Digital marketing agency services, and which of them you actually need

What a digital marketing agency actually does

Digital marketing is four different jobs wearing one coat, and most of the confusion in this whole category comes from agencies selling the coat rather than any of the four jobs inside it.

The four are search, paid, content and social, and a business rarely needs all four at once. Search is the work of being found when somebody is already looking for what you sell, and paid is renting that position while you build it. Content is the material both of those need in order to have anything to rank or point at. Social is a distribution channel and a customer service desk that most small businesses are told is a marketing strategy.

They are not interchangeable and they do not all suit every business. A dental practice competing inside a ten mile radius and a winery selling club memberships to people three states away have almost nothing in common, except that both were sold the same package by the same kind of agency in the same week.

What we do here is work out which of the four earns its place for a particular business and in what order, and then do that work rather than all of it at once, which is a less impressive thing to put on a proposal and a considerably better thing to buy.

The order matters more than the list

Almost every business we meet has been sold the four in the wrong sequence. Social first, because it is visible and cheap to start. Paid second, because it produces numbers quickly. Content third if at all, and search last, because it takes the longest to show anything and nobody wants to sell the slow one.

Run backwards, that sequence spends the most money in the period when you understand your customers least, and it leaves the one asset that compounds until the end. That is the wrong way round.

We start with search, because the questions people type are the cheapest customer research available anywhere and they tell you what the content ought to say. Then content, because paid and social both need something to point at. Then paid, to rent position on the terms search will take months to earn. Social last, and only where the audience is genuinely there.

What is digital marketing, in the sense a small business needs

Strip the category down to what it is actually for and you get this: being present, and being persuasive, in the places where somebody is deciding whether to call you.

For most local businesses the deciding happens in three places. The map pack, when somebody wants a thing near them right now. The blue links, when somebody is researching and has not chosen yet. And increasingly the answer box, where a model summarizes the category and names two or three businesses without the reader ever seeing a list at all.

Those three surfaces reward different work, and the difference is not a matter of degree. The map pack rewards proximity, categories and reviews. The blue links reward pages that answer a question completely. The answer engines reward being the source other pages cite, which is a slower and considerably less controllable thing than either of the other two.

A digital marketing agency worth paying tells you which of the three your customers actually use, and says so before quoting. Most do not ask.

Why it matters for a business that is doing fine

The argument for digital marketing is usually pitched to a business owner as growth, and the more honest version is that it is insurance against a change you did not choose and cannot see coming.

Businesses that sell to people who already know them do fine until the people who know them retire, move away or stop driving past, and the channel that replaces word of mouth is search – which takes months to build, so the businesses that start it while they are comfortable are the ones that still have it when they are not.

That is not a reason to spend everything; it is a reason to start.

Search, and why it comes first

Search work is the part of digital marketing with the longest lag and the longest tail. It is also the only part that keeps working after you stop paying. That is the whole case for it.

The work divides into what your site says, what your site is, and what the rest of the internet says about you, and the three are worked in that order. The first is content and structure: one page per thing you sell, headings that name the thing, answers that finish. The second is technical, meaning the page loads, the markup is clean and the site can be crawled and understood. The third is entity work and links, which is slower and considerably less in your control than anyone selling it will admit to you.

For a local business the map pack sits alongside all of that and runs on a different engine entirely, where proximity to the searcher decides more than any agency likes to say out loud and cannot be bought at any price – what can be improved is the profile, the primary category, the review rate and the pages standing behind them.

Content, and the difference between publishing and answering

Most content marketing fails in a way that is invisible from the inside. It publishes on schedule and answers nothing.

A page earns its position by finishing a question rather than by covering a topic, hitting a word count or being posted weekly. The test is simple enough to apply from the outside. If somebody arrives with a question and leaves with it answered then the page has done the job, and the metrics that matter follow from that rather than causing it.

This is why we start with the search results rather than with a content calendar. What people type is what they want to know, and reading the top ten before writing a word tells you what has already been said and what everybody has left out. The gap is the page.

What we will not do

We will not write a blog because a plan somewhere says twelve posts a quarter, and we will not produce a page whose only purpose is to contain a keyword somebody put on a spreadsheet. And we will not publish a number we cannot attribute, which is a rule we hold because this category is full of statistics that trace back to nothing.

Paid search, and what it is genuinely for

Paid search rents a position that the organic work has not earned yet, which is its honest use and a genuinely good one for a business that cannot wait six months.

It is also the fastest keyword research a business will ever get. A month of ad spend tells you exactly which phrases produce inquiries and which produce clicks that go nowhere, and that report is worth a good deal more than the clicks were. It goes straight into what the content covers next.

Where paid goes wrong is when it quietly becomes permanent, because an account that has run unchanged for three years is usually renting a position the site could have earned by now, which means the business is paying rent every month on an asset it could have owned outright.

We run paid with a stopping condition written down at the start. It is in the proposal.

Social, honestly

Social media is a distribution channel and a customer service desk, and for some businesses it is also a storefront. For most of the local businesses we work with it is none of those things, and it is a standing time cost that produces goodwill and very little else.

That is not an argument against it so much as an argument against being sold it as a strategy – if your customers are on a platform and expect to reach you there then be there and answer them, and if they are not, the hours go considerably further on the pages that get found.

How to tell the work apart from the invoice

The question every business should ask a digital marketing agency before signing anything is what changes on my site, and when exactly can I go and look at it.

Work that shows up as a change to something you own is checkable. New pages, a rebuilt profile, a corrected listing, a fixed template, a report you can actually read. Work that shows up only as a monthly summary of activity is not, which matters because on a surprising number of retainers the summary is the product.

Ask where the deliverables live. If the schema arrives as a plugin license, the listings get claimed under an address at the agency’s domain, or the content lives on a subdomain somebody else controls, then what you are renting stops the day you stop paying and you are back where you started.

Common questions