Month: September 2021

Do you think it’s time to grow your business, but don’t want to hire a marketing team? If so, that’s probably why you’ve come to this post.

We’re about to cover what a digital agency is, and how they can help you and your business success.

But first, having worked in the field for over 20 years, I am often asked the question:

What is a Digital Agency?

A digital agency focuses primarily on marketing your business, products and services in the digital world. This is done through website design and development, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, paid online advertising, social media, email marketing and other services.

There has been a major shift in the marketing world – there was a time when marketing was simple and handled in-house.

You could have your local radio station read your copy, hand out flyers, and take out newspaper ads with great success. 

But, the world has moved on and methods like these, while they still have some value, digital marketing is rapidly replacing it. These traditional advertising methods are falling by the wayside. If you’ve thought about entering this new market, you will probably need an agency to help.

“What is a digital agency? And why can’t I continue to handle my own advertising, after all, it’s been working for years?”

• Let’s Take a Look at Digital Marketing
• Why Use A Digital Agency?
• Your Agency Plays Several Roles
• Summing It All Up

Let’s Take a Look at Digital Marketing 

What is digital marketing? Simply put, it’s creating marketing strategies that will take advantage of today’s digital world.

Currently, the world population stands at approximately 8 billion. Of these, approximately 3.3 billion make use of some form of social media and this number is growing rapidly. 

Digital marketing agencies are those who work primarily on creating marketing strategies designed to take advantage of the digital market. This includes social media such as:

• Facebook (65 million users)
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• And many others 

But this is just the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more involved in making use of social media and having a website to a successful digital marketing strategy.

You and your agency can monitor these strategies 24/7. This will show you what’s working and what isn’t at any minute.

This allows you and your digital marketing agency to make instant adjustments. 

Why Use A Digital Agency?

A quality digital marketing agency bypasses the more traditional, “let’s blast it out there and hope for the best” strategy. Instead, they focus on targeted marketing, lead generation, and brand development. The typical digital agency offers:

Teams of:

• Strategists
• Digital marketing consultants
• Creators 
• Developers

While each of these is a separate team, they have one goal in mind. This is to work together, creating a ground-up digital marketing strategy for your business that delivers results. 

Although there are agencies out there that straddle the fence, many of these agencies still tend to focus on the more traditional methods of marketing. 

Your company needs a website that is “eye candy” to the person who comes upon it. But, the beauty of your website needs to be more than skin deep. Your website must be easy to navigate, filled with useful information, and most of it must convert. 

What does “convert” mean? It means people who visit your website make the decision to make a purchase or dive deeper into the content to learn more. 

Most traditional marketing agencies lack the skilled staff needed to make this happen. While some digital agencies do still offer more traditional marketing services, they are not their main focus. 

Your Agency Plays Several Roles 

While we’ve answered the basics of “what is a digital agency?” there is more to it than this. A good full-service digital marketing agency will focus on these three important areas to ensure the success and growth of your business. 

Learning About Your Business 

It’s hard for any type of marketing agency to “sell” your business to a targeted market if they don’t understand your business. They should spend time with you, learning about your products or service, your market target, your goals, and most of all getting a “feel” for your business. 

An analysis of your current marketing strategies is used to determine what your brand needs. This will allow the digital agency to work with you developing new and more powerful digital marketing strategies that will help you to reach your goals. 

They will research who your “ideal customer” is and how they search and decide where they spend their money. Once you have a firm grip on who your targeted market should be, you can adapt your marketing strategy to form the necessary connection with your customers. 

Mastering Your Online Branding 

Under the guise of “what is a digital agency,” the right full-service digital marketing agency will focus exclusively on creating your online presence. To do this, they have several tasks they need to complete for your business. 

The success of your business counts heavily on having a website that focuses on the buyer that showcases your brand. If you currently have a website, the agency will use a number of tools to analyze it. In doing so, they can determine what changes must be made to achieve the best results. 

Today, it’s not enough to have a website that is nothing more than a catalog of the products you have to offer. If this is all your website contains, all but the most serious of buyers are likely to move on. Keep in mind the average person will only spend 15 seconds looking at your landing page. 

This is known as bounce rate, and the digital agency you choose must have the skills needed to keep people on your site. They do this by creating content in the form of informational pages and more importantly a blog. 

Blogging has become a very popular form of sharing information relevant to the company’s market. Some will cover only relevant topics, others add in seasonal, fun, and conversational content to help boost readership. While some digital agencies use in house writers, many more tend to outsource the work to a skilled commercial copywriter. 

The marketing team must know

It’s important that your marketing team knows how to make the most of marketing strategies such as:

• SEO – Search engine optimization – includes ensuring the content of your website is keyed specifically to what your customers are looking for. In general, today’s website content is designed to meet the SEO standards of Google, Bing, and Yahoo, three of the most commonly used search engines. 
• SEM – Search engine marketing – includes all aspects of creating your online presence, SEO and SMM are core components of SEM. In effect, it is an umbrella term. 
• SMM – Social media marketing – creating and managing marketing campaigns using various social media platforms. Social media is rapidly becoming one of the top marketplaces, and one you simply cannot afford to ignore. 
• MMI – Mobile market integration – creating marketing and developing your website to optimize mobile marketing for those who shop using a cell phone, tablet, laptop, or any other mobile web-enabled device. In the early days trying to look at a website page on a cell phone was virtually impossible. 

The reason? Pages did not automatically rescale in order to fit in the much smaller screen. This is no longer the case, but you do need an agency that can design your site to meet the needs of the “small” screen. 

• Email marketing – Email marketing is NOT dead, in fact, with the right campaign, it is still possible to achieve success. A good email marketing strategy should not just be endless advertising on your behalf. It should include informational content that is relative to your business such as the introduction of a new product or service. Many businesses also send out regular newsletters that help keep your business at the forefront of your customer’s minds. 

Did you know that there are over 2.5 billion email users around the globe? This is a marketplace you cannot afford to avoid. 

• Proper placement of online advertising – Using statistics, experience, and knowledge to strategically place your online ads. Online advertising includes creating banner ads and using pay per click to generate more leads. 
• Video marketing – Sites such as YouTube and Instagram are the perfect place for advertising your business. The agency can produce videos that highlight new products or services by demonstrating their use. In the case of products, this is typically achieved with a video that highlights new items and then demonstrates their use. In the case of services, it can be a video that includes a description of the service and demonstrates their results. 

The goal with SEO is to ensure that through content that “includes high search” keywords, long-tailed keywords, and key phrases appear on your website increasing your organic search results significantly.

In the last few years, blogging has gone from something people did at home to becoming a powerhouse in business marketing. When properly managed, you should realize a significantly larger ROI (return on investment) than you are ever likely to see with traditional marketing methods. 

Boosting Your Return On Investment 

Maximizing your ROI is probably one of the most important functions of the digital marketing agency. Their goal is to ensure you see a continuous increase in your investment rather than stagnation. In doing this, they help you to see higher profits. 

The digital marketing world has no room for sluggishness. It is a constantly changing and evolving marketplace based on demand and changes in technology. A quality full-service digital marketing agency never rests. 

They are constantly testing, analyzing, and modifying your marketing strategy to take advantage of any changes they see in the market. Among the things they monitor closely is the amount of traffic your website sees. Their job is to develop your website to ensure the number of visitors continues to increase. 

If your site sees a loss of traffic, it’s the agency’s job to find out why and make the necessary changes. For example, you won’t find many successful businesses today that don’t have a blog on their website.

This is not something that just “suddenly” happened.” Blogging represented a major change in strategy and one that has proven to be highly successful. 

Everything an agency does for you is geared towards generating more leads for your business. Leads convert to sales and the more generated the better your long-term sales prospects are going to be, which is the ultimate goal. 

What Are the Alternatives?

Now that we’ve talked about the question of “What is a digital agency,” we should take a few minutes to talk about alternatives to hiring a digital marketing agency. The only other successful option you have is to add a digital marketing department to your business. Your department would need a staff that includes:

• Marketing strategist or team of strategists
• Marketing manager
• Developers 
• A designer or team of designers 
• One or more copywriters 

Hiring and maintaining a team like this is likely to represent a major long-term investment for your company. Along with their salaries, you have taxes to pay, vacations, paid holidays, and if your company is big enough benefits. Compare this to the cost of hiring a digital marketing agency. 

How Can I Tell if An Agency Will Be Right For Me?

By now you’ve likely decided to go with an agency. But, choosing one can be extremely difficult. Here’s a few factors you should look for.

Trustworthy

Meet with your agency and gauge their character. Can they be trusted to care about your business and keep your secrets? This is a judgement call, but be careful to think it through. Don’t be afraid to ask to talk to a previous customer.

Willing to Meet Regularly

Will the agency you go with dedicate enough time to meet your expectations? One sign of this is if they are willing to meet regularly.

They Will Help Define Clear Goals

Setting goals mean that the agency you work with has standards for client success. They also may help set realistic expectations for your near and long term success.

Easy to Communicate With

How hard was it to set a meeting? Were they quick to respond? You will need constant communication to have success with your agency.

Summing It All Up 

First and foremost, the role of your agency is to create a bridge between the physical and digital world. This means matching your brick and mortar store or business with a website and a presence on the web. 

Secondly, and perhaps just as important is that a digital marketing agency can help you completely rebrand your business. This can give your business the opportunity to take your business in a new direction. 

Should you invest in a website? You can’t afford not to in today’s marketplace. Does your online presence need to be optimized for mobile applications? Approximately 87% of mobile device users spend their time using an endless variety of apps. 

Looking at the benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency compared to a traditional agency, it becomes evident that taking this step is important. Doing so can make a huge difference in your future profits and growth. 

No matter your industry, utilizing the services of an agency can help you build your business. 

What is a Lead Generation Agency?

A lead generation agency will work with your company to create personalized marketing plans and/or specific campaigns designed to increase your conversions, sales, ROI, advertising clicks, and more. 

Multiple strategies exist to achieve these goals, depending on your business needs. However, they generally include improving your brand’s image, analyzing your target audience, and generating content consistently.

This may sound overwhelming. Or it just might not be your strong suit.

However, making use of an agency’s services can help you achieve your next business goal.

What is a Lead?

Before you can start working with a lead generation agency to build your business, it’s helpful to understand what exactly a lead is – and why you want it.

According to HubSpot, a lead is “…any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form.”

Simply put, a lead is a potential customer and a potential sale. The more leads you acquire, the more opportunities your business has for converting those leads into real sales and hopefully loyal clientele. 

Agencies can help generate leads for your business by implementing strategies for attracting and converting prospects into consumers who have expressly indicated interest in what you’re offering, be it goods or services. 

5 Strategies for Successful Lead Generation 

Digital agencies can help your business generate leads in the online world.

Which may be an area of opportunity for you if your business has previously relied strictly on local and/or print advertising.

While these marketing strategies may still prove successful, it’s crucial for your company to establish an online presence.

And if you are just starting out and have no marketing campaigns currently in place, print or otherwise, utilizing a digital lead generation agency will have countless benefits. 

While there are many ways for an agency to help you find and lure in leads, let’s go over five of the most important ways they can help you build your business:

1. Analyze your target audience
2. Build or update your brand’s image
3. Content marketing
4. Implement paid advertising strategies
5. Set up retargeted ads

Keep reading for further information about each strategy.

1. Analyze your target audience

We write often about the benefits of understanding your target audience and how to define it.

This is typically one of the first steps an agency will take to help you build your business.

Before you can employ a strong marketing campaign to reel in more leads, you must first understand who is most likely to need or want what your business offers. 

Take time to think about the following details of people who will benefit from your product or service:

• Average age
• Income level
• Specific location
• Additional traits

Get specific and create as many buyer personas as you may need.

If some of your products are geared toward millennials in urban areas making six figures per year, count that as one persona.

If you have a service that benefits senior citizens locally, such as within a short drive to your physical location, think about that customer’s traits and write them all down as a second persona. 

The more specific you are, the better. Having a thorough understanding of your target audience helps you down the line with your branding, advertising, and content creation. 

2. Build or update your brand’s image

An agency can also help you improve your brand’s image.

Your brand is essentially a reflection of all the key points of your business, and it is what people will remember if they remember nothing else about you. 

A strong brand image leads to increased customer trust, higher chances of leads signing up for your email lists, and positive word-of-mouth advertising. Business.com breaks down building your brand into four components:

Gather data about your target audience

By understanding your target audience, which we addressed earlier, you can build your brand in a way that caters best to that demographic.

Consider what your audience will respond to. 

• Do your customers want bold and edgy designs and campaigns? 
• Will they understand and/or respond to modern slang? 
• Is a clean and professional image fitting for the age group you’re targeting?

 There are many questions to consider, but spending time analyzing your audience is an important step in building your brand.

Design a logo that reflects your company

Building off the data about your target audience, you can take your answers to the questions above and use them when designing – or updating – your company’s logo.

Colors and graphics are more important than you may realize and go a long way in boosting the success of any marketing campaign.

If this is not your strong suit, don’t worry – your agency will help you with graphic design. 

Consider your organization’s voice

What sort of voice do you want to use when interacting with your potential customers?

Think about this in terms of the copy on your webpage, the language in your email marketing lists, your blogs, customer service techniques, and more.

Wherever you’re represented online or in print, your company’s voice should be consistent. 

Fortunately, a lead generation agency will work with you to analyze the best type of voice to attract leads and gain their trust. 

Build traction

Building traction with leads is all about engagement. 

Once your agency has worked with you to establish plans for your logo and voice, you can start utilizing social media and your website to engage with traffic and generate leads.

This is typically the point of a new marketing campaign in which some sort of free offer is presented to leads.

Free valuable content will help increase trust and build rapport, which slowly and surely leads to conversion of lead into customer. 

3. Content marketing

One of the most daunting aspects of attracting – and then maintaining – new customers is content creation.

 It’s something that most business owners understand the importance of, but few are well-equipped or have enough time to focus on this part of the brand.

That’s where a lead generation agency steps in.

Agency experts can help you create consistent content that will benefit and inform visitors to your website and social media streams, as well as help you entice these visitors with free resources.

There are countless ways of achieving this goal. 

Depending on your business and the industry you’re in, the content you create may vary widely from other companies.

Working with a lead generation agency can be extremely helpful in narrowing down your focus areas for content.

Often the best places to focus on are your website copy, then consistent blogs to help your page rank high in Google searches, and social media posts. 

In addition to creating content like this on a regular schedule, developing one or more opt-in offers for leads who visit your page is crucial. 

When a potential customer visits your site, it’s your chance to get their attention and convince them to purchase what you have to offer.

But most consumers these days, with all the options available to them, need good incentives to choose your company.

When you can offer something of value to that customer before they buy, you have the opportunity to assure them that not only are you an expert in your subject matter, but that you have their best interests at heart. 

A “soft sell” gives a customer more time to consider you before they have to commit and is also one of the best ways to get their opt-in to your email marketing list. 

For example, your landing page can provide your customer with something like, “Enter your email address below to receive your free _____” and fill in the blank with a relevant offer on your subject matter. 

Types of materials to offer your customer can include:

• White papers, defined by Wikipedia as “…an authoritative report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue…meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.”
• Free videos on YouTube or elsewhere
• PDF guides or manuals
• Weekly, monthly, or regular newsletters
• Free access to specific links or webpages that aren’t readily available 

An agency can work with your specific business offerings to devise a plan that’s customized to your goals.

Once your business gets set up with strong content and begins to rank in search results pages, more leads are sure to start rolling in. 

4. Implement paid advertising strategies

You may already know that pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is well worth the investment.

But how does it affect lead generation?

Wordstream.com defines the end goal of lead generation as getting “…prospects into the lead-tracking system.” 

And to get better leads into this system, which initiates a back-and-forth between your company and the potential customer, it helps to meet them right where they are. 

Paid advertising puts you on the front page. So, that when a potential lead needs your services or products, they see you first.

Your lead generation agency will help you determine and implement the best PPC ad campaigns for your business goals.

5. Set up retargeted ads

In addition to paid advertising, there is a technique called retargeted advertising.

This is defined as advertising that reminds a potential customer to return to a product or page they have recently viewed.

For example, after browsing for something on Amazon, consumers will often see ads for that very same item. 

Why is this beneficial? Ultimately, using retargeted ads can have the following effects:

• Convert “window shopping” into purchases: Retargeted advertisements are known to convert more leads into customers (and then sales), based on the idea that people are more prone to purchasing something they’re familiar with, whether that’s from researching it online or seeing ads out and about. 

• Multiple sales of related items: When a retargeted ad reminds a consumer of a product they have already viewed, or even purchased, it can lead to purchases of related products.

• Increased consumer rapport with brand: The more face time your lead has with your products or services, the more they will remember your brand’s image. When they remember you, they’re likely to speak about you. And this means additional word-of-mouth advertising and referrals on top of the sale that the retargeted ad initially led to.

When you partner with an agency to help you grow your business, they can use their expertise to implement retargeted advertising throughout your business’s online presence.

By showing targeted ads to leads who have already interacted with your company in some way, an agency can often very quickly increase the number of leads coming in as well as the conversion rate to sales. 

Work with a Lead Generation Agency to Transform Your Business

Work with a specialist agency like MediaBOOM to drive leads to your business or website. We combine targeted advertising, social ads, SEO, and conversion focused landing pages.

Full Service

Get advertising, digital marketing, and content services. MediaBOOM can perform PPC, Social Ads, content marketing, SEO, and more.

ROI-Driven

We focus on maximizing leads with your budget. We will constantly optimize and A/B test your campaigns.

Expert Marketing Strategists

With over 20 years in the marketing industry, our team has seen and grown businesses in every industry.

Fill Up Your Lead Funnel

Lead Generation Landing Pages

High converting landing pages turn visitors into warm leads in an extremely efficient manner. We combine expert copy and web conversion tactics to get leads on your list.

Automate With Drip Campaigns

Nurture your leads with automatic chats or emails. Your leads will have higher engagement rates and you stay top of mind.

Multichannel Lead Generation

You need several channels to reach consumers all over the internet. Your customers are not spending their time on one website. Therefore, we will go to them.

Getting Started With a Lead Generation Agency

Mediaboom is a digital agency that employs a variety of effective marketing strategies to help you grow your business.

When you work with us, no matter what strategy we recommend for you, our ultimate goal is to increase your sales. Let us help you generate more leads today!

The question is: does SEO really work?

In the vast landscape of digital marketing strategies available this year, one stands out with remarkable potential for organic online growth: SEO.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, involves optimizing a website’s content and structure to boost visibility on search engine results pages, aiming to improve its ranking and drive organic traffic. Achieving this involves strategic use of keywords, enhancements to website architecture, and improvements in user experience, aligning the site with search engine algorithms. This optimization not only increases the chances of ranking higher in search results but also contributes to long-term success by attracting targeted audiences and fostering sustainable organic traffic growth.

You’ve likely heard how important SEO is and may wonder, “does SEO really work for busines growth?” It’s an important question to ask, especially in our digital-first world. Read on to learn if SEO really does work and how to use it to your advantage. 

Does SEO Really Work?

Yes, SEO really does work. SEO is essential for organic online growth and if you do it right, you’ll have an incredible number of internet users find your website quickly. This increases brand awareness and the chances that these users convert to customers. 

It sounds simple, but there’s more to SEO than having an optimized website. Read on to learn:

• What SEO is 
• Why SEO is an important marketing strategy 
• Common SEO mistakes (and how to avoid them) 

What is SEO? 

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your website so it ranks higher on search engines. The higher a website ranks on a search engine, especially on the first search engine results page (SERP), the greater the chances are of people finding your website when they search. 

There are numerous factors that influence SEO, including: 

• Page speed 
• Domain authority 
• Site crawlability 
• Mobile-friendliness 
• Quality of content produced 
• Number of relevant inbound and outbound links 

These are just a few of many factors to keep in mind when thinking of your SEO strategy. It comes technically as the goal to create the best user experience possible. 

Why SEO is a Critical Marketing Strategy

SEO is an incredibly important part of your marketing strategy because it helps build brand awareness, drive organic traffic to your website, build authority and trust within your industry, and nurture relationships with new and existing audiences. Let’s discuss how exactly this happens. 

Building Brand Awareness

The more you focus on SEO, the higher your website will rank on search engines. The higher your website ranks, the more people find your brand. The more people find your brand, the more likely you’ll gain brand fans who, eventually, could turn into brand enthusiasts. That’s why it’s also important to have your brand messaging strategy in place online. 

Driving Organic Traffic to Your Website

If you’re not trying to spend a fortune on paid advertising, focusing on your SEO strategy is a key way to create organic inbound traffic. Instead of paying to appear to internet users, you create a strategy that provides them with the best user experience so they come to you naturally. 

Building Authority and Trust Within Your Industry

A big part of SEO is creating relevant content that’s valuable to users. Typically, this valuable content aims to solve someone’s problem, which means it requires some expertise to write about. The more you produce high-quality content that shows your expertise, the more you’ll build your reputation among your audience and your competitors. 

Google will reward you, too, if you produce valuable content for people. The better quality content you produce, the better your chances are of ranking highly on search pages. If you get on the first SERP of a highly-searched term, your website could get a lot of organic traffic. 

Nurture Relationships With New and Existing Customers

SEO helps you nurture relationships with new and existing customers because it helps them find you and your content faster. The more they see how your content helps them, the more trust you’ll build with them. The greater the trust, the more likely they’ll eventually convert to customers. 

SEO can also help you attract and convert new audiences. The more keywords you rank for, the more opportunities there are for people to find you. The right webpage or piece of content can help you tap into an audience you couldn’t before. 

Common SEO Mistakes

There’s great potential with SEO, but there’s also room for error if you aren’t careful. Here are some common SEO mistakes to avoid and why. 

Targeting The Wrong Keywords

When you create content, you want to target relevant keywords. Targeting the wrong keywords, (keywords that aren’t relevant to your business or content), can confuse Google and have you reaching the wrong audience altogether. Instead, do keyword research and figure out which ones are most relevant to your business and audience so you aren’t wasting your resources. 

Keyword Stuffing

How often you use a keyword in a piece is important for SEO purposes, but trying to use the keywords as many times as possible in your content, known as keyword stuffing, can actually hurt it. Google is smart enough to know when you’re trying to trick it, so if you keyword stuff in hopes of ranking higher, it’ll only hold your content back. Instead, use the keyword where it’s relevant and natural for the user to encounter throughout the content. 

Linking to Random External Sites

Linking to external sites helps with SEO, but you need to think of the quality of those external sites. If you’re linking to random websites that aren’t viewed as legitimate, it could hinder your content. Instead of linking to random websites, link to quality external sites that rank well. That way, Google knows you’re linking to reputable websites and legitimate content. 

Missing the Meta Description 

The meta description, which is the small paragraph of text that appears under your website link on the SERP, is a valuable piece of real estate. It provides important context to users about what your content is about and if it’ll help them get the answer they’re looking for. Don’t ignore it; instead, write a clear and concise meta description that’ll tell Google and your audience the content is worth reading. 

Should I Hire an SEO Agency? 

If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO agency, do it. An SEO agency will take the guesswork out of your SEO strategy and get you the results you want. At MediaBoom, we’re dedicated to helping clients maximize their SEO efforts and experience incredible growth. Head here to schedule your consultation and meet the team—we’d love to help expand your reach.