The services each individual marketing agency will offer may differ slightly from company to company but you should expect them all to offer a similar set of core services.

The primary one is likely to be search engine optimisation (SEO) which involves a comprehensive strategy and several actions to try and improve the search engine rankings of the client’s company website. Another core service will be pay per click advertising (PPC), and this is most likely going to focus on Google Ads, although there are other PPC networks.

Additional services that can be employed separately, although more likely in conjunction with the above, will be content management, link building, conversion optimisation, and reputation management.

It absolutely is, and in fact, not only is it still effective, if done correctly, it can boost a company’s revenue significantly. One of the reasons for this is that with many email platforms and autoresponder services able to sift out spam and bogus us emails better than ever before, it means that genuine emails have a greater chance of being seen by your email subscribers.

Email is a great way to build trust with your email subscribers and creating a long-term relationship with them, provided that the content you send them by email isn’t a constant stream of sales messages. Company updates, product launches, useful advice, competitions and free ‘give-aways’ are just of the positive ways that effective email marketing can be used.

While it is not essential, if you don’t have a blog you are missing a great opportunity to communicate with visitors to your website, create trust with them, and enhance your brand. On top of that, there is also the boost to your SEO that having excellent content on your website in the form of your blog can provide.

If you are concerned that you do not have the time or would struggle to come with ideas to write about, then be assured these can both be overcome. The easiest way to do so is to employ a third party to take care of your content management, including your blog. A digital marketing agency will have a team of writers who can produce high-quality content for your blog on a regular basis, allowing you to get on with running your business.

Content marketing is utilising useful, educational, and interesting information on your website to build and retain a loyal audience. This free content, which you publish on your website, can be in many forms such as a blog articles, videos, infographics and page content. This content may not necessarily try to sell anything, but it plays an important role in taking potential customers through your marketing funnel, and towards a sale.

A marketing funnel is the journey along which your customers travel from the first instant they see your brand or product, through and until the point, when they purchase your product or service. Some marketing companies even extend this to where that customer becomes an advocate for your brand.

Although the principle points within a marketing funnel may be similar across any market sector, the specifics of each company’s will be different. For example, building the brand is a universal necessity, but where one company might focus on email marketing to do that, another might utilise social media.

This is why using a digital marketing agency to create and build your marketing funnel is so important, so that the key points within it are done in the right way, and the customer journey ultimately brings positive action.

PPC stands for pay per click advertising and it is a form of marketing that can bring instant traffic to your website if you have the marketing budget available to pay for the ads. The primary player within PPC is Google Ads which is understandable, given that Google accounts for over 90% of search engine traffic.

Unlike newspaper or magazine ads where you simply pay to be seen, PPC is based on the keywords that someone types into a search box. For example, if someone types in ’emergency plumber Perth’, and you have a PPC ad set up for those keywords, then if you have bid enough, your ad will be seen before others.

This means that if your ad appears, and they then click it, you pay, but the benefit is that person is now being redirected to your website, and there’s greater chance of the person searching, being interested in your brand and products.

While that hopefully sounds straightforward enough, setting up PPC ads so that they are effective, rather than just a drain on your funds, requires skills and knowledge. Factors such as what keywords to bid on, how much those bids should be, and what copy to write in your ads, are just some of the key elements that should be entrusted to a professional digital marketing company.

Sponsored content is written content which a company pays for to appear on the pages of another website in the hope of boosting their brand. In appearance and placement, the content often looks like editorial content that the website has written. The giveaway will often be a small tagline that says, ‘Brought to you by…’, or ‘ Presented by…’ and then the name of the brand who created the content. Social media sites like Facebook have some of the largest sponsored content platforms on the internet.

Conversion rate optimisation is the process, and the actions taken, to ensure that when a visitor lands on a website, everything is in place to encourage them to take a desired action. This could be a sale, them filling out an email opt-in form, completing a survey, or indeed any of the many actions that a business might want a visitor to take.

Poor conversion rate optimisation is one of the biggest errors companies make, whereby they spend their marketing budget driving traffic to their website, and then despair when visitors quickly leave again. Effectively optimising a website for conversions is one of the top services offered by digital marketing companies.

A lead magnet is simply something you offer for free in return for a visitor adding their email address or other information to a form on your website. What they can be is almost limitless but obviously they need to be useful and related to your business. Examples are a report, a free quote or estimate, an instruction video, a free course or a discount coupon.

Due to the diversity of how different social media sites work, and their audiences, it is important that you seek advice on which ones your type of business should be on.

There are some basic rules such as business to business companies being on LinkedIn, whereas businesses that sell to the masses are often best suited to Facebook. However, there is a lot more to it than that, and each individual business owner should get advice from a digital marketing agency, who can go as far as fulfilling all their social media marketing.