What Services Come With a Digital Marketing Agency Partnership

Finding the right digital marketing agency to work with can be a make-or-break decision for your marketing department. It’s critical to find a partner that can transform your digital marketing strategy into an executable, tactical plan and has the capabilities to produce the content you need in-house.

If you’re wondering how to hire a web developer or are going through the process of selecting a digital marketing agency, consider searching for a partner that offers these core services.

Digital Marketing Strategy

Before you and your digital agency start talking about marketing tactics, it will lead you through the process of developing a strategy. This process is critical to its ability to translate your vision and business goals into a variety of tools and content. It will serve as the overarching strategy that drives all of the other deliverables below.

Digital Design and Development

Your website or app is the central piece of your digital ecosystem. It is the hub of your brand and serves as the main point of conversion for most online transactions.

The website development process begins with strategy and documentation, where you and your partner define what it will take for your website to be successful. This also includes documenting the information architecture necessary to execute that vision.

After you’ve formulated a site map, a skilled team of designers will turn that vision into a compelling user interface that drives users through a buyer funnel to achieve the goals you outlined in your digital marketing strategy.

The best agencies take a mobile-first approach to web design, recognizing that user experience is critical in driving conversion, and many users are visiting your website from their mobile or tablet devices. From there, they design the desktop version of the user experience.

After design, your agency will begin the process of developing your website or app. This includes making long-term decisions about how you will work together to manage content, and whether it should build the site on a content management system (CMS).

When working with your digital marketing agency, you should also ensure it’s building content in a way that allows for quality social sharing, which will be critical during the inbound marketing portion of your digital strategy.

Inbound Marketing

For a lot of businesses, inbound marketing is crucial to the success of their brand, but it’s also an ambiguous term. Inbound marketing is comprised of the following marketing tactics that drive customers to your site via a variety of online outlets.

1. Content Strategy

Digital marketing agencies that use content marketing best practices will help you plan, execute and accelerate content. This process begins with developing buyer personas, where you work together to clearly understand your ideal customers. This includes defining their marketing triggers, business challenges and goals.

The persona process is followed by a content plan to reach each persona. This will likely include a mixture of long- and short-form content. If you don’t have the capacity to take on content production in-house, be sure to find a partner that offers this service.

2. SEO

Quality search engine optimization will drive traffic to your website. However, website and digital content shouldn’t be optimized just for search engines; a quality marketing partner will balance SEO strategy with content that delivers user value and helps you outrank and out-write your competition.

3. Social Media

Social media is perhaps the most challenging portion of an inbound marketing strategy. With a constantly growing number of outlets, all with different key metrics, defining the best strategy for your business can be a challenge.

A quality social marketing team will create a results-focused campaign to meet your digital goals of driving traffic, leads and customers. It will also translate your brand voice into great social copy across the best channels to reach your audience.

4. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation delivers personalized digital experiences to your customers. It is the process of understanding your users and following them through the entire customer life cycle, nudging and guiding them at key moments. A quality marketing partner will help select the right tools and technologies to automate your marketing so you’re selling around the clock.

Video Production

Research shows that video is critical in a content plan. It is more engaging than copy and still images and can drive customer connections in multiple outlets. Consider why video should be a key element in your marketing mix when planning your video production schedule with your marketing partner. Work together to determine the right mix of commercial, social media and new media placement; video content can drive traffic from all three.

Advertising

Your marketing strategy should be supported with a quality advertising plan. This can include traditional advertising (television, print, outdoor, radio, sponsorships) and digital advertising (search engine marketing, banner ad placement, video ad placement). When working with your marketing agency partner, you should determine the best advertising mix to reach your ideal customers.

If you’re looking for a quality, long-term relationship with a digital marketing agency, consider a specialized firm for your industry that can offer this mix of marketing services.

At Vitamin D, we live in the software world and we provide marketing for software companies that is designed to break through the clutter, grow their user base, and increase revenue. And it doesn’t hurt that we’ve gotten pretty good at it. Are you interested in seeing the kind of work we do? Check out some of our case studies here. Would you like to talk to us about a potential project? Schedule time with us here.