Nowadays, many consumers make their purchases online. Statistics indicate that as of 2024, there are 2.4 billion online shoppers, around a third of the world population. With such huge numbers, it's clear why digital marketing has become a preferred marketing channel for most businesses.

However, with so many different digital marketing platforms with various requirements and catering to diverse audiences, it can get tricky to get started with digital marketing. Businesses need to understand the other digital marketing styles to determine the ones best suited for them. Hiring a digital marketing agency would be advisable if you are getting started with digital marketing. This article will guide you through hiring an agency and provide actionable tips on using them to grow your brand.

What is a Digital Marketing Agency?

A digital marketing agency is a business that offers advertising and marketing services using digital channels such as social media, websites, email marketing, content creation, and more. The goal could be to reach existing customers or even new ones. The marketing agencies determine the best platforms to reach the target audience.

For instance, if your business sells gym equipment, digital marketing agencies focus on people who love working out. They may use content creation, SEO, and search engine marketing to draw such audiences to their client’s site. On the other hand, if you sell stylish dresses and jewelry that are popular with young girls, they may use Instagram or TikTok marketing to reach your target audience.

Importance of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing enables you to reach your target audience with their desired content. It also lets you get the data you need to take your marketing campaign to the next level. For instance, when you or your digital agency runs a marketing campaign on Instagram, you will receive various metrics such as your audience, click-through rate, and more. These will show you how effective your marketing campaign was and help you improve your future campaigns.

Importance of a Digital Marketing Agency

We have already seen why digital marketing is essential, whether you do it yourself or engage an agency. Let us look at the benefits of working with a digital marketing agency.

Access to a Wide Range of Skills

Digital marketing agencies have professionals with specialized knowledge and experience who can help your business navigate the complex digital marketing world. Their expertise is in different fields, such as SEO, PPC, SEM, SMM, and email marketing. Remember that hiring professionals in all these fields would cost you a lot. However, when you work with a digital marketing agency, you will have access to all these professionals at no extra cost.

Access to Advanced Tools

Digital marketing agencies use various tools to create an optimal campaign for their clients. They use keyword research tools, social media marketing, analytics, and competitor analysis. These tools can help optimize your campaigns for better targeting and improved results. The tools can also provide essential insights into the performance of your campaign.

If you consider the cost of buying the tools, you might pay a lot of money. However, since agencies serve digital marketing clients, they can leverage their use efficiently, which can, in turn, drive success with your marketing campaigns.

Cost-effective

Many business owners have the misconception that hiring digital marketing is more expensive than handling your campaigns internally. However, when you consider the cost of building an in-house team with all the skills we mentioned earlier, you can see that it is more cost-effective to work with an agency.

In addition to the cost of hiring, an in-house team will require training and monthly salaries. However, when you work with an agency, you will only pay the agreed fee while they hire and pay their employees. Since they work with different clients, you can enjoy better cost efficiency. By saving on your digital marketing, you can use your budget on other strategic areas to drive the growth of your business.

Flexibility and Scalability

Working with a digital marketing agency will provide you with flexibility and scalability that you would otherwise not have gotten with an in-house team. In case of rising demand, the agency can quickly upscale or downscale its operations to cater to your needs. Whether you want to increase your marketing efforts during Black Friday or reduce marketing efforts during the low seasons, an agency can adjust its marketing tactics and budget to meet your needs. 

Ability to Focus on Your Core Activities

Let's assume you are a business making handmade bags. You need time and effort to develop a product that meets your customer’s needs. This is on top of other management processes such as stock control, customer service, accounting, distribution, and human resource management. That means it takes a lot of effort to run a successful business. 

When you add different digital marketing strategies, you can quickly run out of time to focus on your core business. However, you can focus on your core business when outsourcing digital marketing. This can help improve business efficiency.

Understand the Latest Trends and Tools

Like other technologies, digital marketing changes to meet current trends. If you are using your in-house team, it can be hard to keep up with the latest trends and tools. However, digital marketing agencies can stay abreast with emerging trends since it's their core role. Their proactive approach helps to ensure that your digital marketing efforts are driven by innovation, helping you achieve optimal results.

A Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

As noted earlier, digital marketing consists of different strategies. Since digital marketers have the knowledge and experience to develop these strategies, you can be assured of a comprehensive marketing campaign. Unlike other businesses that may focus on social media advertising and ignore SEO, your agency will boost your presence in all channels. This comprehensive approach will increase your presence online, ensuring that your brand remains in people’s minds.

Ability to Measure Results

While digital marketing offers great analytics, the numbers you can see in the in-built platform can be limited. Fortunately, agencies have advanced analytics tools that effectively measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Using this data-detailed approach, they can get insights into what is working and the areas needing improvement. Since you want them to deliver results, the more analytics they get, the better the results you will get.

Improved Creativity and Innovation

No matter your marketing strategies, agencies can add new ideas and a fresh perspective to take your campaign to the next level. Because of their experience with diverse clients, they understand the best strategies for driving engagement and increasing traffic and conversion. This expertise can help you engage with your audience more effectively and stay ahead of the competition.

Smooth Campaigns Execution

Managing a digital marketing campaign requires a lot of planning, implementation, and monitoring. With their advanced project management skills, agencies have the skills to manage your campaign more efficiently. They will take all the necessary steps, from setting your goals to developing your campaign timelines and measuring the outcomes. This ensures that your campaign is executed smoothly, reducing chances of errors while increasing the return on investment.

Who is a Digital Agent?

Once you hire a digital marketing agency, they will provide a professional known as a digital agent or a digital marketing consultant. The role of this professional is to understand your business's products, processes, and goals. Once they have the information they need on your business, the professional will create a digital marketing plan to meet your goals.

Based on your information, they will create a buyer persona for your target audience and determine your campaign's best digital marketing channels and approach. When you get a third-party look at your business, they can view things uniquely. They will quickly notice the areas where you are missing marketing opportunities and what is working and what isn't.

Types of Digital Marketing Agencies

Digital marketing agencies can be put in different categories depending on their service. These are:

Full-service Agency

This is a one-stop shop for all digital services, from SEO, PPC, SEM, email marketing, and more. The services that these agencies offer have different goals, such as:

• Increasing brand awareness.
• Generating leads.
• Increasing revenue.
• Creating awareness of the business.
• Creating a following for the business.

The agencies can achieve these goals by completely overhauling the marketing strategy. When you hire them, they will create a marketing strategy that will depend on customer engagement, site audit, etc. The agency will also pay special attention to the business data such as customer engagement, conversions, leads, and clickthrough rates. They can then launch a well-coordinated and consistent campaign across different platforms. Where necessary, they will adjust the campaign to match their findings. 

SEO Agencies

SEO increases your website’s visibility on search engines and across different devices. Therefore, the primary role of an SEO agency is to improve your ranking on Google and other search engines. When customers search for keywords related to your niche, your site will appear in the search results. This will enable you to reach more prospects, resulting in higher conversions.

They do that using various steps, which may begin with a site audit to determine if your site has been penalized and if there are elements that prevent it from ranking well on the SERPs. Afterwards, they can use various tools to determine the keywords users search for in your niche. Then, they can optimize your site for the SERPs.

PPC Agency

Just like SEO agencies specialize in organic searches, we have PPC agencies specializing in overseeing paid ads. Also known as digital agencies, they help to plan ads depending on the target audience. They then measure the results to determine how well the strategy works, using data such as conversion, ROI, and click-through rates. 

Where necessary, they adjust the ad to improve it and eliminate errors. The ads could be sponsored search ads, video ads, search engine banner ads, or sponsored search ads. They can also include video ads on streaming platforms such as YouTube.

PPC agencies ensure your ads are shown to the right target audience. They can also help your business create ads and content that will draw the interest of your audience. They aim to give you a higher return on your ad spend while keeping your advertising budget low, giving your business complete control over its ad expenditure.

Social Media Marketing Agency

As you know, social media marketing refers to marketing done on social media such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Therefore, social media agencies aim to help businesses achieve various social media marketing goals, such as:

• Increasing customer engagement.
• Building a community to advocate for the brand.
• Improving the customer experience.
• Improving brand awareness.
• Positioning your business as the market leader.
• Collecting customer data such as their favorite platform and engagement methods.

Performance Marketing Agency

A performance marketing agency aims to help your business achieve a specific digital marketing goal. You pay them when your business meets those goals. The concept is borrowed from PPC advertising, but in this case, it's pay-per-action. To determine if the agency's strategies are working, consider the number of clicks you receive to your site, whether you are getting conversions, and more.

This form of marketing aims to implement a particular advertising and marketing effort to enable the consumer to take action, such as clicking on a site, signing up to an email list, or even buying a product.

Market Research Agency

The role of these agencies is to help you understand your customers, such as how they perceive your brand, products, or services. They will go out of their way to collect data and determine customers' perceptions of your brand. The data can be collected from customers when shopping to enable your business to adjust depending on how they are drawn to your product quality, customer service, and more.

They will then provide insights on the marketing methods that are working, the changes that need to be made, and the kind of experience customers have when shopping for products. They can provide quantitative data, qualitative research, or both.

Direct Marketing Agencies

This form of digital marketing agency helps businesses communicate directly with customers without going through a middleman. The agent seeks to offer information on your company and its brands directly to the target audience. These could be repeat, new, or returning customers rather than the general audience. This has several goals, such as:

• Increasing brand loyalty.
• Building a deeper connection with the customers.

Direct marketing agencies need to carefully plan for this form of marketing so that they don’t give the wrong impressions of your company, its products, and services.

B2B Marketing Agency

A B2B marketing agency provides services to businesses whose products or services target other companies instead of direct customers. Unlike B2C content, which uses general language that can be easily understood, B2B content uses industry jargon to increase the business's authority.

This marketing agency aims to help businesses increase their conversions and leads. It also helps its clients establish themselves as the authority in the niche while adding value to the company.

Content Marketing Agency

Content creation is one of the key digital marketing strategies. This has resulted in the rise of content marketing agencies that provide different types of content, from blog posts to videos and podcasts. These agencies help position their clients as experts in the industry. 

They do that by creating content that engages and inspires the customers to take action based on the advice of the industry thought leaders. The agencies help businesses to increase brand awareness and position themselves as a reputable brand. Therefore, when customers want to buy something, they will think of them first.

How to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency

Several factors must be considered if you are searching for a digital marketing agency. These include:

Your Individual Need

Start by determining the kind of agency services you are looking for. Choose the one that best fits you. To determine this, you should ask yourself several questions. These are:

• Do I need a fully remote agency, or would I prefer one near me?
• Do I need a full-service agency or a specialized service such as SEO?

Determine Your Digital Marketing Goal

You want to ensure that the digital agency you work with aligns with your digital marketing objectives. While there are many agencies, not all will be well-fitted for your goals. Consider how the partnership with the agency will help you reach your digital marketing goal. Will it be the best fit for achieving your desired results? 

By asking yourself the questions, you can determine if the agency has the knowledge, expertise, and resources to help you achieve those goals. This will also help you get an accurate budget quote.

Performance-based Marketing

You want to ensure that the digital marketing agency will provide you with the desired results. They should, therefore, provide you with the necessary data to show the effectiveness of your campaign. Additionally, they should provide analytics on the ROIs of their previous clients.

Constant Communication

When you ask them questions about their services, how fast do they respond? If they are too slow to respond to your queries even before you hire them, that will be a red flag, and you had better avoid them. While this doesn’t mean you need to micromanage them, you need an agency that is honest and is open with their communication. When you have someone available to answer your questions through phone, chat, or email, you will get the much-needed peace of mind.

Budget

Your budget is also a key consideration when hiring a digital marketing agency. Remember that digital marketing services don’t come cheap, so you don’t want to break the bank when hiring for such a service. Determine the amount you want to spend on outsourcing your digital marketing services. Consider if you would be ready to spend a little bit more or if you want to stay within your budget strictly.

Creativity

If your brand will stand out from the competition, you should work with a creative brand that has original ideas and creative thinking. You don't want an agency that will only copy-paste the campaign they run for your competitors. Instead, they should have an innovative approach, depending on your unique scenario.

Line of Services 

The services that the digital marketing company offers are also a key consideration. You don't want to hire a social media agency when you need an SEO agency. Therefore, consider if an agency has the services you need before engaging them. 

Research

Once you have shortlisted a few agencies you feel would be a good fit for your business, don’t end there. Start researching details such as:

• How much do they charge?
• Size of their teams.
• What are their previous customers saying about them?

By bearing these questions in your mind, narrowing down your search for a good agency is easy. Remember to check independent sites such as TrustPilot or Google when checking out the agency reviews and client testimonials. Understanding the experience of their past clients can give you a hint of the kind of services to expect from them.

Questions to Ask the Agency

To take your research even further, you must ask questions to understand more about them, their services, operations, and whether they will be a good fit for your business. Some of the questions to ask them include:

• What are your services?
• Do you have any experience working with businesses similar to mine?
• What are your areas of digital marketing specialization?
• What resources and marketing tools will you be using?
• How often will I get results for my campaigns?
• How do you remain updated with the recent technologies and trends in digital marketing?

Conclusion

A digital marketing agency can play an essential role in your strategy. They can bring the tools and expertise to run an effective digital marketing campaign. You can be assured of a successful campaign by working with a reputable agency. If you are getting started with hiring one, our detailed guide will be helpful.