Why Should Digital Agencies Invest In Digital Marketing Services
Typically, a Digital Agency stands on three pillars: Design, Development & Marketing. Their service ranges from the more generalist such as website design, logo design to web-app development, tech support to search engine optimization, email marketing.
On the other hand, a Digital Marketing Agency will specialize in specific areas; viral campaigns using video/content marketing; knowledge marketing, pay-per-click ad management and banner advertising with Facebook or Google, local search engine optimization and marketing, content marketing, podcasting, and conversion funnel management and much more.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss the future trends in digital marketing, highlight the importance of having your in-house digital marketing team, and list down various digital agency vendors to help you with your in-house digital marketing.
Digital Transformation in Digital Marketing World
A digital transformation in marketing refers to the shift from digital complacency (refer table Digital Age 1.0) to the active pursuit of digital excellence (refer table Digital Age 2.0). In other words, it asks businesses to adapt to new market realities.
PRE-DIGITAL
SELLER DRIVEN
Rolodex
Telecalls
Direct Mail
Trade Shows
Events
Billboards
Bingo Cards
Golf
DIGITAL AGE 1.0
LEAD GENERATION – MARKETER DRIVEN
Websites
Webinar
Email Marketing
Web forms fill-in
DIGITAL AGE 1.0
LEAD GENERATION – MARKETER DRIVEN
Anonymous Research
Buying Groups
Omni-channel
Work from Home and Always On
Decentralized decision-making
Intent Monitoring
Account-based Marketing
GDPR
56%
A specific report on the retail food & beverages market found — 56% of consumers have become “brand agnostic,” saying they don’t care if a product is offered under a national brand, store brand, or specialty brand.
Digital Marketing has come a long way since the boom of Information Technology. More and more users are finding products/services of their choice online through Search Engines, Social Media Platforms, Mobile Websites, Voice Searches, Email communications.
As a result, Digital Marketing is embracing the Digital Age 2.0 (as seen in the table). It involves huge dependence on data analytics in finding the best possible way to personalize the experience for prospective customers.
In the next five years, we could see the following trends in digital marketing:
- A zero-click and visual change to the future of search.
- Gaps between the three pillars of Digital Agency are blurring. Development is no longer just for building websites but even SEO professionals need to have a strong understanding of Python language.
- ePrivacy will be a top industry concern.
- UX is becoming a ranking factor.
- Paid results will play a definitive role than organic searches with the growing prominence of social media.
- Voice Searches and the SEO opportunity linked to it are yet to be explored.
Grooming your In-house Digital Marketing Skills
The age-old debate of training an in-house marketing team or partnering with another agency for marketing assignments continues to have its relevance today.
Being an ever-evolving field, the Digital Marketing space gives way to new avenues. Say, COVID scenario has pushed major brick & mortar stores to embrace the power of digital marketing in order to stay relevant.
Hence, it is an opportunity for Digital Agencies to build their in-house teams to:
- Diversify the offered range of services.
- Grow expertise within the company, i.e., embrace the Digital Age 2.0 (as mentioned earlier here)
- Maintain client-agency privilege, i.e., in order to tap-in a major client, your agency will have to rely on an in-house team.
- Sync-in with the digital transformation of the digital marketing world, i.e., as gaps between various marketing strategies are blurring, it is best suited to have in-house expertise for better outcomes.
While a niche-focused agency may have already specialised themselves in building an in-house marketing team, the time is ripe for a full-fledged digital agency to strengthen its in-house marketing expertise – for account-based marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, social media management, branding, ad management, etc.
“Brands like Coca-Cola, BBC, Best Buy have their in-house ad agency namely Content Factory, BBC Creative & Yellow Tag Productions respectively. However, it isn’t necessarily the only agency that these brands work with. Hence, if your agency can ensure them of in-house expertise, you can land-in their business.”
Here is our collection of Digital Marketing case studies that brought amazing results to our clients.
We, further, think that the following traits are necessary to successfully build an in-house digital marketing team:
- Data analysis.
- Effective communication.
- Ability to make decentralised decisions, i.e., any level of associates must be trained to question the basis of any campaign.
- Staying up-to-date with the latest marketing trends & user privacy concerns.
Even if you have remote workers in your team, you can coordinate better on any marketing assignment with these digital agency outsourcing tools.
Popular Digital Marketing Services To Offer
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You can start by offering SEO services which would require a minimum 6 months to 1 year of investment. Later you can expertize in local SEO strategies.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) & Social Media Marketing (SMM): You can kick-off with 3 minimum budget campaigns to test the market needs. As you gain expertise, you can expand the scope of SEM.
- Video marketing
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Branding/Rebranding
Also refer, How SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing and Influencer Marketing are all the same thing.
Moving ahead, here is how Artificial Intelligence is making in-roads in SEO strategies, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing. Increasingly, Data Visualization will aid your digital marketing potential. Look at how infographics can propel your content marketing.
Challenges
- Scouting for specialised talent: Digital Age 2.0 emphasises a lot on responsible marketing through respect for user privacy concerns, highlighting social issues through creative advertisements (as shown below), etc.
- High competition: While your agency is about to set up its in-house team, it will be up against global competition. It may demand a considerable amount of resources to attract your existing and prospective clients.
- Security concerns: Digital Marketing involves data analysis. There are a number of legal considerations around collecting and using customer data for digital marketing purposes. Your in-house team will have to comply with the rules regarding privacy and data protection.
Choosing The Right Digital Vendor for Digital Marketing Services
Such vendors eliminate the need for users to carry out repetitive tasks. This goes on to save time for other significant works.
Marketing Automation Vendors offer features that ease email campaigns, social media campaigns, lead management, and more.
45%
Workflow
25%
Higher Revenue
22%
Promoting their Services
“A report from Marketo says that businesses using automated marketing can grow their workflow by 45%, enjoy 25% higher revenue, and spend 22% more time in promoting their services.”
Refer to our analysis of the 9 best Marketing Automation tools to increase your business ROI. Here is one of our case studies on marketing automation using Marketo for White Label B2B Clients.
Account-based Marketing
Such vendors help in nurturing a small set of high-quality leads.
This will prevent:
- Over-emphasis on campaign vanity metrics such as Social Media likes (which truly doesn’t mean anything)
- Allow marketing and sales teams to dedicate the right resources to the most promising accounts
- Jabmo
- Demandbase
- Madison Logic
- Terminus
Understand what account-based marketing is all about by following this link.
Affiliate Marketing
Here is an interesting resource on how affiliate marketing is done
Marketing Cloud
Such vendors can track your entire marketing funnel in one place.
From content recommendations, SEO suggestions, designing Call-To-Action (CTAs) to tracking customer interactions with your campaign.
- Salesforce
- SAP HANA Cloud
- HubSpot
- Marketo
Search Engine Marketing
- Boostability Inc.
- WebiMax
Social Media Marketing
- Sprout Social
- HootSuite
- Falcon.io
- Buffer
Email Marketing
- MailChimp
- GetResponse
- Campaign Monitor
Content Marketing
- Contently
- Outbrain
Now that you may be convinced to develop an in-house digital marketing team, we would also like you to understand how to customize and build your own Digital Marketing packages.
Wrapping Up
‘Everything for everyone, customized’ is the mantra that will evolve the future marketing trends. Technology (AI & ML) will emerge as the core fabric of marketing to analyze customer’s expectations.
We have tried to present you with the best opportunities to build your in-house marketing team, given the fact that a digital agency today cannot sustain only with designing and development services.
As a matter of fact, established brands are very peculiar when it comes to choosing an agency for designing/development whereas upcoming businesses want to focus on their position in Google results rather than any development/designing aspects. But what remains common between these businesses is that they are open to multiple agencies for a broader perspective on the ever-evolving digital marketing space.
Give us a call at +1 (919) 234-5140 or contact us through the webform. We will be more than happy to assist you in setting up the latest Digital Marketing Services.
Comment down below to share your thoughts.
Good luck!
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