So you’re launching a website! Congratulations. You’ve probably put a lot of thought into the content you’d like to host, the products you’d like to sell, and the people you’d like to reach. But have you considered how best to go about promoting your site? Connecting with readers and consumers is more difficult than it sounds. With over 644 million active websites out there, it can be easy for a site, even one with engaging content or useful products or services, to go unnoticed. And if your site isn’t attracting any traffic, it doesn’t really matter how much work you put into your font selection or graphic design. That’s why you should consider partnering with a digital marketing agency to launch or promote your new website. Here are five benefits of working with a digital marketing agency.
1. An Agency Can Provide an Objective Assessment of Your Site
If you’ve spent a long time building your company and/or website, you’re probably fully immersed in what you’ve created. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can leave you blind to glaring issues in your site’s functionality or your products’ appeal. Having used the site so much, you’ve developed workarounds and shortcuts to deal with issues that new users won’t know how to handle. One benefit of hiring outside help with marketing is that you’ll get fresh eyes on your entire package. The agency can evaluate your site and your strategy objectively, giving you insights you would otherwise miss. They might even be able to recommend a pivot that could open up new avenues of profitability for your site.
2. You’ll Stay in Touch with Trends in Marketing
Digital marketing is one of the fastest-changing fields out there, and if you’re focusing on the other aspects of your business or website, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s currently in vogue. Trends in social media, the news, and the marketing industry dictate how digital marketers operate, but it’s difficult to keep track of all these things while also running a website. Employing an outside agency helps you ensure that your site and your campaigns are on the cutting edge. They can keep your social media presence on point, even as new platforms appear and attract new demographics.
3. Digital Marketing Agencies Can Improve Your SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing traffic to a website by improving its ranking on search engines for key terms related to the site. It’s a dense and complex field, but it’s also of paramount importance. Since most web users click a link on the first page of results, if your site doesn’t rank for important keywords, you won’t get much traffic at all. In fact, your SEO does a lot more to determine the success of your website than things you’ve probably paid a lot more attention to, like your site’s design or the products you sell. Getting eyes on your site is the name of the game with SEO, and an agency can help optimize your site into a fine-tuned organic traffic machine.
4. An Agency Can Help You Fine-Tune Your Sales Funnel
The term “sales funnel” refers to the stages through which a user passes on the way to making a purchase. It’s an apt figure of speech because a site constructed with sales in mind ought to be somewhat like a funnel, starting off with a wide intake designed to attract tons of users, and inevitably directing them toward a narrower objective (buying a product or signing up for a mailing list). The stages of the sales funnel ought to be optimized to prevent people from bouncing off the site before making a purchase, and a shrewd digital marketing agency will know exactly what to do make your sales funnel as efficient as possible.
5. Agencies Understand Modern Advertising
One reason SEO, sales funnels, and other web-centric buzzwords are mentioned so often when discussing digital marketing is because the old ways of selling products have become ineffective. SEO works because it’s an element of an inbound marketing strategy, helping users find you, whereas outbound advertising, in which you seek out customers, has largely fallen out of favor, as many web users are now mostly blind to the advertisements they encounter. A digital marketing agency can spend your advertising dollars in a way that actually has an impact, targeting ads perfectly for your key demographics and avoiding wasteful spending on campaigns that don’t work. Email marketing is a great example. Left to their own devices, many companies send out email blasts that are largely ignored. An agency can write compelling emails that actually get opened and generate leads.
Don’t let your website disappear in the vast sea of content on the Internet! Hiring a digital marketing agency can be the difference between obscurity and ubiquity for your website.
