To effectively market your brand online, you need a digital marketing expert that understands your brand. Marketing is that important step in branding that pitches your business to your target and existing customers.
A lot of people out there claim to be digital marketing experts, but truth be told, you need to know for yourself what makes an individual, agency or company an expert in digital marketing.
In this post, we’re going to tell how you can identify a digital marketing expert. Be it an individual or a digital marketing agency.
Why You Need a Digital Marketing Expert
The internet has become a marketplace for every business. Hardly will you find a business today without any form of online presence, even if a social media page.
To top it all, digital marketing has proven to be more cost effective than other forms of traditional marketing.
For some businesses, online presence stops at having a functional website and social media pages. However, for some who have spied out the enormous opportunities inherent on the internet, they take their digital marketing efforts a little deeper than others. Some of these companies take extra steps to not only get their business in front of their target audience but to also convert them as customers.
When businesses want to go through this great length to ensure that they remain visible to their target audience, they hire a digital marketing expert to take care of things.
Who is Not a Digital Marketer?
Hiring managers often get lost in between the digital marketing block and the search engine optimization (SEO) block. A digital marketer is neither an SEO expert nor a social media expert. Although there’s some overlap in the roles these experts can perform, you should not rely on one to do the job of the other. For example, an SEO expert should not helm your digital marketing campaigns. Reason being that you could end up with a site that ranks high on SERPs but does not bring any customer conversion.
Precisely, your digital marketer is the guy that develops and executes a strategy that all your digital channels will follow to sell your brand effectively to your target customers. On that note, what you should look out for in a digital marketing company that you want to hire for your brand is pretty straightforward as you will soon see.
You might wonder why one guy can’t be your SEO, social media and digital marketing expert all-in-one. Well, why that is not completely impossible, it is a very rare human resource to find. More like the typical case of finding a needle in a haystack.
A truly versed digital marketer will have a well branded strategy to position your business based on outcomes of his market research. He will move on to ensure that his strategy is executed across all digital channels of your business. The digital marketing channels could include your website, social media pages, email marketing, SEO (including content marketing), and Paid-per-clicks (PPCs).
How to Identify a Digital Marketing Expert
Just like hiring an SEO expert, you should never take their word for it as there are a lot of self-acclaimed digital marketers in the market place. If you really want to sign with the right digital marketing agency, you need to know how to identify the right one.
An expert digital marketing agency should be able to demonstrate that they have experience in the following:
- Customer & Market Research
- Digital Marketing Plan & Strategy
- Execution
- Optimization
- Communication
1. Customer & Market Research
This is where your potential digital marketer demonstrates his knowledge of your customer and market. It is not enough to hire an experienced digital marketer but hiring one that is versed in your business or niche reduces take-off time and makes things way easier.
2. Digital Marketing Plan & Strategy
A great digital marketer would always work with a plan and a strategy to make it work.
A good digital marketing plan involves using a data-driven approach to review existing digital marketing effectiveness, customize analytics and set up KPIs and SMART objectives.
A digital marketing strategy is a framework that provides a logical sequence to follow to make a business successful online.
3. Execution
This is a structured approach for implementing the digital marketing plan. A great digital marketing expert should be able to demonstrate that he is able to bring both his rolled out plan and strategy to fruition.
4. Optimization
This has to do with optimizing the various online resources of your business. For example, website, video, images and social media posts should be optimized for specific keywords or brand mentions. Most importantly, your potential digital marketer should be able to work with these 5 essential elements to improve your SEO for easier conversion of target audience.
5. Communication
It is important that your potential digital marketing expert have an effective channel of communication. Launching marketing campaigns involves a lot of back and forth communication until success is achieved. You want to make sure that you and your digital marketer are able to communicate ideas effectively.
If any of these components for identifying a great digital marketing expert is missing, you probably want to look for another digital marketer to give your brand an image.
Apart from following this guide on how to identify a competent digital marketer, also endeavor to ask for verifiable evidence of their previous works.
For instance, you can ask your digital marketing expert for examples of the following from previous works:
- Customer and market research
- Digital marketing plan and strategy
- Email marketing campaigns
- PPC advertising
- ROI numbers
- SEO improvements
- Social Media campaigns
- Successful campaigns (and why they were successful)
- Unsuccessful campaigns (and why they were unsuccessful)
- Website optimization
Conclusion
Digital marketing has become a serious concern for businesses today. In summary, a digital marketing expert (be it an individual or a digital marketing company) is not an SEO expert neither is he your social media guy. He is the guy that makes sure your target customers understand your business.
Before now, the concept of identifying an expert digital marketer might have appeared ambiguous to you but we are confident that this article on how to identify a digital marketing expert has prepared you to tell the difference.