The Ultimate Guide to Working with a Digital Agency in the UK
Introduction to digital agencies
There are a whopping 5.35 billion internet users worldwide. That’s two thirds of the world’s population! And, of those, 5.04 billion use social media. So, if your business doesn’t have a digital marketing strategy, you’re seriously missing out.
If the idea of launching a digital marketing campaign fills you with dread, you have no idea where to start, or you want the skills and expertise of an experienced digital marketing team, a digital marketing agency is a great option. But with thousands of digital marketing agencies here in the UK, how do you know where to start?
In the following chapters, we’ll cover what digital marketing really is, what a digital marketing agency can do for your business, and top tips for finding a digital agency in the UK.
Understanding digital marketing
Before we dive into what a digital marketing agency is, what it does, and the benefits of working with one, let’s talk about digital marketing and what it actually means.
What is digital marketing?
As opposed to traditional marketing, which involves billboards, magazine ads and direct mail, digital marketing is any marketing that is done online. This means campaigns that are intended for audiences using phones, tablets, computers, or another device.
Key components of digital marketing
There are several areas that make up digital marketing, which we’ll take a look at below:
- Website design
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Content marketing
- Account-based marketing (ABM)
- Lead generation
- Social media marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
Website design
Your website is a window into your business. If yours isn’t truly reflecting your brand, or giving a great first impression to prospective clients, it’s time to update it.
Website design is more than just selecting a nice template, though. It’s about incorporating your brand’s look and feel (or establishing one if you don’t really have one) and making it as user-friendly as possible for your visitors. After all, if your website flows well, is easy to navigate, and has a good load speed, people are far more likely to stick around.
The right website design can improve time on site by 84%
Search engine optimisation
Another key element of digital marketing is search engine optimisation (SEO). If you have a website, you want people to be able to find it. SEO helps you do that. SEO aims to boost your ranking in search engines, and it serves to allow potential clients to find you more easily when searching for specific keywords. There are multiple types of SEO to consider:- On-page SEO (focuses on ensuring you’re targeting and using the right keywords across your web content).
- Off-page SEO (focuses on elements that don’t happen on your website, such as backlinks).
- Technical SEO (focuses on ensuring the technical aspects of your website are having a positive impact on your search ranking).
Almost half (48.5%) of internet users use search engines to research products before making a purchase
Where people do their brand research:
Content marketing
Content marketing is the production of many different types of content – from blog posts and videos to guides, e-books and webinars. However, it’s not just a case of writing a piece and hitting publish – it’s about truly understanding your buyer personas and where they are in the marketing funnel.
Content marketing involves coming up with a plan that gets the right piece of content in front of the right customer at the right time. It’s about ensuring content is written with the target audience in mind, attracting and engaging them, generating leads, and, ultimately, driving sales.
97% of businesses generate positive results as a result of content marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing is a marketing approach that helps you reach your target audience through hyper-personalised content. ABM is a collaboration between sales and marketing, ensuring both teams are aligned in their goals, and are working cohesively.
ABM aims to create an outreach that’s more personal, valuable and relevant to your target audience. The ultimate goal is to increase conversions and return on investments (ROI), build client loyalty, and create happy customers.
Businesses that use ABM strategies see a 208% increase in their marketing contribution to pipeline
Lead generation
Lead generation is used as part of a digital marketing strategy to attract new enquiries and build a rich sales pipeline. It’s used to help capture prospects’ attention, nurture them and move them along to a position where they’re ready to make a purchase.
Lead generation is a great way to help ensure your target audience finds you more easily, and gives you a better understanding of your customers’ pain points.
Social media marketing
As mentioned above, an astronomical number of people are now using social media. If you’re not in their space, you’ll likely miss out to a competitor who is.
Social media marketing involves creating a strategy that helps you successfully and confidently post the right types of content on the channels you know your target audience is using on a regular basis. That could be LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or a number of other social media platforms.
Ultimately, you’ll want to create social content that will result in high engagement – likes, comments and shares – and that will be relevant to the audience you want to attract, enticing them to find out more about your business and use your products or services.
55% of buyers do research via social media.
Pay-per-click (PPC)
Pay-per-click (often referred simply as PPC) is an effective marketing strategy that uses ads (such as Google Ads) to direct visitors to your website. You pay each time your ad is clicked.
While Google Ads is one of the most frequently used channels for PPC, there are a whole bunch of other types – from Facebook’s Paid Ads to Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn.
PPC traffic converts approximately 50% better than organic data
Benefits of digital marketing for businesses
To put it plainly, if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy, you’re doing your business an injustice. More than that – it’ll be having a detrimental effect on your success. With the vast majority of people online, businesses, too, need to have an online presence to see results.
When you break down all the points mentioned in the section above, there are tonnes of digital marketing benefits. The methods employed help:
- Attract potential customers
- Boost traffic
- Create a great impression of your brand
- Engage your audience
- Provide valuable insights and resources
- Get in front of the right people at the right time with the right content
- Build your sales pipeline
- Nurture your leads
- Increase conversions
- Maximise ROI
- Create happy customers and brand advocates
A combination of the marketing approaches above will give you the best possible results, but this needs to be planned out carefully and strategically.
Digital marketing statistics
Ok, so there are plenty of reasons to consider digital marketing, but if that hasn’t convinced you, here are a few statistics that might:
77% of B2B purchasers won’t speak to a salesperson until they’ve done their own research
55% of buyers do research via social media
31% of B2B professionals sat that social selling allowed them to build deeper relationships with their clients
20-40% of webinar attendees become leads
More than 35% of B2B marketers surveyed have established a lead nurturing strategy
In 2018, 12% of all retail sales globally were eCommerce sales
People spend over 3.5 hour per day on their mobile devices.
72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO tactic
78% of internet users conduct product research online
91% of businesses now use video marketing
Ads can increase brand awareness by 80%
72% of marketers spend the majority of their marketing budget on digital marketing
Working with a digital agency in the UK
People choose to work with digital marketing agencies for a whole variety of reasons, but what exactly is a digital marketing agency? And what do they do? Let’s take a look…
What is a digital agency?
A digital agency is a company that specialises in digital marketing strategy, and digital marketing methods and tactics. A good digital marketing agency will consist of a team of experts, each with a sound understanding – and a wealth of experience – in their digital marketing specialism.
A digital agency will generally employ a range of professionals with backgrounds in website design, UX, lead generation, ABM, content marketing, SEO, and PPC.
What does a digital marketing agency do?
A digital agency will employ a variety of digital tactics to help their clients – whether B2B, B2C or both – succeed in their digital marketing goals.
This could include:
- building a new website that fits the look and feel of your brand
- ensuring your website is user-friendly
- building out a content marketing strategy
- getting your product or brand in front of the right people at the right time
- improving SEO so you’re found by more potential customers
- creating ads that will drive web traffic
- creating share-worthy content across your social media channel
Why work with a digital agency in the UK?
There’s a wide array of benefits when it comes to choosing to work with a digital marketing agency. Let’s explore below:
Expertise
Let’s face it, digital marketing is complicated. It’s not as simple as hopping onto a free app and creating a template. It requires knowledge of so many different elements. From understanding how user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) in web design to ensure your website visitors have the best possible experience, to understanding the types of content that work for your target audience, crafting high-quality pieces of content and knowing where and when to distribute them. There’s so much to consider.
Within a good digital marketing agency, you’ll find experts who live and breathe digital marketing. They’ve spent years honing their skills, ensuring they can provide their clients with not only an exceptional service, but also making sure they get the results they’re looking for.
The experts you come across at an established digital marketing agency have worked with a portfolio of businesses, many of which may be from the same industry or niche as your own. Understanding how they’ve helped those businesses will give you a good indication of how they can help you achieve success, too.
Tools
As well as wanting to know you have the right people working on your digital marketing efforts, working with a professional digital marketing agency also ensures the tools used to create those marketing efforts are going to result in the best outcome.
For instance, a digital marketing agency should be using the best tools available in order to produce stunning websites and gorgeous templates, and all of this should look and feel cohesive across your entire brand. If it’s produced with a free or cheap tool, it will likely end up looking poor quality and unprofessional.
Digital marketing strategy
You may have an idea for a piece of content, or simply a goal you want to achieve, which is a great start. But an experienced digital marketing agency will be able to form a strategy that will help you realise your goal. This involves understanding how it all ties together and looking at the digital marketing tools that can be used in order to achieve great results.
So, they’ll look at understanding your target audience and where they spend their time online, ensuring that all content addresses their needs, informs or persuades using the right messaging that follows your brand guidelines (if you have them – if not, they can help you develop them).
It’s not about creating a beautiful new website or incredible video/ webinar/ e-book/ other and throwing it out into the ether. It’s about ensuring the right people find it at the right time. And that takes careful planning and consideration.
Insights
As mentioned above, it’s not about throwing a digital marketing effort out into the big wide web and seeing what sticks. It’s about going in with a sturdy plan and tracking the success of your efforts once they’re live. This will help see whether your efforts are on track, who’s engaging with them, whether that’s leading to conversions, and so on.
A digital marketing agency will review and analyse your digital campaigns on a regular basis to see how they are performing and tweak where necessary.
Time and resources
As you can imagine, many of the above points require a lot of time, effort and resources. Especially if digital marketing isn’t your forte. From planning to execute a high-quality video, for instance, it can take even an experienced professional an entire week. So, if this is not your remit, it will take significantly longer.
Even when you have an in-house team of digital marketers, we understand the pressure when you have multiple campaigns running parallel. A digital marketing agency can relieve that pressure, acting as an extension of your marketing team.
How to choose the right digital agency in the UK
As chapter 4 explains, there are tonnes of benefits to outsourcing your digital marketing efforts to a digital agency. However, it’s really important to find an agency that’s the right fit for your business. One that aligns with your business goals, values, and industry.
What should I look for in a digital agency?
To simplify your search for the perfect digital agency in the UK for your needs, we’ve put together some handy questions to consider:
Do they give you positive vibes?
Sometimes, when you know, you just know. As with many things in life, when it comes to picking a digital agency in the UK, one of the best things you can do is trust your instincts.
Is their communication clear and insightful?
You’ll also want to be sure that the digital agency you choose will be open, transparent, and able to provide you with details when you want an update on a campaign or project. You should be able to gauge whether this is the case by talking with them and checking out reviews.
Do others rate them?
Checking out online reviews to see if a digital agency is everything they make themselves out to be, and that they do have a good reputation, is a great way to determine whether you want to work with them.
What can they tell you about their past successes?
Reading case studies is also a great way to ascertain whether a digital marketing agency can deliver what you need it to. Case studies are a fantastic way to see a range of successes, facts and figures — from increased ROI to increased organic views and more. Even better if there are some positive customer comments to peruse.
Do they produce quality over quantity?
The idea of sending out tonnes of projects at the speed of light may sound appealing, but you’ll want to be sure that the digital agency you choose is able to deliver quality content. Churning out vast amounts of poorly written articles, sloppy web design, or unengaging social media posts simply won’t get you the traction or results that a well-researched, high-quality piece of work would.
Once you can check all of these questions off confidently, you’ll be well on your way to selecting the right digital marketing agency for you.
Future trends in digital marketing
Digital marketing is constantly evolving and, as such, digital marketers need to stay on top of the latest developments and trends. To do so, the ones worth their salt will continue to learn and improve on their skill sets, all with the goal of doing a better job for their clients.
Key trends in digital marketing include:
Personalising the customer experience
Tailoring your marketing efforts to your target audience’s preferences and providing seamless, personalised experiences across multiple channels.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
You can’t escape this trend at the moment. Wherever you go, there’s talk of the latest innovations in AI and machine learning, and automations in marketing campaigns.
Video marketing
There’s increasing emphasis on video content across social media platforms and websites to engage audiences and convey messages effectively.
Interactive Content
Creating interactive content such as quizzes, polls, and interactive infographics to enhance user engagement and drive conversions.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing continues to trend, with many businesses collaborating with influencers and micro-influencers to reach targeted audiences and build brand credibility.
Local SEO
Optimising online presence for local searches helps to enhance visibility in local search results.
Privacy Compliance and Data Security
Ensuring compliance with GDPR regulations and prioritising data security to build trust with consumers is a must when it comes to digital marketing, so it’s great to see this trend continuing.
Sustainability and Social Responsibility
Incorporating sustainable and socially responsible practices into marketing strategies to resonate with environmentally and socially conscious consumers.
Voice search optimisation
Optimising content and SEO strategies for voice search. The use of voice assistants has been on the rise for some time now, and continues to grow.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
Exploring AR and VR technologies has been big news in the last few years, helping businesses to create immersive brand experiences and enhance product visualisation.
Finding a digital agency that has a good grasp of these – and future – trends is crucial. Looking for an agency that understands which of these will work best for you, and why, is a must.
Ready to start your digital marketing journey? Find out what KAYBE can do for you.
