Good digital marketing can make or break any business.
It can be the difference between winning a Formula 1 race or driving a car that breaks down in a few laps. Good marketing generates more revenue, helps build customer loyalty, and spurs brand awareness.
Hiring a digital marketing agency may sound like a lofty investment, but don’t slam on the brakes just yet. You can actually pick and choose the most suitable services according to your current business needs and budget.
Let this list of marketing agency services help you decide what to outsource to keep your business moving forward.
What Is a Digital Marketing Agency?
A digital marketing agency offers various services to support your business in generating traffic and revenue. These services may include:
Digital marketing agencies employ experts in each one of these areas who can help your business execute these essential functions.
Who Needs Digital Marketing Services?
From your local indie bookstore to large enterprises to nonprofits, any business can benefit from outsourcing digital marketing services. Which services you choose to hire out all depends on your current goals, needs, and budget.
Is your marketing at a standstill? Are you struggling with certain areas of digital marketing? Do you have specific goals in mind you want help with? Your answers may help you consider outsourcing some of your digital marketing functions.
How Much Do Digital Marketing Services Cost?
At the end of the day, the amount of money you spend on digital marketing will be up to you.
If you’re looking to save on digital marketing services, you can do them yourself by becoming an all-in-one digital marketer for your business.
But if you want to fast-track your results, marketing services can cost anywhere from a couple hundred to several thousand dollars a month, depending on the agency.
You can see some actual costs of these services in the Semrush Agency Partners hub.
What Are The Most Common Digital Marketing Services?
Not sure which functions you should outsource? Here’s a rundown of several digital marketing services, their nuances, and what makes them effective, so you can make an informed decision about the services you might hire.
Keep in mind that when you employ all the services together, you’ll get the most out of your marketing.
So let’s get into the different services.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great place to start with your marketing. SEO is the process of organically increasing traffic to your website using unpaid methods. As a result, this will help you improve your ranking on search engines so you’re more visible to potential customers.
Many site builders like WordPress, Squarespace, and WIX have guided SEO setup tools included you can take advantage of when creating a website.
And while those are an ideal first step, SEO is an ongoing process and should be managed daily for optimal success.
Some areas of SEO a hired agency may focus on include:
- On-Page SEO: focuses on optimizing the website internally to rank higher (e.g., blog posts, articles, landing pages, schema, etc.)
- Off-Page SEO: helps optimize the website externally using outside tactics like link-building
- Technical SEO: involves optimizations to website and servers to help bots crawl and index your site
Talk to an agency about what aspects of SEO your business should prioritize.
Content Marketing
Websites don’t run without content. Without content, Google can’t crawl or index your site. Without content, potential customers don’t know what your business does. And without content, you can’t guide them on their way to your service or product.
Simply put, content marketing is the development and distribution of the content on your website. Your content could be written words, video, audio, or other visuals.
Some common forms used in content marketing are:
- Blog posts and articles
- Case studies
- Social media posts
- Press releases
- White papers
- Emails
- Newsletter
- Infographics
- Landing pages
- Videos
- Webinars
- Podcasts
You can distribute content through various channels including organic (e.g., blogs), paid (e.g., Google Ads), and social (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.).
A good agency can help you see results with your content marketing efforts.
Paid Advertising (PPC)
One way to get faster results and traffic to your website is with a paid advertising strategy. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a system of advertising in which a business or advertiser pays a small fee in exchange for a clicked ad.
PPC attracts customers at various stages of the buyer journey. Ads can come in various dimensions and styles including text, images, or videos.
Some ad types include:
- Shopping: a carousel of ads from available online marketplaces
- Display: image-based or video-based ads
- Search: text-based ads
- Social: ads that appear on social media
PPC campaigns are often a great return on investment (ROI). For example, you could pay $2 for a click that might result in a $500 sale, which would make your ad a worthy investment.
An agency can help you with everything from messaging to design to placement.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great channel for promoting your brand’s services or products. It allows you to directly connect with subscribers to inform them about:
- Special offers
- New products
- News updates
- Ebooks or other new content
- Webinars
- Your brand
You can start utilizing email marketing by acquiring new subscribers through tactics like gated content or webinars.
As your list grows, consistent email marketing can help you engage with your customers to develop better relationships and gain their loyalty. You may be able to generate additional sales from email marketing campaigns when crafted properly.
Market Research
Before you launch a business, the right market research can help determine customers’ needs. Market research can also help existing businesses amp up their marketing strategy.
Sure, you can conduct market research on your own, but it can take a long time to gather thorough and accurate information.
Hiring a professional can help you uncover and analyze:
- Geographic location
- Customer demographics
- Business conditions
- Competitors
- Potential sales
- Potential demand for product/service
- Consumer preferences
A market research agency can help you make more informed and strategic business decisions.
Video Production
Video is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a fast-growing and essential medium you can utilize on every major content marketing channel.
Video production involves storyboarding, shooting, writing, and editing video footage to create short or long-form videos for educational or promotional purposes.
When the video is done well, it can boost engagement, increase brand awareness, and improve page rankings.
Here are some other ways you could use video:
- Viral branding
- Video tutorials
- Onboarding videos
- New product releases
- Social media
- Training and educational video
- Webinars
The possibilities are endless!
If you have a great video idea, but can’t make it a reality, it might be because you haven’t found the right agency just yet.
Public Relations (PR)
Of course, you want your business to be successful. But you also want it to look good in the public eye while spreading brand awareness.
That’s where PR comes in.
Public relations (PR) is a necessity for businesses. It strengthens communications between organizations and the public.
A good PR team helps you respond to negative and positive moments more strategically so you can leave a good impression on the public and your customers. They can also help increase brand awareness and improve credibility by educating the public.
A PR team typically has relationships with the media and a far better reach than you may have as an individual. Plus, media placements can make a positive impact on your SEO.
They also can help grow your brand by positioning you or your business as a thought leader in your industry.
If these are areas of growth for your business, consider hiring a PR agency.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
As arguably one of the most utilized yet ever-changing channels, it’s no surprise so many agencies specialize in social media marketing.
Social media marketing, obviously, is the use of social media networks to promote your business or brand.
But when we get down to the nitty-gritty, social media marketing:
- Creates brand awareness more easily and effectively
- Helps establish a brand voice
- Positions your brand faster than print, TV, or radio
- Uses organic and paid methods to market to your customers
- Lets you engage with your audience
- Helps uncover data about your audience
- Acts as a channel for customer service communication
- Makes distributing content easier
- Keeps you trendy
- Helps analyze competitors
Social media marketing is also very cost-effective, especially for new businesses or those with small marketing budgets.
A social media marketing agency can help your business break new ground in this channel.
Marketing Strategy
So maybe you check all the boxes and are utilizing every content marketing channel. But how do you get them to all work in perfect harmony?
All of these components work better together when there is a strong marketing strategy. Think of a marketing strategy as GPS navigation leading you toward your ideal company vision.
Creating a marketing strategy ensures you:
- Target the right people
- Communicate the right information
- Develop or improve existing or new products and services
- Increase sales
- Grow sustainably
A marketing strategy is fluid. Update yours as necessary—because, let’s face it, the marketing industry never stops changing.
If you’re struggling to nail down a marketing strategy, find an agency that can help you be more intentional with how you market your business.
Web Design & Development
Your website is likely your most important marketing tool.
Two main functions go into creating a website—design and development. So how are they different?
Website designers ensure the site is appealing and easy to interact with. They tend to focus on the more artistic aspects.
Web developers focus more on the programming and technical aspects that help the website function. So that webpage you can access in less than six seconds? It probably has a good web developer behind it.
It’s easy to ixnay web developers entirely and just focus on website design, but this may not be smart in the long run. A growing website could suffer without the help of a web developer.
Ideally, having both can help your website look great and load faster so you can keep users engaged for longer periods of time.
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Why You Should Hire a Marketing Agency
Hiring a professional marketing agency can save you time and a lot of headaches.
You’re already busy managing your business, building customer relationships, and improving your brand presence. You could benefit from one less thing (or a few) to worry about.
Determine the areas you’re weakest in or want to improve upon the most, and let one of our vetted marketing agencies do the heavy lifting for you. So you can focus on what’s most important.
