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What Does a Digital Agency Do?

Posted at Feb 13, 2020 2:22:00 PM by THAT Agency | Share

What is a digital agency? What does a digital agency do? Digital marketing today is an overwhelming, chaotic mess. It requires both technical specialists and creative writers and artists who work as a whole to realize any strategy effectively. That's demanding, and something most businesses don't have the time or expertise to manage. After all, you have to perform the day-to-day tasks that make the business work in the first place. A digital agency is what can pursue effective marketing for you, while making the entire field easier to understand.

 

What Does a Digital Agency Do? | What Is a Digital Agency? | THAT Agency of Palm Beach County, Florida

 

What Does a Digital Agency Do That's Different From a Creative Agency?

 

It's important to understand exactly how a digital agency is different from a creative one. A digital agency certainly exercises their creativity, and a creative agency can help you design branding elements that are useful in the digital world. You see, creative agencies are primarily focused on branding. They can help you design everything from a logo to the product appearance itself. They don't offer the scope of a digital marketing agency, however.

 

A creative agency is very useful for producing letterheads, business cards, and giving your brand an iconic look. What they can't do without a digital agency is create strategy and content to grow your website and online sales.

 

Digital agencies focus on long-term strategies housed in both the creative and technical fields. Creative agencies focus on branding alone. They can work very effectively together, but the digital agency is the long-term one. It's the one you want in charge of strategy and implementation.

 

A digital agency is focused on getting you visitors, improving your search engine marketing, making your online ads effective, designing your website, improving lead figures, creating content that grows your site, and building a community around your brand on social media – just to name a few things.

 

Let's start with that last item.

 

1. manage your Social Media

 

Social media management incorporates social media advertising and managing the voice of your brand on different platforms. That voice has to be both responsive and consistent across your brand's different social media profiles.

 

Posts themselves have to be well designed to create response. They'll often feature content that you'd like to see shared. Responding to comments is also important (at least the ones that aren't trolling). When people feel a brand's taken the time to engage them on social media, they feel more loyal to that brand.

 

Free Social Media ROI Calculator | Microsoft Excel File | THAT Agency

 

2. Create high-quality content

 

How is this content created in the first place? The digital marketing agency takes care of this, too. The main goal of content is to draw visitors in and engage them enough that they seek out other elements of your site. Many make the mistake of making their content glorified sales or product pages. This doesn't work very well.

 

People want what's called thought leadership from content. They want something that captures their interest and respects their time. They want to learn something, or see a viewpoint from a different perspective.

 

For instance, a jewelry retailer wouldn't feature content primarily about their products and how nice they look. They'll feature content about the meaning of a new design, or the largest discoveries of a particular stone. They'll feature content about the history of giving jewelry, or the differences between different cuts of stone. That content will relate to their products in direct and indirect ways, but what visitors are getting the most of is information – not sales.

 

Digital agencies create the blogs, articles, videos, apps, and even games that bring inbound marketing your way. People seeking you out make better customers, who are more likely to engage your site, make a purchase, and even become repeat customers. SEO means search engine optimization, and each piece of content is optimized for Google and other search engines to pick up on and feature your content in relation to the searches people make about your industry's products and services.

 

SEO Checklist for Blog Posts | Free Download | THAT Agency

 

3. Ensure a Sleek, Efficient Website

 

Websites are a bit like garages. It's easy to let things pile up in them. Sure, you know where everything is, so it may not look like a mess to you. Yet anyone entering for the first time and looking for something specific would rather leave than keep looking.

 

The more chaotic, over-built, and older a website gets, the slower it will run and the harder it will be for a visitor to use. It will be harder to measure the information you need to measure to assess the efficacy of your different pages. It will become more difficult to implement new tools. It will run slower, and on fewer platforms. It will be much more open to security breaches.

 

This goes for newer websites that don't have skilled design and tool implementation, too. Visitors will bounce off a website that fails to load properly or doesn't look right on the device they're using. You lose countless customers that way every day.

 

A digital marketing agency doesn't just make sure everything looks good and reads well. They also ensure your site works quickly and cleanly on every device, they make sure online shopping is secure and fast. They implement tools like chat bots that can take the pressure off your customer service staff and handle broader and more common questions.

 

Website Cost Calculator | Web Design Pricing | FREE Estimate | THAT Agency of West Palm Beach, Florida

 

4. Assess your digital marketing Strategy

 

This might be the most important answer to the question, “What does a digital agency do?” They make sure every part of your strategy is producing, and they make the adjustments needed to improve those results over time. A digital agency is data-heavy, and they're experts at parsing what that data means for you.

 

The full list of what a digital agency does expands far beyond this article alone. They can automate how remarketing targets customers. They can segment your email lists so that content makes it to the visitors who are most likely to engage it. They can drive business-to-business leads. They can turn your best repeat customers into advocates for your brand on social media. They can dig deep into certain target niches with the right influencer campaign.

 

Modern marketing strategy doesn't just take advantage of what's mentioned in this article. It relies on it, and succeeds or fails because of it. It's driven by knowing what data is most important, by what data relies on long-term growth vs. short-term, by how seasons or events influence marketing engagement in different industries.

 

For many, even learning the surface elements of this kind of marketing is overwhelming and confusing. Digital agencies don't just handle it for you, they translate it into something that's more understandable. That way, you can manage and control it, and make informed decisions about it. The best digital agencies empower you to drive the perception and reach of your brand, and then they'll do the work that realizes this.

 

Choosing a digital marketing agency is an important task -- one vital to your business' bottom line. Selection criteria can encompass the evaluation of everything from RFP completeness to the agency's own financial viability.

 

Q. With so many factors to consider, how do you ensure you make the right decision when choosing a digital agency?

A. With help from this free scorecard.

 

Marketing Agency Selection Scorecard | Free Template | THAT Agency

Tags: Digital Marketing

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