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Now more than ever, business leaders rely on their digital marketing agency partners and consider them trusted advisors. With an efficient agency on your side, you can remain relevant, ahead of competitors, and keep your audience engaged.
A few years ago, partnering with a digital marketing agency was primarily transactional. A business would set its budget. Outlay its strategic goals. The marketing agency would then do everything to secure high, one-off results over the campaign period. While this was phenomenal for a short burst in results, it often led to a lack of customer loyalty. This often worked against the brand once the campaign concluded.
Why would you want a digital marketing agency to evolve your brand?
Simple. Because it’s not just about the “marketing”. Most good agencies are structured to be trusted advisors.
Your brand is the cornerstone of your company. It’s what you are, who you are, and how you show up to the world.
It’s also one of the most valuable tools in your marketing toolkit. Branding can help you differentiate yourself from competitors, and establish trust and credibility with your customers. That’s why, for your brand to evolve over time, stay relevant and fresh, it’s wise to “leave it to the experts”.
A digital marketing agency can help you do this by becoming a trusted advisor for your brand. They’ll work with you to understand who you are and what your vision for the future looks like. This can help evolve your brand accordingly. Beyond the fluff, they’ll work on the operational stuff and key activities that make up the plan for how to make those changes happen. This is to ensure that they’re implemented in a way that aligns with all other aspects of your business operations (like sales or customer service).
Nowadays, the right digital marketing agency can do many things and should assist in evolving your brand.
A few basics you should be getting from your agency:
1. Accountability.
When you hire an agency, you’re hiring someone accountable for your marketing results. They don’t have the luxury of being able to say “the client didn’t give me enough time or money.”
Agency marketers are also highly likely to be innovative thinkers and creative problem solvers who have experience in executing successful campaigns across many different industries. The magic often happens in this cross-pollination of industry exposure.
2. Diversify Your Brand & Visibility.
A digital marketing agency can help you diversify your brand by expanding into new areas and becoming more visible in those areas while understanding how your brand fits into the market. This means that if one area of your business is struggling or declining, others may be growing and thriving—and the agency will help you capitalise on those areas to make sure they’re also growing and thriving.
Helping you understand how to evolve your brand for the future as well as adapt your brand for different audiences and channels is typically what an agency is set up to do.
3. Build An Audience.
A digital marketing agency can help you build an audience that wants to engage with what you have to say, whether it’s through conversion rate optimisation of a landing page, engagement on social media or through more traditional channels like email or print! A campaign strategy that links all the channels together is often a tell-tale sign you’re doing it right.
4. Getting s*** done. No red tape.
Often, larger corporates have studio teams that specialise in digital marketing, brand and design. Though, they still opt to partner with agencies that are often smaller than their studio team, and rightly so. This is because incumbent teams often suffer from decision and process paralysis that often comes with the territory. This can sometimes mean that getting out a humble EDM can often be weeks, if not longer to produce, much less deliver.
The right agency can often turn this around quickly enough to begin the approval process sooner.
I also find that as an outsider “looking in”, you can almost immediately identify areas in the process that can be improved, offer candid advice and even training to bring internal teams up to speed with certain tech or tools.
It was similar circumstances that allowed the team at Let’s Play Digital to partner with retail juggernauts from Spotlight Holding Group (Spotlight, Anaconda & Harris Scarf) and Bapcor (Autobarn, Federal Batteries, Burson’s, etc) to turn major jobs around efficiently and effectively.
With the rise of digital marketing in the naughties, there was simply so much more that marketing agencies could achieve. Since then, there has been a heavy focus on building long-term relationships with customers, and rightly so. As such, agencies have moved away from this transactional approach and become a business’ “go-to” for campaigns, leads, loyalty, and a captive audience.
Don’t underestimate the value of being able to call on an experienced CMO, CDO, Creative Director or CIO at will, albeit outsourced. It’s an extraordinarily powerful position and is no longer limited to organisations that are able to hire people for these positions in a full-time capacity.
Here are just some of the fantastic ways digital marketing agencies have taken on this advisory role:
Providing Up-To-Date Reporting On All Results
One of the hardest parts of marketing is correlating expenses with return on investment. Unless a customer clearly identifies that the purchase decision came from a specific channel, it can be difficult to understand. However, through consistent reporting, a digital marketing agency can provide a clear breakdown on ideal budget allocation. They can then make recommendations to elevate this success and eradicate any bottlenecks.
We Know Who To Target
Whether you’re a new or established business, understanding your precise target market can be incredibly difficult.
Your target market isn’t everyone you want to target. It’s more the audience whom you love engaging with and are most aligned with your values and ethos. Understanding consumer behaviour, we know that a good agency can often target an audience and high-profit markets much faster. Seeing an increase in any set metric, after a strategy implementation, is a sure way to build trust in the business. This is something that Let’s Play Digital not only does but works into the strategy success measure.
We Know How To Keep People Engaged
For a business leader, previous and current customers are everything. From word of mouth to repeat purchases, they are the people that typically keep a business going. Whether through EDM funnels, social campaigns, or a new website, digital agencies base actions on data and experience, not opinion. We want customers to keep thinking and talking about your brand as much as you do. Therefore, rather than just focusing on the immediate, agencies focus on the holistic experience. A phenomenon that can elevate businesses to unprecedented heights.
With an eye for detail and a goal for success, marketing agencies have evolved as extensions of their clients. Rather than stimulating one-off results, they’ll do everything to find the right solutions for clients consistently. They have therefore taken on the role of a trusted advisor.
At Let’s Play Digital, we believe the marketing journey is never-ending. It’s our goal to continuously build new strategies and tactics that will bring your business the success it desires. Partner with us, and we’ll work to form a strong relationship with you, your audience and know we’ll always strive to be your trusted advisor.
If you’re looking to evolve and elevate your brand, let’s chat!
