What is a Digital Marketing Agency?
A digital marketing agency focuses on bringing more business to your company through online means, whether your business is a retail storefront, a B2B service provider, a specialty manufacturer, a professional services firm, or anything in between. Digital marketing agencies like Unfair Advantage offer a variety of services, from website and search engine optimization to paid online advertising and social media marketing.
What’s the Difference Between Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing Strategies?
Traditional marketing starts with the 4 Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. Once you know the product or service you’re offering and its price, you then figure out where your buyers are (place) and what to do to get their attention (promotion). Marketing includes everything from creating your marketing materials to advertising (using billboards, radio, TV, magazines, and more) and attending trade shows for your target audience: all the things you do to let your potential customers know what you have to offer.
It’s more important than ever to look at how your target customers are looking for and finding your business as well as your competitors. The already rapidly growing area of e-commerce sped up the past couple years: a recent study found that 67% of consumers say their online purchasing has increased since the start of the pandemic. And it isn’t just retail consumers: purchasers of B2B services report spending 27% of their time researching independently online as part of the buying process. That’s where digital marketing comes in.
What does this mean? Maintaining and enhancing your business’ online presence is key to growing your business – not only having an easy-to-use website, but also how that website is ranked by search engines and found by users, listings in online directories and review sites, consistent blog and social media activity, paid advertising in search engines and/or social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, and more.
One major advantage of digital marketing over many traditional marketing tactics is the ability to track and measure results. You may not know who sees/hears/reads your television/radio/magazine ads, but you will know how many people see your digital advertising efforts (known as impressions) and, better yet, how many click on your ads. From there, you can measure how many fill out your lead form or purchase a product on your website. You can measure which ads work better than others and target your online marketing dollars toward those activities with the highest return.
At Unfair Advantage, we use data and performance to drive decisions about all of our marketing efforts for our clients. Everything we do, from brand awareness to lead generation and ecommerce purchases, is evaluated from the standpoint of how it contributes to your company’s revenue and business objectives.
How Does a Digital Marketing Agency Help Grow My Business?
First, a digital marketing agency can help refine and expand your marketing strategy. By knowing the larger digital marketplace and how each element works and combining that with the specifics of your business and what makes it special, a digital marketing company has unique insights into what strategies will work best and when and how to implement them. Including as much data as possible on your target market, your sales cycle, and your competitors, your marketing strategy provides a roadmap to achieving your business goals, whether those goals include:
● Increasing leads
● Increasing revenue
● Improving brand awareness and online visibility
● Ensuring your tracking and reporting is accurate and timely
● Increasing return on investment
Our experts at Unfair Advantage also know that digital marketing is a piece of a larger plan that fits into overall business objectives. Our team works with yours to make recommendations on how to integrate the digital marketing efforts into that overall plan.
Second, once your marketing strategy is agreed upon, a digital marketing agency has the resources and expertise to implement the tactics needed in the order which will best accomplish your business goals. Experienced digital marketers have solved the problems of how to find more customers online many times so they are the experts in determining how to reach new audiences or develop new channels.
Third, as your business grows, your goals, strategy, and tactics will need to be adjusted accordingly. Hiring an agency who has demonstrated the ability to pivot along with your business means your business is better able to respond to market changes, competitor changes, and other challenges. Growth provides opportunities to expand your marketing efforts and those expansions are also a part of our customized, results-oriented, forward-thinking plans.
What Are Digital Channels?
Digital channels are the places that your business can be found online. When someone looks for your company by name or by type (“coffee shops near me”) in search engines such as Google or on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn, they’re using digital platforms. When a searcher enters a question, a phrase, or a word (any of which are “search terms”) into a search engine, they will get a variety of paid ads (also known as paid media or PPC) targeting their search term in addition to the search result pages that the search engine deems are most relevant to their original query (known as organic results).
What Services Do Digital Marketing Agencies Offer?
Digital marketing agencies provide a wide variety of services:
● Business website and landing page design
● Search engine optimization
● Paid online advertising
● Social media management
Website and Landing Page Design and Optimization
While most businesses have a website, a good website is more than a billboard, a brochure, or a catalog. Once a potential customer lands on your website, how does that person use it? What is their experience if they’re using a mobile phone vs a desktop? What do they learn about your business? Is it easy for them to order a product or learn more about your services? These are all part of the user journey and the goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the user to become a customer. Our team includes specialists in website design who test and optimize according to user behavior to increase leads and generate revenue.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your website does your business no good if it can’t be found by potential customers. Making sure that its technical foundation makes it easy for search engines to understand what you offer so that they can match searchers to you is just the start. Driving more users to your website and keeping them engaged long enough to make a purchase or fill out a lead form requires consistently updating the content on your website. Managing your presence in online directories, local business listings, and customer reviews all contribute to more leads and revenue. Unfair Advantage’s SEO experts can help with a wide range of SEO services .
Paid Media Advertising
Once your website is built and optimized for your business, it’s time to spread the word. Paying for online advertising, whether that’s using search engine marketing using Google or through various social media platforms like Facebook, can quickly get expensive. Different channels are more effective at reaching certain audiences and each channel has different rules for how to place ads and how to target your audience. Our paid media advertising team uses a data-driven approach to create and optimize your online marketing campaigns.
Social Media Management
Today it isn’t enough to have a website, your business also needs to be on social media. And it isn’t just millennials on TikTok: one report predicted that social network users age 65 and up will outnumber those ages 18 to 24 by 2023 . Which means it is a highly competitive space where your efforts have to be consistent and focused, whether you want to use social media platforms to drive traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, or grow revenue. Our social media management program has delivered results for businesses from local retailers to niche newsletters and from SaaS to healthcare providers.
How Do Digital Marketing Agencies Operate?
Digital marketing agencies hire and train a team with expertise in the services they offer. At Unfair Advantage, our training program is the equivalent of a 2-year digital marketing course compressed into 6-8 weeks. And every single team member goes through that training, whether they come to us with years of experience or none at all, before they work on any client’s account. Some team members specialize in a particular service like SEO, others have experience in a broad range of services. When you hire an agency, you have access to the breadth and depth of those resources.
Once you decide to hire a digital marketing agency, your team, usually led by an account strategist, will meet with you to get to know your business. Using their knowledge of the digital marketing options available combined with your business goals, they will then develop a customized digital marketing strategy. The rubber meets the road as the team implements, optimizes, and updates that plan as your business changes. Services are billed on an hourly basis with additional charges for paid advertising based on the amount spent.
What Does Unfair Advantage Do Differently?
At Unfair Advantage, we know how important transparency, trust, and communication are. Your team uses data to drive results and that data is always YOUR data, not ours. And we’ll communicate with you regularly so that you always know where your digital marketing efforts stand. In fact, direct and honest communication is one of our six core values.
Unfair Advantage Core Values
Our six core values are the driving strategy behind everything we do:
- Do what it takes to deliver excellent results
- Communicate directly and honestly
- Have the right attitude
- Do what you say you’re going to do
- Do the right thing
- Always learn and try new things
These values drive how we engage with clients and with each other every day.
Let’s talk about how our team’s data-driven, results-oriented, customized approach can help achieve your business goals!
