What is a Digital Marketing Agency?

A digital marketing agency is a business you hire to outsource your marketing efforts, instead of hiring an in-house marketing team. A marketing agency can usually offer a wide range of digital marketing services including social media marketing, content marketing, marketing automation, graphic design, search engine marketing, and much more. 

You can work with a full-service digital marketing agency that usually offers a whole range of services or with a boutique agency that focuses on specific digital channels. 

What's the advantage of working with a digital marketing agency? 

The advantage of working with an agency is that you don't have to hire your own in-house digital marketing team. Hiring in-house is usually very expensive, takes much longer to find the right marketer and to validate that they are a good fit for your business. 

With an agency, you can select a specific provider that has proven expertise in the specific marketing channel that you're looking to grow. You also get to see their digital marketing strategy before they begin working on your digital marketing campaigns. So it's more visibility, more transparency, and often a quicker way to get results. 

That may sound pretty groovy but the challenge is finding the right agency for your business.

What does a digital agency do? 

A digital agency can offer you a variety of digital services. Here are some of the main ones. 

Content marketing

A content agency would usually do three things: 

• Content development - come up with a content marketing strategy and a list of topics to write about for the next 3-6 months
• Content writing - write various types of content for your blog, website, and social media pages
• Content management - manage the team of writers and editors who would bring your content from ideation all the way to execution

Search engine optimization

An SEO agency specializes in getting you more organic traffic through optimizing your on-page content, link building, digital PR, and building out a content strategy for your business. 

Social media marketing

Social media marketing services can do a variety of things including - optimizing your social media channels, increasing your engagement, creating and publishing posts, doing video marketing, and working with influencers on your behalf. 

Email marketing

Your email list is the best way to keep track of your customer data and connect with your potential customers. An email marketing agency can help create a comprehensive list of email strategies to improve your open and click-through rates and increase your email revenue. 

Site optimization

Most digital agencies would also help you improve your website. They would run data analytics to find areas of improvement, provide design services to help you make minor modifications to your site based on that data, or manage an entire website redesign if needed. A good digital agency would also help you monitor the user experience and optimize every part of your sales funnel to improve those conversion rates. 

Digital marketing strategy

So many business owners rush to fix their ads and forget everything else. Sometimes your digital advertising campaigns aren't the problem and what you should be focusing on is building a better online marketing strategy. Having a better strategy in place will help you focus your digital marketing efforts on those areas that will impact your ROI the most. 

How much do digital marketing agencies cost? 

The top digital marketing agencies usually charge a monthly retainer which could vary from $1,000 all the way up to $5k-$10k per month depending on the scope of the project. The price could vary based on their expertise and they often have a minimum project price that you should ask for. 

Some agencies charge hourly rates for their services and in the US that could cost around $100-$175. If you hire a company overseas you may get a rate of as low as $40/hour. 

How to select the best digital agency to work with?

Here's a step-by-step process of finding the perfect agency for your project.

Determine your business goals

First, you should determine what your goals are. Are you trying to improve your click-through rate on your email promotions? Improve your conversion rate? Get more organic traffic? Improve the engagement on your social media campaigns? Create better content for your target audience? Each one of these goals will require a different set of expertise. 

Select your marketing channel(s) 

Next, select the marketing channel or channels that you would like to work on. Look over your list of goals and pick the channels that will help you hit each of those targets. 

Look for a team of experts with a proven track record

Now you're ready to begin looking for a qualified agency to run your project. The most important factor is their past experience. Don't be wowed by a fancy sales deck or 5-star reviews, ask each agency for their client list, practical experience, and past successes with brands in your industry or niche. 

Find the best agency on Mayple

Want to work with a digital marketing company but not sure which one to pick? Find the perfect one on Mayple. We have a community of some of the best digital marketing firms and performance marketers on the planet.

We do a thorough vetting of each marketer and match them to your business based on their proven success record of working with similar companies to yours. You will also get a personal marketing strategist that will help monitor the marketer's work and give you helpful suggestions on how to grow your business even further. 

Don't settle for less. You deserve to work with the best. With Mayple, you can find the world's top digital marketing companies for your specific project.