows the advertising platforms to work with agencies that are managing the marketing campaigns on behalf of the clients, making the agency generate revenue based on the campaign’s budget or in other terms.
Once the search engine returns the result, the ad will show up to the user, agencies will place bids on the best keywords that are tailored to your business goals and to the intent of the user.
There are multiple types of strategies you can bid on search engine marketing platforms that can greatly increase sales, and digital marketing agencies should leverage them on behalf of the client to maximize engagement.
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, and/or Twitter can be a great way to generate conversions and attract prospects. They have many features to engage with your audience and bring them to your site or convert them within the social media platform.
It is necessary to understand the audience and social media platforms have great tools to segment them with ease. They have the ability to segment by age, gender, location, job title, and other sorts.
Social media marketing is a great way to attract customers. when a digital strategy is fully developed, there can be a massive reach of users who are watching and clicking on your ads.
You can have a video as an ad on these platforms and can support your goals towards conversions and revenue.
Social media advertising is here to stay for the long run and has helped many businesses target their ads to a relevant audience. That is the power of social.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to advertise to audiences that have already subscribed to your email list and want to consume your content. It has the power to change how people think or receive deals and discounts from your E-commerce store.
If you are a news site, you can send exclusive newsletters to them to retain and convert your audience. There are many email marketing platforms like Pardot, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and others.
You can build “drip campaigns” which is a sequence of emails based on the interaction of the user with emails and with your website, they are created so that it has the possibility of converting users, having phone calls with them, or generating revenue when purchasing online.
Drip campaigns are provided by email marketing platforms. They are meant to be easy to build and can be complex as well depending on the audience and sales cycle.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is one type of marketing that shows display ads to users that are navigating sites that have space to show relevant media to audiences that are either cookied or searching for something online.
“Cookied” in marketing terms means that users have a small piece of code on their browser that is shared with a site in order to understand user behavior and show relevant ads to them.
There are many websites that have ad placements in order to make a profit from the ad as well. Programmatic advertising is another way to share remarketing ads.
Remarketing Ads are display ads that are shown on sites that follow users’ intentions in order for them to view and click the ad.
An example would be that you were searching for a laptop computer on Amazon. You leave the site without purchasing the product and when you are navigating other sites, if they have placement for remarketing ads you will be shown, if the advertiser has an active campaign, an ad about laptop computers.
This type of display advertising is widely used across the web. Both the advertiser and the search engine make a profit when they are clicked.
Programmatic advertising doesn’t necessarily need to be remarketing, it could be based on categories, for example, if you are researching something on a tech site, it would be more likely that display ads will show you tech products.
These are just the different types of display ads that are shown on placements where websites can show them to a relevant audience.
Press Release Distribution
Press releases are a great distribution channel to share news about your company or some big announcement that you need to share.
There are multiple vendors that can help you distribute the press release to trustworthy sites and can share your press release without too much hassle.
The most common site for press release distribution is https://www.prnewswire.com/. It has a great outlet of sites that can deliver the content to audiences that could potentially be interested in your update.
The main types of press releases are new hires, new products, events, research findings, new ventures, business partnerships, awards, book publications, rebranding, and crisis management.
Press releases are meant to share information that does not necessarily have a call to action.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is a really interesting marketing channel, it leverages the power of native advertising which means that the sponsored content blends in with the site’s blog structure, which makes it look unintrusive to the user’s eyes.
Sponsored content is usually called native advertising as well, and as the name states, it feels that they aren’t ads, they feel that they are part of the look and feel of the site.
The most common distributors of this type of marketing are Taboola and Outbrain, which help advertisers share content through article interstitions to share “content ads” from advertisers.
As you can see in the above image, if you open a page that has an article (this was taken from inc.com), the sponsored content is shown below the article so users can either scroll down for more information or click in one of the articles that are being sponsored.
TL; DR
These are the main channels that digital marketing agencies use to advertise a brand’s content, this can be for an e-commerce or a lead-generating website.
Search engine optimization, social media, email, and search engine marketing are the most widely used channels to deliver ads to potential customers.
Most of the time, digital marketing agencies charge a percentage of the total budget for the campaign. An example would be if you spend $10,000 on social media ads per month, they will likely charge around 15-25% of the max budget, which means that clients will pay $1,500 – $2,500 more for the maintenance and management of such campaigns, you will end up paying $11,500 in total for that campaign.
That can happen with email marketing, sponsored content, press releases, programmatic advertising, etc.
The desire to have attention from an online audience can be determined by your creatives or text ads, the location and timing, and your brand’s online reputation.