BigCommerce helps growing businesses, enterprise brands, and everything in-between sell more online.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep your head above water in a sea of digital marketing opportunities. There are a lot of decisions to make.
Should you try search engine campaigns or social media marketing?
Is it better to generate leads through blog posts or landing pages?
Is email marketing still working for ecommerce?
What type of content should you create for each phase of your conversion funnel?
Will Instagram Shopping help you increase sales?
Finding the answers to these questions can feel overwhelming, but that’s where a digital marketing agency comes in.
An agency can help you answer the right questions and find the right solutions to increase your brand awareness, manage your online reputation, drive qualified leads and boost your ecommerce sales volume.
A digital marketing agency can be specialized in digital marketing tactics or it can be a full-service digital agency.
A full-service digital agency typically offers end-to-end solutions for your online presence – from branding your business, designing your website and optimizing it for higher rankings in search engine results to creating and executing complete digital marketing strategy for you.
If focused on digital marketing tactics, services of a digital marketing agency may include anything and everything from an overall strategy to content marketing, email marketing, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, influencer marketing, PR services and much more.
You might want to consider hiring an agency to help you with marketing endeavors if:
You run a small online store as a hobby or a side business and you don’t have time to promote and grow your brand yourself.
You just started an ecommerce website and you are not quite sure where to start with digital marketing or how to implement it.
You run an established small business but you find it more cost-effective to outsource marketing services to an agency than hiring an in-house marketer.
Your business is growing quickly and you need to consult with digital marketing specialists to learn how to scale your marketing efforts.
If you choose to hire an agency, you can choose a local or a global one, depending on your preferences, business type and industry.
Once they are on board with your team, experts from a digital marketing agency can help you with key points of your online promotion.
Let’s take a look at the most important benefits you can gain from collaborating with an agency.
Without a proper strategy, your marketing efforts might fall flat, leaving you without any tangible results.
To create a strategy, an agency can use their resources to conduct market and audience research, create your customer personas, map buyer journeys and carefully decide when, where and how to market your brand to get the best results.
Once you have a strategy defined, you can collaborate with an agency to help you create a clear marketing plan with actionable steps for accomplishing both short-term and long-term goals.
If you don’t position your brand the right way, there’s a good chance your ideal customers might not find your products or services or they might get confused with your offers.
Key brand positioning statements can include a short and punchy tagline, clear, concise and benefit-oriented value proposition, a so-called elevator pitch that can help you explain your business in a single sentence, your vision and mission statements, your brand voice style guide and more.
These messages and guidelines can help you speak clearly to your audience, convey the right message and engage your customers from the get-go.
Your reputation might be the single most important asset of your ecommerce business. Not just because it helps you retain loyal customers, but because it can also significantly affect the number of new customers who come across your brand online.
To help you manage your reputation, a digital marketing agency can find relevant online business directories and rating platforms to publish your company profile on and help you gain more customer reviews, better product ratings and attract more qualified leads.
Even though omnichannel marketing has been a popular solution, it doesn’t mean that you need to be present on every channel all the time. Instead, you should choose your channels wisely to meet your customers’ needs and a marketing agency can help you do just that.
Choosing the right channel for your ecommerce business may mean one of these scenarios:
If you sell a modest amount of handmade products, you might only need Instagram promotions.
If you run an expanding online apparel store, you might start a Google Ads campaigns along with Facebook and Instagram ads and an email newsletter.
If you own a B2B business and you want to target decision-makers in large companies, you could get the best return on investment (ROI) with LinkedIn campaigns and content written by experts to strengthen your credibility and authority.
The simplest way to decide which platforms to be active on is to know where your ideal customers spend the most of their time online, as well as how they typically consume content, what type of content they prefer, what influences their online shopping behavior – how they decide to buy and other online behaviors.
Once you’ve chosen you marketing channels, an agency can help you with research, creation, testing, measuring and tweaking your campaigns.
The services that a digital marketing agency can offer might include copywriting for your website, landing pages, product descriptions, sales pages and more. Or, writing blog posts, case studies, white papers and other long-form content, as well as measuring its impact.
Plus, an agency can provide designers to create custom illustrations for your social media campaigns, engage a video production team to make sure all your promotional YouTube videos look professional and on-brand or help you start a podcast and grow your following.
Your promotional banners, search engine ads, social marketing campaigns, emails, special offers and discounts are all likely to lead to your business website. That’s why you should make sure your website is fast, reliable and functional.
To improve your website performance, you can get a full-service digital agency to create custom website strategies for your brand and help you boost visitor engagement and encourage your website visitors to take an action.
Optimizing your website may include SEO audit, link-building campaigns and detailed analytics reports to help you increase your visibility and rankings in search engine results.
It could also mean simplifying your website navigation menu, positioning call-to-action (CTA) buttons strategically, creating a streamlined checkout process, implementing secure payment options and more to improve user experience and boost your conversion rates.
To decide whether an agency is right for your business:
Check out the portfolio of the agency to see if there are ecommerce projects that resonate with your brand.
Check out testimonials from previous clients on the agency’s website.
Check out customer ratings and client reviews on credible rating platforms.
Make a decision based on the location of an agency or their typical project pricing.
Of course, your decision will also depend on your marketing needs, preferences and the scope of services you want to outsource to an agency.
Hiring a digital marketing agency can be a fruitful move, whether you are just starting out with an ecommerce business or you run a successful online store and you want to attract more customers.
Experts from a digital marketing agency can help you with a variety of services. It could be as simple as writing an email sequence for your next product launch or as thorough as documenting and executing your overall digital marketing strategy.
Either way, an agency can become an extension of your team to help you drive more traffic, generate leads and increase revenue.
BigCommerce helps growing businesses, enterprise brands, and everything in-between sell more online.
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