Is it Worth it to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

Is it Worth it to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

Is it Worth it to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

We are in the golden age of digital marketing. With so many tools and advertising platforms available, anyone can develop a robust online presence for their business.

But, as any business owner could tell you, building a marketing plan takes time. And time is a precious commodity when you’re already busy with taking care of clients, improving your product, and a thousand other little tasks that your business requires to operate healthily.

Don’t work yourself to the bone. Digital marketing agencies educate themselves on the latest marketing practices and technology so you don’t have to.

Let’s take a look at the 4 ways that outsourcing your digital marketing could help free up your day and scale your business.

1. Marketers already know the ropes

If you’re in the business of, well, starting a business, then you’re certainly familiar with educating yourself. Given the time, you could become a marketing professional for your own company. After all, you already know what makes your company exceptional. All you have to do is learn more about the marketing tools at your disposal and the best practices to utilize them effectively.

Of course, that’s much easier said than done. Marketing professionals often have years of full-time experience with using these tools, watching the market change, and developing a methodology. You’d practically be taking on another full-time job on top of running your business.

The greatest benefit of outsourcing is that everyone involved is allowed to specialize. Marketers already understand the marketing ecosystem. It’s their bread and butter. You aren’t just paying for someone to take some work off your plate (though that’s certainly also the case); you’re paying to access a professional’s wealth of knowledge.

2. Your marketing efforts can expand beyond “the bare essentials”

With marketing, you get what you give.

When your business is a small startup, you’ve probably got one eye on the budget at all times. You’ve got to be lean just to make a profit, and that includes developing a lean marketing plan. Maybe you build a landing page and claim your Google My Business and leave it at that.

But once you start expanding and you’ve got liquid funds to allocate, it’s time to bulk up that marketing plan. According to a study done by Nielsen, a well-known marketing researcher, almost half of all companies aren’t spending enough on marketing to maximize their ROI.

With the help of a marketing professional, you could design and run Google Ads and LinkedIn Campaigns to expand your potential audience. You could create an information resource on your website (say, a blog?) to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. You could develop a regularly-updating social media presence targeted at your preferred audience.

All these individual efforts combine to create a online ecosystem surrounding your business known as a marketing funnel. Each piece of the funnel encourages potential leads to take the next step, from learning about your business to consuming your free content to booking a consultation call.

Not only can a digital marketing agency design and set up your funnel for you, they can maintain it. So your marketing efforts and your business expand, but your workload doesn’t.

3. You have constant access to impartial advice

Constructive criticism is a powerful tool for improvement. This is especially true when you’re reviewing your company’s marketing material. Only by recognizing the flaws in your ad copy can you ever hope to make it better.

But in the world of business, honest criticism can be hard to come by. Internal employees might be hesitant to voice their opinions on the quality of your advertising for fear of calling out the team member that created it. They especially don’t want to criticize their boss’s ideas, even if you’re asking them to.

Digital marketing specialists offer a totally impartial perspective on your marketing material. Their primary concern is getting the results that you want, and if that involves telling you to scrap or rework an idea, so be it.

4. The “testing phase” of your marketing campaign is much shorter

More than a source of criticism, marketers will work right alongside you to develop new marketing campaigns. Their experience helps you move more quickly past testing phase of your marketing campaign.

What’s the testing phase? It’s the preliminary information-gathering portion of a marketing campaign that combines theoretical research with practical execution.

You determine an audience that you want to target based on who responds to your marketing the most. This process could involve a substantial amount of trial and error as you test multiple ads with multiple target audiences. ROI for this period can vary immensely until you find a responsive audience.

Digital marketing agencies can cut out some of that guesswork. Using a combination of experience, audience tracking tools, and frequent analytics monitoring, the testing phase could take as little as two weeks to generate useful targeting data. From there, your marketing efforts can become exponentially more efficient, and your audience targeting only gets more accurate.

Schedule a consultation today

If you’re ready to see what a skilled digital marketing agency can do for your business, schedule your consultation today with 1GS Digital Agency and receive a FREE 12-point website and social media audit. Find out why we received Clutch’s “Top Florida Advertising & Marketing Agencies Award” in 2021 for yourself!

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Why You Need a Flexible Marketing Funnel

Why You Need a Flexible Marketing Funnel

Why You Need a Flexible Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is the journey a person takes to work with your business. Every single company has a unique optimal approach when it comes to implementing its own funnel. But how does a company find its optimal approach? What if you’re not happy with your funnel’s ROI?

You shouldn’t feel shackled to a strategy that doesn’t work. With the right preparation, you can build a marketing funnel that keeps you competitive long after the planning stage.

Here’s why.

You can develop a completely unique strategy that addresses your company’s needs

There’s no one-size-fits-all marketing campaign — at least, not an effective one.

To achieve the best results, you need a unique marketing approach that stands out from your competitors’ advertising and engages with your company’s needs directly.

Typically, you start this process by developing a particular “ideal client profile,” which is a conceptual customer that’s most likely to want your product or service. Then, you can determine how to reach that kind of client. Given the ubiquity of the internet today, it’s a safe bet you’ll reach them by advertising online. Ask yourself:

  • Do they use social media?
  • Would they be Googling your service specifically?
  • Would they sign up for a newsletter pertaining to your product?

And so on. Tailor your strategy to fit your ideal client’s typical consumption behavior.

Finally, you can decide how all of your advertising efforts fit together in a productive way. This is where the funnel becomes more of a flow chart:

Each piece of advertising should flow into the next so you’re always providing your customers with a simple next step. These steps lead them further down the funnel until eventually, they convert from potential to paying customers.

It’s a complicated process with no easy answers. But with 1GS, you’ve got experience and a wealth of advertising resources at your disposal. We can help you craft an efficient, logical funnel that helps you achieve your organization’s goals.

You can plan for adjustments in your original strategy

Think of your marketing strategy as a road map. You want to reach points A, B, and C in an appropriate timeframe, and a map can help you plot out the most efficient route to do that. But what if you find out a road is closed? What if your car breaks down along the way? You’ll have to set a new route and a new timeline to accommodate these sudden changes.

A flexible funnel allows you to expect the unexpected in the planning stage of your strategy. You may not know exactly what issues you’ll face once you enact your marketing plan, but you can schedule a weekly or biweekly meeting to review the progress of your journey.

Flexible marketing funnels accommodate checkpoint-based strategizing like this. Regular check-ins on the success of your campaign, such as weekly or biweekly meetings, can keep you on track.

You can review analytics and adjust spending

You might be asking, “How do I know if my marketing is working?” 

A marketing funnel typically involves a series of systems feeding into one another, delivering potential customers deeper into the funnel until (hopefully!) they reach the point of sale. Due to the interconnected nature of the funnel, pinpointing the successes and failures of the various marketing systems can be tricky.

An excellent resource to review is the ad analytics.

Ad analytics let you see how every aspect of your funnel is performing in real-time. Analytics can help you learn more about:

  • how many potential customers have encountered your advertising
  • how many potential customers are pursuing more information about your product (ie clicking links, visiting your store page)
  • how many customers have converted into paying customers
  • the resulting revenue

These statistics create a kind of narrative concerning how many customers are descending the funnel and how far they’re getting. You can pinpoint what portion of your ad spend is offering the best ROI by compiling this raw data into a report.

Not sure how to make your analytics work for you? 1GS specializes in collecting and synthesizing useful marketing data for our clients. We’ll explain every step of the process from top to bottom — of the funnel, that is.

You can restrategize and refresh your marketing approach

You never know what’s down the road, but good or bad, you can learn from it. emA flexible funnel gives you the power to continually improve the efficacy of your marketing strategy. 

For example, imagine a Montessori school wants to boost the number of enrollments it’s receiving. There are cookie-cutter methods of approaching this problem — you could simply draft an ad to run on social media and on Google saying, “Accepting applications!” and leave it at that.

But this process is static, and it doesn’t consider the audience’s reactions to the ads. The parents in this audience aren’t just looking for a place to spend money; they want a school that cares about their children’s early education. Instead, you could optimize your advertising to focus on the children’s activities and highlight the lessons the children are learning. Based on the ad analytics, you might discover that more parents are engaging with the ad on Facebook. So, you run a boosted campaign on Facebook to improve your chances of reaching an interested audience.

This responsiveness to your audience’s viewing tendencies can offer a world of possibilities. You can target your ad spend where it matters most and boost the effectiveness of your advertising.

Call on the marketing funnel masters

With 1GS, your funnel is always evolving. We offer regular check-in meetings and analytics auditing so you always know how your ad spend is performing.

We create the right marketing plan for organization’s specific needs. All you have to do is tell us what you want to accomplish with your marketing push, and we’ll put all of our resources to work to reach those goals.

But we know that proof is worth more than promises. Consider reading the testimonials from some of our current clients for more on our flexible marketing funnel approach.

Want to know what 1GS could do for you? Schedule a consultation today.

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Environmentalism in Advertisements: How a Statement can Elevate Your Brand

Environmentalism in Advertisements: How a Statement can Elevate Your Brand

Environmentalism in Advertisements: How a Statement can Elevate Your Brand

Even in our crowded marketing environment, brands don’t need to rack their brains to make their advertising stand out. The best way to get people to listen is to have something important to say.

No matter what product or service you’re offering, we all share something in common with our customers — we’re living together on a planet that needs our help. If your company is ready to offer that help, there’s a growing market of people that want to support your efforts. Let’s look at how green messaging can propel your brand into the limelight.

Cultivating a Feeling of Goodwill with Your Audience…

After the global pandemic forced the world to recluse, many brands are meeting the demand for travel experiences by offering getaway sweepstakes. But these brands simultaneously met another urgent need by theming their nature escapes around sustainability.

Take the beach-themed beer brand Corona. They’ve recently launched a high-profile ad campaign featuring an eco-friendly island getaway.

Though the details are still in the works, the brand is offering an island vacation with constructions made of 100% naturally-sourced materials to minimize their environmental impact. They’re even on track to receive official environmentally-friendly accreditations for their efforts.

Once on the island, visitors may also be able to join in on eco-workshops themed around living without plastic.

Of course, promises are only as good as the entity keeping them. That’s why you can cultivate a genuine feeling of goodwill in your audience…

…By Turning Your Eco-Promises into Reality

The beauty of fulfilling your eco-promises is that you expand your brand’s reach far beyond your typical market, which can vastly increase your market share.

Consider the soda brand Mtn Dew. This sugary drink, which typically markets itself toward young adults and gamers, is aiming to invigorate public interest in the outdoors with what they dub an “outdoor enthusiast’s playground.” PepsiCo has already invested $1.25 million in sustainable outdoor activities in the town of Mountain City, Tennessee, the town from which Mtn Dew takes its name.

Importantly, this isn’t a one-time cash injection for the purposes of a marketing push. The brand is continually funding local efforts to create more green jobs and to maintain the new outdoor activities. This proves to their community — and international fans — that they mean to uphold their eco-promise.

Public goodwill for eco-conscious brands goes a long way to expand your audience.

According to a study down by the marketing analytics company FirstInsight, over two-thirds of customers are willing to pay more for sustainable products. Take advantage of this loyal, built-in market!

Create Lasting, Meaningful Value for Your Customers

If you’re familiar with 1GS, you know we’re always trumpeting value beyond marketing. Ride the momentum of what your customers want. Build your marketing around it. Make your product the key to a lock in the minds of your audience.

In the face of modern-day climate change, eco-promises help empower your audience’s ability to do something about a problem that’s much bigger than them. Many people just don’t know how to react to the realities of climate change, but they still want to help.

That’s where you can come in. Your brand can represent a solution that inspires hope in your audience and provides them with a sense of comfort. You can be the boutique, slightly-more-expensive alternative that audiences prefer.

Not Sure How to Get Started?

1GS provides competitive marketing solutions no matter what audience you’re trying to reach. If you want to increase your brand’s visibility, strengthen your content output, and create a positive relationship with your audience of choice, contact us for a consultation today.

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Copyright ©️2022 1GS Digital Agency. All Rights Reserved

Environmentalism in Advertisements: How a Statement can Elevate Your Brand

Even in our crowded marketing environment, brands don’t need to rack their brains to make their advertising stand out. The best way to get people to listen is to have something important to say.

No matter what product or service you’re offering, we all share something in common with our customers — we’re living together on a planet that needs our help. If your company is ready to offer that help, there’s a growing market of people that want to support your efforts. Let’s look at how green messaging can propel your brand into the limelight.

Cultivating a Feeling of Goodwill with Your Audience…

After the global pandemic forced the world to recluse, many brands are meeting the demand for travel experiences by offering getaway sweepstakes. But these brands simultaneously met another urgent need by theming their nature escapes around sustainability.

Take the beach-themed beer brand Corona. They’ve recently launched a high-profile ad campaign featuring an eco-friendly island getaway.

Though the details are still in the works, the brand is offering an island vacation with constructions made of 100% naturally-sourced materials to minimize their environmental impact. They’re even on track to receive official environmentally-friendly accreditations for their efforts.

Once on the island, visitors may also be able to join in on eco-workshops themed around living without plastic.

Of course, promises are only as good as the entity keeping them. That’s why you can cultivate a genuine feeling of goodwill in your audience…

…By Turning Your Eco-Promises into Reality

The beauty of fulfilling your eco-promises is that you expand your brand’s reach far beyond your typical market, which can vastly increase your market share.

Consider the soda brand Mtn Dew. This sugary drink, which typically markets itself toward young adults and gamers, is aiming to invigorate public interest in the outdoors with what they dub an “outdoor enthusiast’s playground.” PepsiCo has already invested $1.25 million in sustainable outdoor activities in the town of Mountain City, Tennessee, the town from which Mtn Dew takes its name.

Importantly, this isn’t a one-time cash injection for the purposes of a marketing push. The brand is continually funding local efforts to create more green jobs and to maintain the new outdoor activities. This proves to their community — and international fans — that they mean to uphold their eco-promise.

Public goodwill for eco-conscious brands goes a long way to expand your audience.

According to a study down by the marketing analytics company FirstInsight, over two-thirds of customers are willing to pay more for sustainable products. Take advantage of this loyal, built-in market!

Create Lasting, Meaningful Value for Your Customers

If you’re familiar with 1GS, you know we’re always trumpeting value beyond marketing. Ride the momentum of what your customers want. Build your marketing around it. Make your product the key to a lock in the minds of your audience.

In the face of modern-day climate change, eco-promises help empower your audience’s ability to do something about a problem that’s much bigger than them. Many people just don’t know how to react to the realities of climate change, but they still want to help.

That’s where you can come in. Your brand can represent a solution that inspires hope in your audience and provides them with a sense of comfort. You can be the boutique, slightly-more-expensive alternative that audiences prefer.

Not Sure How to Get Started?

1GS provides competitive marketing solutions no matter what audience you’re trying to reach. If you want to increase your brand’s visibility, strengthen your content output, and create a positive relationship with your audience of choice, contact us for a consultation today.

Need More Tips on Optimizing Your Content?

Our experts at 1GS agency are ready to optimize your content, no matter the platform. We have over 20 years of experience with multiple plans tailored to your needs. Contact us today to learn more!

Copyright ©️2022 1GS Digital Agency. All Right Reserved

How Can My Dental Practice Stand Out from the Competition?

How Can My Dental Practice Stand Out from the Competition?

How Can My Dental Practice Stand Out from the Competition?

Advertising has changed since the days of looking up dentists in the Yellow Pages. Now, customers use popular web browsers to find a new dentist. According to a study done by the marketing company WebFx, 86% of people use the web to find local businesses. Don’t miss out on a huge built-in market!

If you’ve ever wondered, “How do I advertise my dental practice?” then 1GS has some good news for you. Today, we’re talking about how to optimize your dental office’s online presence to help you stand out from the competition.

Quality content matters

We’ll get into the technical first steps of dentist advertising in a moment, but before that, we need to make this critical point clear:

Interesting content = effective advertising, and

Boring content = ineffective advertising.

Even if you follow every step of this article to a T, you aren’t going to see the results that you want without compelling content. The quality factor can turn a good advertising campaign into a fantastic (or even viral!) one. You could contact us for a free consultation for more information on how we could craft quality content on your behalf.

Research your competition

To help you get a point of reference for your competition, check out what they’re offering. Sign up for their newsletters, read their ad copy, and see what specials they’re advertising.

While you’re looking their content over, ask yourself honestly: is it working? Are you compelled by their offers? Are they offering a genuinely good deal to customers? Take notes on the aspects of their advertising that work and improve on them. Offer a better deal or better-written copy (more on both of those later).

Local awareness ads

Advertising your Miami-based dental practice to a person in Minnesota isn’t going to help either of you. Thankfully, social media services like Facebook offer localization options that target users within a certain radius of your office.

Local Awareness ads can offer your address, hours of operation, and a “Get directions” link to users. You could even include a call button as your CTA, or “Call to action,” which can prompt a quick appointment scheduling process.

Google ads act similarly to Facebook Ads, allowing you to target local customers looking for a new dentist. You can even add a “call” button to the ad that allows users to get ahold of you directly.

TIP! More points of attack mean more customers

To cover the broadest possible customer base, consider using multiple platforms to advertise on. Releasing advertisements on multiple platforms can help you discover where your preferred audience scrolls, browses, and clicks. These ad platforms also offer ad analytics, which can help you learn more about the demographics that most often engage with your ads.

Not sure what to do with ad analytics? 1GS specializes in reviewing ad analytics and compiling easy-to-read reports, so you know exactly how your ad spend is performing.

Offer promotions and features

Nothing turns heads like a good deal. Using your knowledge of the competition, consider offering a lower price for new customers’ first visits. You could list all of the features of this appointment in the copy as well so the customer understands exactly how much they’re getting.

If you’re already offering a more competitive price than your local competitors, this will do the advertising for itself! Consider drawing a direct comparison with the competition’s pricing while highlighting the quality of your services.

Patient referrals are also a powerful way to expand your regular patients. According to the Pride Institute, 93% of people trust recommendations from their friends. Encourage these recommendations by offering discounts for both the new patient and the existing one. You’ll be surprised how quickly word-of-mouth spreads.

Optimize your website’s copy and flow

Search engines operate on keyword searches. When a user types in, “dentist near me” in Google, Google offers results that either contain or are relevant to that query. To improve your chances of appearing near the top of the first page, include search engine optimized phrasing such as this.

What is search engine optimized phrasing? There are specialized SEO services that give you the raw analytics related to certain phrases. 1GS offers SEO analysis services, including keyword research and implementation. Contact us for more info.

Then, once the customer finds your website and visits it, you want to make sure it’s easy to navigate. Make communication with your office a breeze — maybe a contact form is the first thing the customer sees on your front page!

Advertising isn’t easy. But a free consultation is.

If you’re ready to expand your audience, it’s time to improve your online presence. 1GS makes the process simple — you tell us what you want to accomplish with your advertising, and we get right to work. We offer services to suit any budget along with regular check-in meetings and audit reports so you always know how well your content is performing. No more overworking yourself to get results, just quality online content for you and your practice.

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Trust and Relatability: Helping your Customers Get to Know Your Insurance Brokerage

Trust and Relatability: Helping your Customers Get to Know Your Insurance Brokerage

Trust and Relatability: Helping your Customers Get to Know Your Insurance Brokerage

best insurance marketing agency image of professionals collaborating

“What’s the most important thing about insurance? Do I want the cheapest insurance? What’s the best insurance? How much does my insurance cover? What insurance company has the best customer service?”

Notice how that list contains questions with objective and subjective answers. Advertising your competitive prices and the amount of coverage you offer is essential to garnering new customers, but so is establishing a feeling of trust. Emotional appeals can remind your audience of the humans behind your company and help them connect with you in a personal way. Communicating authentically with your customers can also make them more receptive to your future messaging!

Let’s talk about some key ways you could start building a relationship with your audience to find new customers and maintain existing ones.

Offering free information

This is a big one.

According to Forbes, the average American sees anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. In today’s crowded advertising market, it’s not enough to simply inform customers about the existence of your company. How do you make your advertising stand out and build insurance brand awareness?

Offer your audience something they can use: knowledge.

Whether it’s a guide on how to choose the best insurance plan or a quick post on road trip health tips, this information might benefit your customers in their everyday life. And the best part, from their perspective, is that you’re offering it free of charge. The only thing they need to offer you in exchange is their attention, which they’ll gladly give to something they feel is important or relevant to them.

In the long run, this simple process can help establish your brand as a thought leader in the eyes of your audience, making you a trustworthy source of information. When it comes time for a customer to start researching for a new insurance plan and they have no clue where to start, your brand could come to mind.

Maintaining a regularly-updated social media presence

Imagine this: you’re researching insurance brokerages to find a new plan. You look up “affordable health insurance” and check out the social media pages of two companies to see what other people are saying about them. One company has a robust, frequently updated page with two years of posts and plenty of comments, while the other hasn’t been updated in three months and has no recent comments.

For most people, the first brokerage “feels” more legitimate than the second. Firstly, an active social media page makes a company feel prosperous, which indicates that they’re successful and they have a sound product. Second, many people are very hesitant — rightfully! — to trust internet-based sources. What if a scammer created a lookalike page to trick people into divulging personal information? It happens more often than you might think.

One of the telltale signs of these phony lookalike pages is a sparseness of content. Scammers put only as much effort into these pages as needed to get people to click on them. If your page is well-established with a healthy amount of followers and weekly posts, customers can easily determine which page is yours. Plus, if you’ve got a wealth of information on your page, customers might just stick around to learn something!

Establishing a clear line of communication

Social media is a form of communication that sits at the center point between professional and casual. You can use comments and messaging to connect with audience members directly, either by answering questions or prompting responses. Responding to direct questions about your product from customers can help them understand the benefits of working with you. This can also remind your audience that you’re more than a logo.

Moreover, the conversations in your comment sections can act as advertising all on their own. Other users can see how cordially and thoroughly you engaged with the question, which could encourage them to ask their own questions.

All of this can communicate to your audience that your brokerage is friendly and personable. This can make a big difference when those users start thinking about a new insurance plan!

Overwhelmed? 1GS can help.

Maintaining your social media can be a lot of extra work when you’re also running your brokerage. 1GS specializes in optimizing your online presence so that potential customers understand the personal touch your brokerage provides.

Interested in learning more? Check out this testimonial from a client of ours and contact us through our website. We can’t wait to get started.

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