When it comes to digital marketing services it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by how many are actually out there. Every digital marketing agency is selling several of them, and there are so many that overlap, seem to duplicate, or use so much jargon it’s impossible to actually tell what on earth they even do.
That’s the last thing we want at OggaDoon – and if you’re tired of going around in circles, just get in touch and get some real answers. After all, there’s nothing more frustrating than speaking to agencies who just want to sell, rather than add value.
The first thing to do is gain some clarity on exactly what digital marketing services are out there, and what all that lingo means. Here’s your short guide to digital marketing services and if you keep scrolling, our hot advice on how to best use them for your business’ advantage.
What are digital marketing services?
Although these can be broken down in a hundred different ways, there are essentially five core digital marketing services out there.
Website design and development
And yes, website design and development are different. A website designer or website design agency will want to sketch out the look and feel of your website, explore your customer journey, and ensure the messaging is absolutely on point. A website developer or website development agency, on the other hand, takes the designs and makes them into reality by using coding or template adjustments.
Sometimes a website design agency also offers development, and a website developer also offers design work. But make sure you ask the question before you get started, or you could find you end up with double the spend.
Social media management
This looks pretty simple: managing your social media. But what does a social media management package actually look like? The full breadth of the service starts with an audit on your social channels, with recommendations on how to improve your profiles, targeting, copy, and visuals. It then delivers content (copy, hashtags, links, images, videos, GIFs, etc) on a weekly or monthly basis, all designed to engage with your audience.
Next, a good digital marketing services for social media will engage with your followers and get involved in debates and trending topics on your behalf, creating monthly analytics with recommendations on further optimisation. It’s a huge task, so make sure you’re getting all of this impact if you’re paying for it.
Content creation
Content creation is an absolutely vital part of the digital marketing services package, because without content, you’ve literally got nothing to say online. ‘Content’ covers copy, web releases, blogs, news articles, images, GIFs, videos, infographics, banners…
If you can read it or see it online, then it’s content, and the best agencies are those creating a wide variety of content types to ensure your audiences never get bored.
SEO and PPC
The more technical end of the digital marketing services spectrum, SEO literally means Search Engine Optimisation: anything and everything you do online to make it easier for Google to push you to the top of search results when people search for your business, your services, or your industry. This can involve ‘backend’ changes to your website, alterations in copy and layout, and technical improvements to site speed, mobile optimisation, and more.
PPC is the twin sibling of SEO, and is essentially the paid for, ‘I can’t wait for my SEO changes to kick in’, version of SEO. You pay Google or another web channel a certain amount for clicks or impressions based on the target aspects you want to rank for.
Digital marketing
The worst culprit under the ‘digital marketing services’ banner, this really depends on the marketing agency that you’re talking to. That’s because it is typically used to cover all the other little bits of digital marketing that don’t naturally fit into one of the above boxes.
In our minds here at OggaDoon, we believe that digital marketing includes newsletters, mailers, pop ups and web forms, online surveys and interaction points, chatbots (with or without AI), webinars and video conferencing, and literally anything else that happens online that connects you to your audiences.
There are many digital marketing services
And not all of them are created equal. The best digital marketing services are those which have been expertly tailored to your company: your brand identity, your business lifecycle stage, your industry, what you’ve tried before – and what worked.
One easy way to find out just what your business needs is to talk to us directly, but if you are looking for more generalised advice, then here are the three things you should definitely be doing, and three things you should definitely not be doing when it comes to digital marketing services:
DO: test
One of the best things about digital marketing services is that you don’t just have to trust your agency that everything will work eventually – digital aspects of marketing have plenty of opportunities to test. Whether you’re A/B testing the use of emojis in tweets, videos on Instagram, different delivery days for newsletters, or different times for pop ups on your home page, there are always opportunities to test and find the best way to accelerate your brand’s growth.
DO: ask about metrics
Numbers, numbers, numbers. Digital marketing services will each have their own metrics and associated KPIs, so do be bold and ask your agency what KPIs they are working towards and how they compare to industry standards. If they don’t know, then perhaps it’s time to talk to another agency who understands the importance of tracking growth and success.
DO: work collaboratively
We want the absolute best results for our clients, and that means we need to work collaboratively. Have a new member of staff joining you? Tell us! We can create a short ‘Welcome to x’ campaign that will deliver insight and attraction to your company for future recruitment, across your website, social (particularly LinkedIn), and job sites. And that’s just for starters.
DON’T: compare prices like for like
There is no such thing as a like for like quote when working with agencies on digital marketing services. You need to take many other factors into account, such as their previous track record, recommendations from others, the metrics they have achieved most recently, what their contract length is, and more.
DON’T: just do what your competitors are doing
Your competitors are the best at doing what they do. Make sure you focus on doing the best at what you do. If your brand doesn’t naturally sit on YouTube, don’t pour time, money, and effort into creating a YouTube channel! If your competitors are killing it with chatbots, don’t just replicate it for your own website and hope it delivers the same results. The best digital marketing services are those curated for you and your audience.
DON’T: give up immediately
It’s easy to hope for instant results with digital marketing services but especially for specific niche audiences, you need to commit to at least 6 months to ensure market penetration. Simply stopping in one direction within days and trying a second doesn’t give you enough time to really test, so you could be missing real opportunities for growth.
Looking for more guidance? Choosing the best digital marketing services for you – and then delivering excellence – is exactly what we do. Get in touch now.
OggaDoon specialises in guerrilla communications and marketing to gain you reach.
