Los Angeles Digital Marketing Agency

For companies today, digital marketing matters because it offers:

• Multiple online marketing strategies
• Cost-effective marketing solutions
• Level playing field
• Advanced targeting and personalization options
• Accurate campaign tracking and measurement
• Continuous campaign performance feedback

A few factors influence how much you spend on digital marketing, including:

Your online marketing strategy’s complexity

Web marketing plans can become complicated quickly, especially if your company uses multiple channels and teams for marketing your business. That’s why complex projects require a more significant investment because they need more resources and team members to succeed.

Your digital marketing tools

Marketing your business online demands a toolkit, which will generally include tools for:

• Tracking rankings in organic search results
• Researching competitor strategies
• Developing content calendars
• Tracking content progress from writing to editing to publishing
• Scheduling, publishing, and monitoring social media posts
• Creating ads for social media and search campaigns
• Building, sending, and monitoring email campaigns

 

While your company can access some free tools online for scheduling social media posts, you’ll often need to set aside some of your digital marketing budget for paid tools for researching competitors and monitoring organic search rankings.

Depending on your business, you may also invest in some third-party services, like:

• Freelance design
• Professional digital marketing services
• One-time consulting

These services often help your in-house team with managing your online marketing strategy.

A freelance designer, for instance, can provide high-quality graphics for your company’s blog posts, social media posts, and ads, which saves you the time of creating these images yourself. In comparison, a digital marketing agency can streamline your entire strategy by leading and managing it for you.

Whether you choose to hire help or work in-house will depend on your company and its capabilities.

While large, enterprise-level corporations can often handle their digital marketing campaigns in-house, many SMBs encounter bottlenecks. Not having enough team members, time, or even experience in an area can all bring your digital marketing efforts to a halt, which is where a third-party provider can help.

Your online marketing strategy’s aggressiveness

Like complex strategies, aggressive online marketing strategies require a more substantial investment. Your business, for example, may invest closer to 10% of your total revenue versus 6.5% to make your plan more competitive.

Whether your company requires an aggressive strategy will depend on your goals, as well as your industry. If you operate in a tough market where everyone uses online marketing, you will probably need an aggressive plan for promoting your brand.

Digital marketing budgets vary. The average small-to-midsize business (SMB), however, spends $2500 to $12,000 per month on Internet marketing. Generally, companies will dedicate 6.5% to 10% of their revenue to online marketing. If your business earned $1 million in revenue, for example, you would then set aside $65,000 to $100,000 for digital marketing that year. Every company is different, of course, so you may invest more or less in online marketing. Should I use digital marketing services?

Before researching service providers, requesting quotes, and scheduling meetings, make sure that online marketing services are the best option for your business. This proactive step will not only save you time but also help you determine what you need or want in a digital marketing agency.

Determine if you need online marketing services by answering these questions:

• What strategies do I want to use?
• What resources will I need to use these strategies?
• How much time will I need to dedicate to these strategies?
• Do I have the in-house resources (including time) to use these strategies?

If you find that you don’t have the time, resources, or skill to use the digital marketing techniques that you want to, like SEO then it’s worth considering an online marketing agency. An agency can help you take advantage of these strategies without consuming your time or energy.

A digital marketing strategy, search marketing uses paid and unpaid techniques to earn your business increased visibility across the Internet. A few examples of these techniques include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and SEO.

SEO encompasses an umbrella of strategies. These strategies, like improving your website’s speed, focus on increasing your visibility in search results, like on Google or Bing. When it comes to search results, increased visibility translates to increased traffic, as well as leads, sales, and revenue.

You can see the value of SEO when you think about your search habits.

When you go to a search engine like Google, how often do you scroll down the list of results and click to page two? Not often. Studies even show that the first page of search results earns 71% of all clicks and that only 25% of users visit the second page of results.

You want a spot on the first page, and using SEO in your search marketing strategy can help you earn it.

Ok, so SEO can increase your visibility in search results, but how does it do it? Great question!

This search marketing strategy improves your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) by optimizing your online presence according to the ranking factors or algorithms used by search engines. Search engines use their algorithms to rank or organize sites in search results.

 

Your online presence generally consists of three areas:

1. Your website
2. Your social media
3. Everyone else’s site

These areas get classified into two separate SEO focuses:

• Off-page SEO: With off-page SEO, you focus on your social media presence and presence on everyone else’s websites. The core focus of off-page SEO — attracting links to your website from other sites — is one of the most influential ranking factors. That’s because links, especially from trusted and reputable sites, serve as a massive trust signal to search engines.
• On-page SEO: With on-page SEO, your focus gets dedicated to your website. On-page SEO revolves around making your site friendly to search engines and users, like by creating a fast website, informative title tags, and engaging content. The design, content, and functionality of your site play a vital role in your ranking capabilities.

On-page and off-page optimizations power SEO. When you optimize your online presence according to SEO best practices, search engines notice. That notice can result in higher rankings in search results, which leads to more traffic from your target market.

If you want to learn more about the workings of SEO, check out this SEO guide!

One of the reasons search marketing includes not only SEO but also SEM is because of how long SEO takes to work. While you may see immediate results after launching a PPC campaign, SEO takes a few months to deliver.

On average, expect a three- to six-month turnaround for SEO.

SEO takes time for a few reasons, including one outside your control. Search engines have a tremendous number of pages to consider when compiling search results. Their crawlers must visit and index millions of sites, and it can take time for search engines to sift through all that content.

Not to mention, off-page ranking factors can take time to optimize. If you’re looking to attract links to your site, for example, that can take months. Even on-page SEO can take time, especially if you’re tackling massive tasks like creating a responsive website.

SEO, however, is worth the investment and wait.

Once you optimize your website and earn those top spots in search results, you start receiving traffic. This free traffic includes people in your target audience. Attracting this kind of qualified traffic can result in new leads, more sales, and additional revenue.

SEM, also known as search engine marketing, uses paid ads that appear in search results to promote your business, products, and services. These ads generally appear at the top or bottom of search results, like on Google and Bing.

SEM operates on the following:

• Keywords
• Bids
• Budget
• Any additional targeting options