An integral part of any successful business today is how they present themselves amongst their competitors and to their desired audience with their online presence. Many business owners recognize that making the investment into a designated specialist will help to enhance and exhaust their success digitally and through the relevant platforms.
What is Digital Marketing?
Before outsourcing professional assistance for your digital marketing strategy, it is important to have full knowledge and understanding of what digital marketing entails and the importance of its execution for your business. Digital marketing emphasizes your media through online technologies, such as phones and computers, to enhance the presence of your enterprise against competitors and to better connect with your target audience. This includes, but is not limited to, your website, social media pages, search engine optimization, email marketing, organic and paid advertising.
Having an online presence is simply not enough. Every business should clarify the best ways to exhaust each strategy in their ongoing digital marketing campaign to build brand awareness and increase conversion rates.
Digital marketing includes a wide range of marketing strategies:
– Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This achieves ranking your business higher in the search results of Google to drive traffic to your site and other platforms
– Affiliate marketing
The use of content creators and influencers to collaborate and promote your services or products through their platforms to their audience for brand awareness and acquisition
– Email Marketing
Allows you to directly engage with individuals who are familiar with and subscribed to your brand. This tool allows you to encourage conversion rates and analyze performance.
– Social Media Marketing
By posting relevant content, you can remain easily engaged with your customer directly through the use of social media.
– Pay-per-click (PPC) and advertising campaigns
To create brand awareness and conversion, you may need to consider different routes of advertising, including paid campaigns, through the means of various platforms.
– Content Managing
Depending on the platform you wish to communicate with your audience, it’s important to piece together relevant content to keep your customers engaged.
– Mobile
The importance of mobile marketing is especially crucial as a call-to-action tool.
Measuring the performance of the analytics for your campaign performance will allow you to make more informed decisions for conversion rates when it comes to your customers
It is important to integrate and fully optimize each of these marketing strategies within your business to remain relevant within the industry, amongst your competitors and to your customers. It may be in your best interest to seek out a specialist or professional marketing agency to implement them on your behalf.
Why is Digital Marketing important?
Any successful business understands that most people in today’s world will validate any company by searching for it on the internet to see whether they have an active website and a social media following.
There are several categories of marketing under the umbrella of digital marketing listed above, that can be utilized for your marketing strategy and help you to achieve the desired goals for your business. Exhausting the correct online marketing tools allows your brand to build awareness within the industry, progress with customer acquisition and make a greater return on investment through the correct channels.
Creating and building an online platform allows you to build trust with your customers by communicating with them directly and familiarizing them with your brand. As you continue to grow your online platform using different strategies, you will be able to monitor and analyze the performance of each and adjust accordingly for better results.
Why seek a professional?
The purpose of hiring a professional is to ultimately complete in-depth research of your industry before planning and organizing the structure of your digital marketing strategy. A professional will remain extremely meticulous with the small details of marketing that you may miss out on when building your online platforms. They will provide you with direction and guidance of the marketing structure for the future of your business and assist with the execution and performance analysis.
Seeking out an expert can save you a lot of time as you’ll be able to communicate with your audience sooner once you’ve had the correct marketing platforms and channels implemented for you. Their responsibility to remain updated with current trends and changes in software and media platforms can only encourage your success.
Choosing a Professional Digital Marketer
Depending on the size of your business, your desired business goals and your marketing needs, you may wish to seek out a professional for various reasons. A digital marketer can help to set up your business from the ground running to simply enhance your current presence.
Specialists and Freelancers vs Media & Marketing agencies
Some businesses may require the assistance of a specialist in a specified field of digital marketing such as search engine optimization (SEO) or content marketing, to enhance their existing online presence, whereas others may require the backing of an entire agency with building their online presence from scratch.
A specialist will have expertise in specific fields of marketing which can help to optimize certain areas of your online presence where an agency will have multiple designers and content creators to work on your project, collectively. If your business is in the initial growth and planning stages, it may be best to formulate a budget that can work with an agency that assists with start-ups. Their services will include the first stages of marketing with logo and website design all the way to advertising campaigns and performance analysis. Should you be seeking ways to polish certain areas of marketing, such as social media or affiliate marketing, with an already established business, a specialist may be in your best interest.
Marketers will have a portfolio with a proven track record of their best work for you to view. This will help you to make a prominent decision when selecting a marketer. You should consider factors such as their experience in similar businesses or industries, years of experience in the field and testimonials or recorded performance when making a decision.
Budget
You will need to formulate a marketing budget before hiring a professional to help with your digital marketing. It is important to set a reasonable budget aside for your digital marketing needs. Once you’ve determined your marketing needs and goals, it will be easier to find the appropriate specialist or marketing agency to complete the required work.
Your budget will need to include the operational costs of your digital platforms such as the domain, software tools and any monthly subscriptions for automated services that will help to run your business.
How the pricing structure works
The digital marketer will determine the entire cost of your project based on several factors including its urgency and the amount of work to be completed. Of course, you will want to consider their years of expertise and the calibre of clients they have worked with as well as the length of time you’ll need them for.
It is important to reflect on your marketing needs and budget before going ahead with negotiating a price when outsourcing. You want to ensure that you are being given reasonable rates for what you require and that the expert will stay on brand guidelines and work within given deadlines. The rule of thumb in marketing is usually, “you get what you pay for” so you want to ensure that you do not compromise your brand by attempting to cut costs. Equally, it is imperative to review their past work to ensure that you are provided with the correct service by your marketer.
When working with an agency, you may negotiate budgets based on the entirety of the project, phase deadlines and/or a percentage of campaign returns. This means that payment can be made in several ways: you may pay a deposit and then complete payment upon the completion of work, pay in project increments, for example, web design, social media campaign etc. or you may negotiate a percentage of returns based on the performance of your business. When working with a sole freelancer or specialist, you may pay for their services at an hourly or project-based rate.
What the pricing structure looks like
As mentioned previously, when working with agencies, there are several ways that pricing can be broken down.
In Toronto, you can find an agency that offers digital marketing packages at a basic, premium and tailored rate. Depending on your needs, you will most probably be looking at a start-up package of anywhere from $2,500 to $25,000. This will include services such as, but not limited to, logo design, website set-up and design, social media pages and your search engine optimization.
Should you be looking at specialized marketing with a freelancer, you may be paying by the project or by the hour. The average rate for a freelancer can start anywhere from $50 to $150 an hour or $250 to $5,000, per project.
Digital marketers may work on retainer for certain marketing strategies such as paid advertising campaigns or SEO which will cost an average of anywhere between $500-$1500 a month.
The cost of your digital marketer will depend on their expertise and the urgency of your project. When you are looking to outsource your digital marketing, you want to ensure that the digital marketer is reputable and will help your business to maximize its full online potential. It is important that you are well informed of the work your digital marketer is able to produce and will immerse themselves fully into your business.
