In a nutshell, a digital marketing agency is an agency that focuses solely in the digital realm. They don’t offer services for traditional marketing channels like print, billboards, TV, radio, or newspapers. Instead, they focus on websites, social media, digital ads, search engine optimization (SEO), and content creation – all of the tools used to find and engage audiences online

A digital agency can be niche, focusing on solely one aspect of digital marketing, or full service, meaning they help to create a marketing strategy and material for every aspect of your digital marketing plans. Depending on the size of your business, the goals of your campaigns, and the budget you have available, a digital marketing agency like birr, can help you determine the best approach, or marketing strategies and channels, for your business.

Why should you be concerned about your digital presence and worry about digital marketing?

• Organic traffic is responsible for 53% of traffic to all websites.

• Brands with a dedicated blog have a 55% more traffic rate than those that don’t.

• 75% of people don’t go beyond Google’s first result page.

• Leads generated via SEO have a 15% closing rates
  
  From DemandSage.com

• According to a recent research report, “98% of customers will check reviews online before doing business with a local brand. Customer experience done well has so much impact on your brand value that you stand out in your sales.”- Hubspot

   

We are 20 years on from the DotCom boom and bust, and doing business online has become ubiquitous. If you aren’t managing your digital presence like you manage and oversee your physical locations and spaces, it is almost guaranteed that you are harming, and negatively impacting your business’s sales.

The data is pretty clear: you need to make sure your business is online, and that your online presence is putting your best foot forward. Let’s look at some of the ways a digital marketing agency will make sure that people find you because, contrary to the voices in Kevin Costner’s head, just because you built it, doesn’t mean they will come.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is the first thing you do when you have a question about, well, just about anything? You go online and search it. It doesn’t matter if it’s about a product, a service, or whether the chicken or egg came first, in the 21st century, our first port of call is a search engine. Google is the reigning champion of search engines. With a market share of 90% of all search queries worldwide, it’s no wonder “googling” something has become a verb synonymous with search.

But, how does Google, or any other search engine, like Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. find the answer to your search query? Search engines send out crawl bots to analyze and map all websites. They start by downloading a file from your website called a robot.txt file. This file includes a sitemap that lists the URLs of your site that you’ve given permission for web crawlers to crawl. It then indexes these pages for search engines to use on their results pages.

Using its algorithms, the search engine then presents to you what it believes are the most accurate results for your search. It makes these conclusions based on a number of factors. The factors include:

• Search intent

  • What exactly are you asking, or hoping to find?

• Relevance of content

  • Are the keywords on your site applicable to the search intent?

• Quality of content

  • I.e. how many other websites link to your website with similar keywords and intent?

  • Is your content trusted and reputable?

• Location

  • Where are you searching from? 

  • Where is the content coming from?

• Usability of content

  • Is your content easy to navigate?

  • Is your site/content mobile-friendly?

• Freshness of the content

  • Is the content recently posted, or is it many years old?

You might wonder, how does the search engine know all of this? Search engines will review and analyze the URL of the page, title tags, frequency of keywords, header and body tags, image and video content on the page (and their associated file names), and the meta description for each page. It then uses the magic of computational logic and artificial intelligence to determine which pages to display on the search engine results page (SERP).

The nature and skillfulness of search algorithms have improved dramatically over time. So much so, that you will now be penalized for attempting to “game” your search results. It is extremely important that your content is humanized, and delivers the answers the searcher is looking for, in a manner that is clear, concise, and easily read not just by web bots, but also the humans that are consuming the content.

Content Creation

What is content? Content on your website is everything from the words that tell people about you and your business, to the photos, graphics, illustrations, and videos you use to make it look “pretty”. Creating content for your site that is relevant to your target audience and answers the queries they enter into a search engine will be what places your web page in front of them.

If SEO is the backbone of digital marketing then content is the flesh and blood of your digital marketing strategy. In short, content is everything when it comes to digital marketing. Content and content strategies are always maturing and evolving. But, as new fads come and go, creating content that speaks directly to your audience, and demonstrates your ethos and values as a company or brand, is what will endure. It’s more important that your content is authentic to your brand than that it’s “on trend”.

If your digital strategy is focused on social media, you will need to be creating multiple pieces of content, per day. If your digital marketing is focused on ad buys, then you will need to invest in creative and clickable content. You will want to ensure that the content on your website is clear, concise, and helps move people through your sales funnel. Content in your newsletters and email campaigns needs to be informative, engaging, and add value to your target audience. And if you don’t have a digital presence, either because you’re just starting out, or you don’t believe in it, then we’d love to know more about your business and/or strategy!

As mentioned above, it’s important that your content reflects your business’s ethos and values. Your audience wants to know more about you and what makes your business different from the rest. Creating content for the sake of creating content will not help you or your business stand out in the crowd. You’re just contributing to the noise we’re all exposed to every time we go online.

The best way to maximize your ROI on digital marketing is to focus on creating engaging, informative content that speaks to your audience, and answers all of their questions about your products or services. How you share that content is what your digital marketing strategy will determine. Emails, social media, blogs, ads, etc. are all just channels of distribution. You can leverage the same pieces of content across multiple channels and platforms. By leveraging content across multiple platforms, you increase your audience’s exposure to it, and the likelihood that they will engage with it. birr’s designers, copywriters, photographers, illustrators and strategists can help your business develop a content strategy that will place your business on your customers’ radar.

Email marketing

If you’re building a digital marketing strategy without email marketing, what the heck are you thinking?!? When most people think of email marketing, they’re turned off by the thought of “spamming” their clients and customers. But you must remember that content is everything to your digital marketing strategy. If you’re delivering content that isn’t spammy, then you have nothing to worry about! In addition, remember that people have signed up for your email newsletter – they have given you their email address so they can hear from you! They want to receive your emails!

Email marketing is a great way to share stories about your brand in a longer form version. By being strategic about creating content on your website, you can lead people to various pages or posts with introductions or lead-ins in your newsletter, and provide a link for them to click through to the “full story”. This not only helps increase traffic to your website but, by analyzing the links that are clicked, you’ll gain insight into the content that your audience finds most engaging, and in turn, refine your content strategy to produce more content like that. This becomes a reinforcing loop that will greatly improve your results over time.

Email marketing is also arguably the highest ROI marketing channel in the digital space. Various studies have shown that for every dollar spent on email marketing, $35-$40 in sales are returned. What other marketing channel delivers that high of an ROI? Check out some other stats on the value of email marketing here.

Social media

You can’t talk about digital marketing, without talking about social media. Social media has been the great democratizor of the digital space, allowing everyone from the multinational with a nine figure marketing budget to the home-based solopreneur to be seen by people around the world. However, as the platforms have evolved, so too have their business models and content algorithms. It has become more and more difficult for businesses to achieve “organic” reach, and the platforms are forcing businesses to pay more and more for “paid” reach.

Success with social media requires an understanding of your goals, your customer funnel, and how you evaluate results beyond just vanity metrics. Having 10,000 followers is great, but how many of them are actual customers? Do you need to be sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Telegram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and every other social media platform in existence? Or, is your ideal demographic only on one or two of the platforms? Establishing how your social media content ties into your overall marketing strategy is imperative to ensure that you’re not just spinning your wheels with your social media activity. And, just like email marketing, ensuring that your content provides value to your audience will help increase its engagement, and as a result, its reach. 

Learn More about our Digital Market Agency

Providing the full stream of digital marketing services, birr builds compelling brands by igniting the creativity that exists in everyone. If you’re ready to make your mark on the world wide web, get in touch.