Illustration of services provided by a digital marketing agency

What Is a Digital Marketing Agency, and Why Is It Useful?

In this blog, we’ll address the following:

  • What digital marketing agencies are and how they work
  • The average cost of services from a digital marketing agency
  • How an online marketing agency can grow your business.
  • What makes the best digital marketing agency for your company

Over 80% of modern shoppers make purchases online, so polishing websites and managing social media accounts are critical for any business’s survival. The smaller the business, the less visible it’ll be and the more its success will depend on how well it navigates the digital market. A powerful online presence can help you find new leads, pulling them down the marketing funnel faster and completing more sales. Whether you outsource your marketing needs to an agency or attempt to tackle them with your own team, no business can survive without a substantial investment in digital marketing.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a multidimensional strategy across online channels to boost a business’s visibility and reach. Websites and social media are great places to start, but sending email blasts is another effective way to communicate with potential customers. By itself, blogging can provide a 70% increase in sales-ready leads, and a search engine’s recommendation for your business can increase conversion rates by 15%. To address digital marketing is to employ strategies and tools across each of these channels to meet sales goals.

What Do Digital Marketing Agencies Do, and How Do They Work?

Digital marketing agencies provide any combination of digital services to boost a business’s popularity, generate more leads and increase revenue. Some agencies are broad enough to perform all of the following services, while others specialize in one or two:

  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Web Design

As many services as there are, these are most pivotal to a business’s survival.

Content Marketing

This strategy involves the consistent creation and spread of high-quality content to promote a business’s ability and willingness to solve potential customers’ problems. To attract new customers and keep current ones loyal, digital marketing agencies employ any combination of blogs, FAQs, service pages and city pages. A marketing team’s writers know how to best represent a business to potential buyers.

Computer keyboard with the words “write blog” on one of the keys
A digital marketing agency can create amazing blog content for your business.

Email Marketing

The purpose of email marketing is to send emails to large numbers of current and potential customers. The crafty graphics and wording of these emails encourage users to take some type of action. Beyond buying a product, actions might also include registering for a subscription with a promo code or writing a review. For every dollar businesses spend on email marketing, they can earn $40.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making a search engine more likely to represent your business among search results. By including keywords in relevant and unique content, digital marketing agencies can make your business more accessible to 80% of potential customers. SEO may sound important because it is. All digital marketing agencies need to deliver on SEO, even if they’re not “SEO agencies.”

Social Media Marketing

Billions of people use social media daily, but spamming followers’ feeds isn’t a good idea. Instead, social media marketing requires a genuine strategy. How do you respond to negative reviews? What voice should you use for your posts? What are the best times to post? No matter what platform you’re on, these considerations are all part of mandatory account management.

Web Design

For most potential customers, your homepage is your first impression. Establishing a visually inviting and authoritative website requires expertise. Writing enough code from scratch to make a beautiful site takes a lot of time and is beyond the ability of most marketing professionals. To keep your site from becoming an eyesore, digital marketing agencies will often use a Content Management System (CMS), like WordPress, to streamline web development and publish content. A user-friendly website with grammatically flawless pages is the easiest to trust.

What Are the Types of Digital Marketing Agencies?

Each “type” of digital marketing agency corresponds to any of the major services. For instance, there are “SEO agencies” and “social media agencies.” We recommend agencies that package multiple services together. Not only are services less expensive when you buy them in packages, but communicating with one team instead of several is a greater convenience. An agency with enough flexibility and expertise to tackle all services is called a full-service digital marketing agency.

What Can I Expect from a Digital Marketing Agency?

Do digital marketing agencies even work? In the long run, digital marketing agencies can save time and money, tailoring each business’s strategy to generate the most sales leads and boost revenue. Digital marketing agencies can also analyze current strategies well enough to course-correct. The best agencies act like in-house teams, communicating directly enough to keep you up-to-date on all progress.

You’ll have to invest in marketing anyway, so you might as well outsource your needs to a digital marketing agency. The only alternative would be to create an in-house team, which may be a major expense for the smallest businesses. By enlisting a full-service digital marketing agency, you’d avoid a substantial investment in talent acquisition, and you could focus more exclusively on improving products or services.

How Much Do Digital Marketing Agencies Cost?

For all agencies, cost can vary by thousands of dollars. Agencies that specialize in a single type of digital marketing can charge as low as $500 per month, while full-service digital marketing agencies can charge around $5,000 per month. The importance of competitive digital marketing makes it a substantial investment.

What Impacts Can They Make?

By targeting each stage of the marketing funnel, digital marketing agencies grow organic traffic among leads who’re ready to buy. Professionals like us expand your business’s reach among target demographics, monitoring behavior and engagement to inform further marketing activity. The bottom line is that more traffic means more money, and an effective full-service digital marketing agency can create high-quality content that’s valuable enough to consumers for your business to receive more traffic.

Hand drawing a marketing funnel on a clear screen
Marketers can help your business grow by creating strategies for each stage of the marketing funnel.

How Can I Find the Right Digital Marketing Agency?

Before browsing among any agencies, think about what you specifically want from them. The more information you provide to a marketing agency, the more it helps you. What’s your voice? Do you keep it casual or professional? What are your values? What’s your look? Do you aim for modernity or kitsch?

The best digital marketing agencies must be willing to customize designs without relying on boilerplates. As either an extension of your marketing team or your marketing team itself, a digital marketing agency should prioritize your vision without steamrolling over it in the name of better judgment.

If you see an agency you like, ask about its work. What services does it offer? What impacts did its portfolio make? What does it need from you to do a good job? What should you do in the interest of marketing? Look at some of the content yourself. Since many digital marketing agencies don’t have great writers, the best writers will stand out.

As a full-service digital marketing agency with many happy clients, we know we can help you spread the word. Choosing the right digital marketing agency is a tough decision, so we don’t expect you to decide quickly. If you’re ready to move forward, please feel free to email us at info@fronterimarketingllc.com or call us at 847-254-0837.