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Top 7 Reasons to Hire a Digital Marketing Firm

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It’s 2018, and digital marketing is more important than ever. Digital marketing is marketing taken to the digital world. Digital marketers analyze data and trends to connect with target audiences. They determine goals and develop data proven strategies to reach those goals. Digital marketing agencies can handle everything from logo and brand development to search engine optimization (SEO) and everything in between. You may think you don’t need a digital marketing agency — you can handle everything — and you can, but you don’t have to. In this data-driven, Internet-dominated world, let a digital marketing firm help you achieve your goals. Not convinced yet? We’ve got seven reasons that should help you realize everything that a digital marketing firm can offer you.

digital marketing

1. Broaden your team to help you achieve your goals.
The first thing a digital marketing team will do with a new client is determine their goals. To achieve anything, you first have to know what it is you want to achieve. A digital marketing firm knows how to extract the real goals of an organization and develop strategies to help it reach those goals. Along with developing data-driven strategies to reach your goals, a digital marketing firm is able to focus on those Internet-driven goals solely. Since it is focused on helping your achieve your online goals, it can focus on those alone and avoid being distracted by other day-to-day business tasks.

2. Outsource some work so you can focus on what you really need to do to better your business.
One of the biggest benefits to hiring a digital marketing firm to handle extraneous tasks like SEO and blog management means that you have more time to do what you really need to do to take your business to the next level. Since you’ve hired an expert to get your website up and running or hired someone to manage your SEO (or both), you can put your efforts toward making better products or providing better services to your consumers. Your attention is no longer taken from what makes your company stand out when you’ve got a team of professionals to help you with the promotion of those products/services.

3. Have a team of experts design your content.
Sure, you know what you like when it comes to design, but you’re not really sure how to make it happen online. That’s where a digital marketing team comes in. It’s important that your vision is projected in your logo, web design, and collateral design, but you don’t need to spend hours pulling your hair out looking at a web platform or learning Adobe Illustrator when you can hire someone to do it for you. Not only is it going to save you some frustration, but it’s probably going to be completed in a more timely manner because you’ve outsourced the work to someone who knows how to do it (there’s no learning curve). As long you communicate what you want things to look like, the digital marketing firm you hire can take it from there.

4. Find everything you need in one place.
Hiring a digital marketing firms means you’ve knocked a handful of jobs out with one hire. That’s right — one. All digital marketing firms are different, but at Cabedge, we can do everything from logo design to SEO to website development to hosting. We’re basically a one-stop-shop for anything digital that your company/organization might need. Digital marketing firms have a team of experts that can do it all, which saves you time and money in the long run.

5. Have someone dedicated to bettering your public image.
Not only does hiring a digital marketing firm mean that you have a team of people working on a handful of tasks, but it means you’ve got a team of people that are working to better your public image while they do them. While digital marketing isn’t public relations, it kind of does a little bit of the job a PR firm would by making sure you have good SEO, by pushing content like blog posts to engage your audience, and by ensuring you have good branding across platforms to help consumers recognize your brand. It’s all the little things you could do, but you don’t have to.

6. Improve your SEO tenfold.
One of the most important things to master in this Internet-driven world we live in today is SEO. SEO isn’t necessarily hard to learn, but it can be time-consuming to master. That’s why hiring a digital marketing firm is that much more important. Let them take over the day-to-day management of getting your website ranked higher by search engines with SEO, and managing your website information. Digital marketing firms are mostly anonymous on the Internet, and no one needs to know you’re not doing everything yourself. You’ll get more done in less time, and you’ll have experts doing it for you.

7. Add an additional perspective and new ideas to the team.
Often an overlooked benefit to hiring a digital marketing firm is getting other people on your team to provide insight. As an often unbiased third-party, digital marketing firms can provide key industry insight into website development and management. They can also serve as another vote when making decisions that concern digital marketing (like social media, branding, and website content). It’s never a bad thing to have a bigger team behind you and your decisions.

Did we convince you? If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to help you out with branding, website development, SEO, and more, contact Cabedge. Cabedge is located in Nashville, TN, but it can help clients across the country.

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How To Use Social Media as a Business

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The early 2000s were a time for social media emergence. Platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter gained prominence, while YouTube was in its early conception. Then came platforms like Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, Spotify — the list really could go on and on. People have hopped onto these platforms left and right, but brands have been a little more hesitant to join. Typically, when people think about social media, they consider it a place to connect with friends. But more and more people are looking to social media to connect with friends, family, AND brands. In an age when consumers care about brand promises and ethical standpoints, social media is the perfect place to showcase that information — Social media is where brands become more than just a name on a product or service. Whether you’ve been trying to get into the social media sphere or you’ve resisted it for years, you’ll want to hear what we have to say about why you should be on social media and how it can benefit your organization in the long run.

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Why Business/Brands Should Be On Social Media

There are a million reasons your organization should be on social media, but here are just a few that should convince you it’s the right move.

1. It’s an easy way to promote your organization and content.
Social media is one of the easiest ways to promote your organization, and it’s usually one of the cheapest, too. With 81 percent of the American population on social media, there’s no denying that it’s a good place to start improving brand reach and impact. The great thing about social media is that you control how much information you are putting out there. While it may depend upon some algorithms (we’re looking at you Instagram), organizations can typically post and promote those posts at a lower cost on social media than through traditional media.

2. You can personally engage with your audience and provide support.
In 2018, it’s important for brands to engage with their audiences. That’s where social media comes in. This can best be seen with customer service. Social media provides a direct point of contact between brands and consumers that is unlike other forms of communication. Because communications on social media can be direct between brand and consumer, it can make or break customer relations. Many consumers are turning to platforms like Twitter and Instagram to either complain or praise a company for products or services, which allows companies to respond directly either to remedy a problem or build an even stronger relationship. Social media has also proven to be instrumental in crisis communications since information can easily be shared so easily to other consumers.

3. Check up on your competition and stay information about industry trends.
Social media is the perfect place to stay informed about what is going on in your industry. Because information is constantly being updated by users, it’s easy to keep tabs on the competition and industry trends. Social media is also public, as it should be for a brand, so it’s easy to gain insights into exactly how your competition is handling certain aspects of the business like engaging with consumers, promoting sales, sharing imagery, and more.

4. Analyze your engagement and customer base.
As mentioned before, social media is pretty instantaneous. The best thing about social media/online engagement is the availability of analytics at the snap of a finger. Every second (on average) 6,000 tweets are being sent out. That’s 6,000 opportunities a second to have your brand mentioned and engaged with. In a world continuously driven by data and information, social media platforms are offering their own analytics, and information about searches, clicks, and likes can also be found through platforms like Google Analytics. When so much information is so readily available, why not take advantage of it?

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Tips and Tricks

So, now that we’ve convinced you to dip your toe in the social media pool, how are you going to use it? We urge you to think about what platform will best suite your purposes. Twitter is best used for verbal communication. It’s increasingly a space used for news gathering and engagement. Instagram is great for visual communication, meaning well crafted photos and engaging captions. It’s also a great platform to utilize for influencer partnerships. Facebook is the tried and true social media platform. Some think it’s going to die out soon, but with over 2 billion monthly active users, we don’t think Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon. There are a ton of other platforms organizations can take advantage of to connect with their consumers and promote their products/services, but Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the big three. Here are some little tips and tricks to make the most of your social media experience:

1. Create a brand personality.
The most important thing to remember when using social media as a business is to have a brand personality. You need to have something that makes you stand out among the saturation. Make sure all your branding is consistent across all platforms, utilize your color scheme, and decide what kind of attitude you want to portray online. Wendy’s and MoonPie have some of the strongest brand personalities on Twitter. They are kind and helpful to their followers, but they also engage in sassy sparring matches with their competition and share hilarious memes that leave consumers compelled to share with their own following. A great brand personality can help engage followers and can build a name for your organization.

2. Create a hashtag.
Creating a hashtag that is specific to your organization is going to be immensely beneficial in the long wrong when you get on platforms like Instagram or Twitter and want to be able to follow the conversations people are having about your product or services. The hashtag is just a way for you to find and follow people that are engaging with your organization.

3. Engage in chats.
Now that you’ve created a hashtag, you can engage in Twitter chats with your consumers. Twitter chats have proven to be very valuable when looking to learn about consumers wants and needs, and they can “generate lively discussions and build deep connections between participants and brands.” The only thing you need to participate is a hashtag! Typically, Twitter chats are set for a specific day and time, and they happen either weekly or monthly.

4. Reach out to people that tag you organically for partnerships.
Influencers, whether you like it or not, are becoming increasingly important in promoting products. Consumers are looking to their peers to recommend products rather than relying on traditional forms of advertising — 71 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service if it’s talked about on social media. Influencer marketing doesn’t look like it’s going away, so it’s important to be on social media platforms to reach out to the proper influencers to market your products/services.

5. Ask your audience what they want to see from you.
Since it’s so easy to engage with consumers on social media platforms, this is a great way to ask them what they want to see from your organization in the future. You can do polls on Instagram stories, ask questions in Twitter chats, or directly post and ask for feedback on recent product/service releases. Social media gives you the ability to harness the power of your consumers with far fewer marketing dollars than traditional methods.

Social media doesn’t have to be scary. But if you’re serious about getting engagement and growing sales, social media is an important step in that process. If you need help getting your social media off the ground, reach out the Cabedge. We have social media experts ready and willing to help organizations through branding, development, and message creation.

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Digital Marketing: What it is and Why Your Organization Needs It

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Marketing, as defined by the American Marketing Association is, “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Digital marketing takes those traditional marketing activities into the digital space. It is a non-traditional field that encompasses a wide range of skills and elements and is essential to achieve success in the world today.

Fundamentals of Marketing

Marketing is all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. It’s about understanding an audience and catering to their needs. It means staying up-to-date on trends in the digital space and using those up-and-coming communication methods to connect with audience members. Digital marketing encompasses a lot of platforms and methods of communication, but it all comes down to being able to promote a product to the right people in the right manner.

  • Understand your product/service’s benefits and features. When you’re selling your product or service you aren’t selling what it is but rather what it can do for the consumer. Will it make their morning run more smoothly? Will it help them chop vegetables more swiftly? Sweaters don’t fly off the shelf because of the color selection they come in, but rather the promise an organization sells of one living their best life while wearing said sweater. Digital marketers know how to pinpoint those benefits and communicate them to a wider audience.
  • Define your audience. The main part of a marketer’s job is to understand the audience they are trying to sell to. In the digital space, it’s incredibly easy to get a message out into the world, but it’s not as easy to get that message to the right people. To define your audience, you simply need to determine who your ideal consumer is. Decide what they eat for breakfast. Figure out where they get their information. Determine where they go to get their work done. Figuring out every detail about your consumer helps you determine the right path and message to reach your target audience.
  • Craft a persuasive message/call to action. The final step to being a digital marketer is to market. Whatever it is you want accomplished (reading a blog post, buying a product, signing up for a service) you need to share it in a creative and persuasive way on the right channels so it reaches the right audience.

Elements of Digital Marketing

The amazing thing about digital marketing is that there are a handful of different avenues one can go down when exploring the field. Because the online space is constantly growing and changing, so is a digital marketer’s job. Here are just some of the elements a digital marketer must have in mind when providing services:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Increasing organic traffic to your website through search engine rankings.
  • Content Marketing: Content marketing requires the creation and promotion of your own content (think blog posts or videos) to build brand awareness and convert customers.
  • Social Media Marketing: SMM utilizes social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to promote content and generate leads.
  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Google AdWords is a type of PPC — marketers pay a certain amount of money based on how much traffic is driven to the site via ad clicks.
  • Affiliate Marketing: Commonly seen on social media, affiliate marketing is a method of marketing that requires a partnership between a brand and a promoter where the promoter is compensated for talking about the products/services online. For example, a corporation can partner with a blogger to have them promote its new nail polish.
  • Email Marketing: Used as a means of direct communication with consumers, email marketing is a popular way to promote content like discounts and events.

Digital marketing is a big world to tackle — that’s why Cabedge is here to help. We have a team of able digital marketers who consider communicating their passion. Contact Cabedge to get a personalized digital marketing plan for your organization today.