How Malaysian Digital Marketing Agencies Can Help You?
The right digital marketing agency can help you grow your business and skyrocket your revenue with digital marketing campaigns that don’t require tons of money or time to set up an in-house digital marketing team.
In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into what digital marketing agencies do, and the type of services you can expect them to offer. Before that…
Let’s get to know the basics of running a digital marketing campaign.
How To Run A Digital Marketing Campaign
Here’s what you need to know about digital marketing campaigns:
Find out your customers and understand their behavior
Before launching a digital marketing campaign, you need to have a deep understanding and insights into your potential customer’s behavior. 90% of marketing messages sound too generic because most companies don’t focus on understanding their customers and the crucial stories behind their problems. That’s how you can deliver your marketing messages effectively to your potential customers.
Create systems and processes
Do you know why most companies give up doing digital marketing too early? It’s because they don’t have documented systems, processes, and workflows. You need to have a structured process to follow in creating blog posts, running Google Ads, running social media ads, and more.
Use the right online tools
You may ask me whether it’s possible to be successful with digital marketing campaigns without using online tools?
Well, you can. But, it’s waste of time. Time is money. You want to use the tools to get things done faster. Moreover, tools will help you make informed decisions than doing guess works. Digital marketing campaigns require a variety of tools from planning to execution and of course monitoring too. For example, you need to use e-mail marketing tools to get your promotional offers to your customers. Using tools like Mailchimp or Mailerlite can make your life easy. Other tools like SEO tools, analytics tools, and even communication tools can help you and your team work efficiently and reach your digital marketing goals.
Consistency is the Key
Digital marketing doesn’t offer instant results. It requires patience as the results will be noticeable only after a few months. Most of the companies that achieved success with online marketing have been consistently putting in their efforts for years. You need to make sure to be consistent with the digital strategies you’re implementing and be patient to get the best results.
Create high-quality content
It’s easy to create generic content. But generic content is not appealing enough to your target audience. You need to write quality content that your target audience finds valuable and helpful. That’s how you can position your brand as an authority in your industry. Don’t create content for the sake of creating. Focus on the value you’ll be provided through the content.
Experience matters
You need to have experience with digital marketing campaigns. But you won’t be able to implement strategies on your own.
Will you focus on creating content? Or will you focus on the operations of your business?
It’s not easy to have your foot on every part of your business. Even if you’re dedicated and committed to learning, it will consume time and money and not to mention sleepless nights. Rather than focusing on something that you can easily outsource (digital marketing), you could focus on increasing the efficiency of your business process.
If you hire an experienced digital marketing agency, you’ll have access to a team of experts who will work along with your business every month and you don’t have to crack your head in building an in-house team. You’ll be having experienced and qualified people working on getting the best results for your business.
However, the disadvantage of hiring digital marketing agencies is that you won’t be able to see every single aspect that the agency does for your business on daily basis. That’s why it is important to choose an agency that’s transparent with its work to ensure a good business relationship.
Sometimes, business owners want to have control over everything. But it’s difficult to control every aspect of your business. You might not achieve the best results for your business if you choose to get your hand dirty in every part of your business. Just focus on the operations part of your business and let the digital marketing agency of your choice handle your marketing efforts.
Some business owners have a misconception that hiring a digital marketing agency is expensive. Little do they know that it is more expensive to hire an in-house digital marketing team.
If you’re looking for long-term success with digital marketing, hiring the right digital marketing agency should be your ideal choice.
Why You Should Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?
The most significant advantage of hiring an agency is that you can focus your time on effort on running your business and provide the best solutions for your customers. You want to focus on building your business by getting more investors, forming new strategic partnerships, sourcing for good suppliers, etc.
Your focus should be on the big picture. You don’t have to learn about SEO or Google Ads. The sales driven by those digital marketing activities are what you should be focused on. On the other hand, you don’t have to worry about hiring new digital marketing employees and avoid burning your money with the wrong full-time hires.
Although the following statistics might not apply to every country in the world, still important for you to know:
- The United States Department of Labor says the cost of a bad hire can reach up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.
- 74% of companies who made poor hiring lost an average of $14,900 per poor hire according to CareerBuilder.
Let’s say you’re hiring an agency within $2,000 (RM8,000) – $5,000 (RM20,000) per month (which are reasonable rates globally but depending on what you’re looking for), you’ll get a team of digital marketing experts with years of experience and various skills. You may need to pay the same amount for hiring 1-2 full-time hires.
For example, Magnes Marketing helped one of their clients in understanding how to optimize their marketing budget through data analysis by a team of a data analysts. They analyzed how the target audience of the client is landing on their site by conducting in-depth behavior analysis and indicating how the users are interacting throughout their purchase journey. Moreover, they also developed econometric models that evaluate how different digital marketing channels are contributing to sales.
Do you think this is something you can do in-house?
Yes, you can. But it’s going to cost you more.
Some companies try to lower their hiring cost by getting interns and entry-level employees. But, to scale their digital marketing efforts, they need to train their employees (additional cost) or hire an experienced marketer.
In most companies, the overall budget is often tied up with payroll and salaries which results in poor allocation to marketing. But, by choosing to hire a digital marketing agency that can deliver results, you can stay assured to get the best ROI.
If you’re a multinational company making millions in revenue, then you can build an in-house team. For small and medium businesses, hiring a digital marketing agency can help you reduce your cost in hiring an in-house digital team and they’ll get you the results your business deserves.
Now, let’s look at the types of services digital marketing agencies offer and what you can expect when you hire them.
Following are the list of services offered by digital marketing agencies:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Getting your website ranking on search engines is not about increasing your brand awareness anymore. It’s all about driving quality organic traffic to your site. According to recent studies, 72% of people use Google to find a solution to their problems. If your business can offer a solution to your potential customer’s problems, then you’ll be able to convert them into paying customers. That’s why it’s more important than ever to leverage SEO to drive the right people to your website and offer them what they are looking for.
Digital marketing agencies can help you generate quality traffic from search engines by implementing result-oriented SEO strategies. They will perform the following SEO tasks to improve your site’s ranking:
Analyze site structure
When search engine bots crawl your website, they are looking at your website’s infrastructure. Your website structure provides information on what your site is about. This is where technical SEO plays a vital role in making your site accessible and indexable. Various technical elements revolve around technical SEO. The digital marketing of your choice will make sure there are no issues or errors which can affect your website’s performance on search engines.
Analyze and Audit Backlink Profile
Although many SEO experts emphasize content creation and on-page SEO, backlinks still matter for competitive niches. For backlinks, it’s all about quality and authority. There’s no point in building thousands of backlink that doesn’t add value to your site. Analyzing and auditing your backlink profile will help to identify where your links are coming from and the type of sites that are linking to your web pages. The digital marketing agency you’re working with will help you evaluate your backlinks and remove the ones that are hurting your site ranking.
Evaluate UX (User Experience) of your site
According to Google, UX is one of the major ranking factors. The experience that your site provides significantly influences your search rankings. Search engines are focused on providing the best user experience for their users and they expect the same from the sites that are ranking on search result pages. So, focusing on providing the best experience for your audience should be the highest priority for the digital agency you’re working with.
Audit On-Page SEO factors
Most digital agencies focus on on-page SEO. Not because it’s easy to do it but it has a great impact on search engine rankings. However, different agencies have different methods of doing an on-page SEO audit. Some of them use a checklist to evaluate each factor, and some use 3rd party tools to find out the issues. Regardless of what method they are using, they need to audit and fix the errors of the following on-page elements:
- Title
- Headings
- Meta Description
- Canonical Tag
- Image Optimization (Alt-Tag)
- Structured Markup
- URLs
- Internal and External Linking
- Page Loading Speed
- Mobile Responsiveness
There are more to the list, but these are the most basic ones that need to be analyzed.
Finding broken links and link building opportunities
Some agencies offer them as an individual service. Link building is a time-consuming process that offers great SEO value for your website. Most agencies are still using PBNs (Private Blog Networks) to build links for their clients. However, this method is not sustainable for the long term.
Experienced digital marketing agencies often reach out to sites relevant to your niche and persuade them by offering valuable content in exchange for a link. Some sites have broken links, which means the site is still linking to resources or sites that are not available anymore. You can either offer your existing content that the site can link to or create content specifically for the broken link.
Before hiring a digital agency to work with, you need to calculate the ROI you’ll be getting by investing in SEO. You can calculate the ROI for an SEO campaign using the following method:
Note** You won’t be able to calculate the actual ROI from an SEO campaign. We can only calculate the anticipated ROI from SEO.
Anticipated ROI: [Anticipated Revenue from SEO campaigns – Proposed Cost of The SEO Campaign] / [Proposed Cost of The SEO Campaign]
You need the following information to calculate the anticipated ROI:
- Average monthly organic search
- Conversion rate of your website
- Average order value
Let’s say you get your number as following:
- Average monthly organic traffic: 30,000
- Conversion rate of your website: 0.66%
- Average order value: $150
The proposed pricing for the SEO service is $3,000 x 12 months = $36,000
The agency that you’re hiring needs to justify the investment for the service. You need to get an additional sale of $36,000 to break even (only the revenue and your profit margin are not included).
So, the SEO service offered by the digital agencies should bring at least 240 new orders. And to achieve that number, the organic traffic to your site should increase as well. For that, your site needs to get at least 36,364 additional traffic from search engines. However, the good thing is that with the right SEO implementation, the conversion rate of your website will constantly increase.
This is a simple calculation to determine whether you’ll be able to justify the ROI with SEO.
You can learn more about SEO ROI from the link below:
Guide to Calculating ROI from SEO
Facebook & Instagram Advertising
Although we are not a fan of social media advertising, it still works for businesses to increase their brand awareness and some business do see positive ROI. We agree that Facebook and Instagram have a massive user base which makes them the best social media platforms that will get your brand to millions of people.
This is the common service offered by digital marketing agencies nowadays. Even businesses like yours are keen to explore the opportunities from Facebook and Instagram. The targeting features offered by this social media platform are considered better compared to other targeted paid advertising. With Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll be able to target your audience by gender, age, location, income, education level, job title, and even interest.
Remarketing and re-targeting ads work better with Facebook and Instagram advertising because you’re targeting the audience which interacted with your business. If you’re looking to gain new customers from Facebook and Instagram, it’s a gamble.
Even if you build a strong following for your brand, you still need to pay to reach the people who are already following your page. The organic reach of social media posting on Facebook has declined over the years.
For some businesses, Facebook and Instagram are like goldmines that offer positive ROI. For us, these platforms can help you build brand awareness will encourage people to recognize your brand in the long run.
When we talk about ROI, Facebook and Instagram’s advertising ROI is simple and they have in-built conversion tracking to show you how many people view, click, visit your landing page and purchase your product.
From our experience, lead generation campaigns work better with Facebook and Instagram advertising compared to other campaigns like website clicks. If you’re in the real estate or education industry, this is a great digital marketing advertising strategy to try out.
But, make sure you’re hiring the agency with a proven track record to get you the best results.
Google Ads
Google Ads Management is one of the most common digital marketing services offered by agencies. It’s a type of paid advertising which publishes ads on Google search engine, Display Networks and Google AdSense enabled sites.
In comparison to Facebook Advertising, Google Ads works well to drive people who have the intent to find solutions to their problems or purchase a specific product. Moreover, Google Ads focuses on keyword targeting which enables businesses to target keywords that are relevant to their products and services. The position of ads on the result page depends on Quality Score based on the quality of ad copy, keywords, and the bid amount.
For Google Ads, you’ll be paying every time someone clicks on your ad. The bidding system for Google Ads works like an auction system. Quality score and the bid amount are the most important elements you should focus on running a successful Google Ads campaign. The higher your Quality Score the better your ad position and your CPC (Cost Per Click) reduce.
Following are the factors that critically influence the Quality Score:
- The relevance of your ads to user’s search query
- The relevance of the keyword to your ad group
- The relevance of your ad copy to your landing page
- The CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of your ads and its ad group
- The performance of your ad account (historical performance)
Google Ads works well for any type of business as long your target audience is searching for your business. If you want to maximize your results from Google Ads, you need to perform constant testing to determine the combination of ads and keywords that brings you the best results. The best way to do it is by hiring an agency that has experience working on Google Ads and generating results for their clients.
Content Marketing
Did you know that content marketing has helped many businesses to scale their revenues to millions?
It’s not about creating blog posts occasionally and publishing them on your business blog. It is more than that. Most companies have a misconception that just creating, and publishing content will get their potential customers to their website. That’s not the case.
The content you create should complement other digital marketing strategies like SEO and paid search and social ads. It’s hard to position yourself as an authority business within your industry without valuable content.
With the right content marketing plan, you’ll be able to consistently produce highly valuable content for your target audience. And content marketing will also work along with SEO in improving your search engine rankings. People are always on the look for solutions to their problems and getting the right content in front of them will help to build trust and convert them into paying customers.
Content marketing includes the following processes:
- Identifying buyer persona
- Content Planning
- Content Development
- Content Publishing
- Content Promotion
- Monitor performance
If you feel your content marketing strategies are not moving the way you want, you should consider hiring an agency with content marketing expertise and knowledge. They will bring a broader perspective and have enough resources to run a successful content marketing campaign.
And here’s how an agency can help you with content marketing efforts:
- They will analyze and audit your current content
- Develop content marketing strategies that are aligned with your business goals and target audience
- Brainstorm for content ideas to improve your brand image
- Create content that is focused on building a reputation on digital channels.
You can see great benefits when you get your content marketing strategies right.
E-Mail Marketing
E-mail remains one of the best digital marketing strategies that generate the most ROI for businesses. Most studies on email marketing indicate that email marketing generates $38 for every $1 spent.
Did you know that the number of people using email is larger than any social media network? KISSmetrics has mentioned that email has 3x the number of accounts like Twitter and Facebook combined.
As the social reach of social media channels like Facebook is gradually decreasing, email has become a professional medium that allows businesses to reach out to their leads and customers. Even with the emergence of WhatsApp and other online communication tools like WeChat and Viber, people like to communicate with businesses through email.
90% of the people visiting your website for the firs-time do not purchase your products and services. That’s why you need to get them to your email list. Once you have your leads in your email list, you can slowly nurture them and convert them into paying customers. Moreover, email marketing will help you create repetitive sales from your existing customers.
Do you think you’ll be able to make repetitive sales by publishing posts on Facebook or other social media channels?
With an organic reach of less than 10%, you won’t be able to reach all your followers.
These are the top benefits email marketing can offer your business:
- Increase your overall revenue
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Improves your sales conversion in the long run
- Improve your brand awareness
- Build a list of loyal customers for repetitive sales
You need to have email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Mailerlite, or Convertkit to automate your email marketing process. There are very few digital marketing agencies offering email marketing services.
When you hire an agency to handle your email marketing efforts, they will come up with email sequences that can convert your leads into paying customers. You will also need their expertise in writing email subjects and content that can improve email open rates and click-through rates.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Do you know the main factor that determines whether your site generates sales or encourage your visitors to take an action?
Conversion rate.
It means your site needs to have the right UX, design, and other elements that influence your lead generation and conversions. If you don’t focus on conversion rate optimization, you won’ be able to determine what is wrong with your site and why you’re not generating enough sales from the website. Sometimes your digital marketing strategies are not good enough to bring in the right audience to your website.
What you should do if all your traffic-generating methods are working but you’re unable to see any significant changes in sales?
You need to evaluate your website and experiment with different variations like CTAs, buttons, colour combinations, and many other elements. But, the most important thing is to convey your brand’s message concisely.
The tagline of Magnes marketing is: “We are a result-driven SEO agency ”. A descriptive statement like this tells the visitors that our agency provides search marketing related solution that generates results. So, it is aligned with the content we produce resulting in better conversion.
Digital agencies that provide conversion rate optimization services will include services like conversion analysis, CRO goal setting, identifying CRO metrics, and performing A/B split testing to see what works and what doesn’t.
Final Thoughts
Digital marketing agencies offer a variety of services. But choosing the right one can be challenging. Digital marketing strategies like SEO is a long-term process. It takes time to see significant results. If you want instant results, you should go for paid advertising which drives traffic to your website instantly. However, once you stop investing in paid advertising, your site stops getting traffic as well. So, it is important to consider the right digital marketing strategy to grow your business.
Focus on sustainable growth.
You need to be careful when hiring a digital marketing agency. It’s all about how much money they can make for your and not vanity metrics like comments, shares, and views. At the end of the day, it’s all about the money your business makes by implementing digital marketing strategies.
Not sure how to choose the right digital marketing agency for your business?
You might want to check out the following link:
How To Choose The Best Digital Marketing Agency
Have you partnered up with a digital marketing agency?
Share your experience with us by commenting below.
