6 Ways a Digital Agency Can Make Your Next Launch Successful

Digital agencies help companies like yours with a wide range of marketing efforts. Some agencies specialize in a single, specific area—such as website design or social media marketing—while full-service digital agencies provide a wide array of marketing services to clients.

My agency, Web Rocket Media, falls into the latter category. I support my clients’ marketing campaigns from start to finish, and our projects encompass everything from blogging to podcasting and video production.

There are six big ways in which an agency like mine can make your next marketing campaign launch successful. A digital agency will:

1. Understand your target audience
2. Build a strong brand identity
3. Develop a comprehensive marketing plan
4. Create engaging content
5. Focus on user experience
6. Leverage data and analytics

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1. Understand your target audience

For marketing to work, you’ve got to know your target audience. Creating marketing collateral and running ads can be expensive—the last thing you want to do is launch a big campaign only to find that it doesn’t appeal to the people most likely to use your product or service.

Finding your target audience involves looking at:

• Psychographics, including customer values and aspirations
• Demographics, such as customers’ ages and income levels
• Interests, or the activities that your customer is most likely to engage in
• Behaviors, particularly around your customers’ purchasing habits

Once you have this data, you have to build audience segments and buyer personas to group your potential customers together. This helps you market to specific groups within your larger audience, maximizing your chances for business growth and getting a good return on investment (ROI).

Finding this information about your audience can involve combing through lots of data—and using specialized research tools that can be costly. As an agency owner, I maintain access to the tools and systems that help me find my clients’ target audience. And because I’m skilled in conducting this kind of research, I can pinpoint the right data sets quickly.

This means my customers can spend more time focusing on running their business, not trying to learn a new tool and pouring money into software they’ll never use again.

2. Build a strong brand identity

Before launching any marketing campaign, it’s important that your business has an established brand identity. This allows you to play around with different campaign assets—like witty emails, colorful infographics, and engaging social media posts—while still remaining recognizable to your target audience.

Your brand identity isn’t just visuals, though. While logos and written copy all contribute to your brand’s overall look and feel, identity also includes:

• Knowing your company’s values and mission
• Clarifying your value proposition
• Understanding how your brand is different from competitors’
• Having an idea of your position—or ideal position—in your market

A digital agency skilled in both branding and marketing can assess whether or not you have the appropriate brand identity in place before launching a new campaign. If not, they can help you build one.

3. Develop a comprehensive marketing plan

If you’re reading this article because you’re interested in launching a new digital marketing campaign, that’s great! Thinking about your next marketing moves is a smart choice for any business owner.

However, it’s important that you don’t stop your marketing efforts after the campaign launches. Even the biggest, flashiest marketing campaigns can require monitoring and nurturing in order to get results.

To set up your marketing campaign for success, a digital creative agency can:

• Outline the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) your company is seeking to hit as the result of the campaign
• Run A/B tests to find out which versions of campaign materials are most effective on the target audience
• Build a content marketing strategy and comprehensive digital strategy for organic growth
• Establish which marketing channels are best used to reach your audience, including through organic search, social media, and email marketing
• Set up pay-per-click (PPC) ad accounts for digital advertising
• Track the necessary marketing analytics to monitor performance
• Leverage data and analytics to make decisions about how campaigns should evolve
• Connect you with influencers and user-generated content (UGC) creators, if useful for your campaign
• Set up marketing automations that allow you to easily connect with your audience on a continual basis

It takes a few different marketing skill sets to do all of the above. While you can hire separate, individual marketing pros to work on different aspects of your campaign, working with a digital agency can be faster and easier.

When clients work with my agency, they know that I’ll:

• Handle finding the right professionals to carry out different aspects of building a successful marketing plan—including branding, web development, SEO services, and more
• Vet the skill sets of each person I work with—and their work, in turn
• Be a singular point of contact for communication
• Develop cohesive digital experiences tailored to my clients’ ideal customers

This is a huge time saver for my clients. They don’t have to worry about tracking all the moving pieces, because I do that for them as part of running my digital agency.

4. Create engaging content

Once armed with data about your target audience and a comprehensive marketing plan, a digital agency can also make the content creation process easier.

Whether you need blog posts, social copy, videos, audio, graphics, or all five, an agency can take care of creating assets for you. Some agencies maintain an in-house team that includes marketers with all those different skill sets, while others work with independent marketing professionals that have unique specialities.

An agency can also make sure that you’re using the right kind of content for each channel, including figuring out what should be paid advertising vs. organic content.

We know how to leverage data and marketing dollars for the perfect mix of reach and return, getting you the best results possible without blowing the budget.

5. Focus on user experience

You’re working on marketing in order to make money, right? It’s easy to get so caught up in your company’s end goal—more sales, more visitors, more followers—that you sometimes forget to think about what it’ll be like for your audience to see and engage with your campaign.

A confusing launch, pushy emails, wordy social media posts, or a hard-to-navigate mobile website can reduce the impact of your campaign and even turn away existing customers.

While I’m dedicated to my clients, I’m also just slightly removed enough from their businesses that I can focus on both sides of the equation: what my client wants, and what their customer wants. (Plus, my team has experience in UX design and research.)

We create simple, enjoyable customer journeys that capture clients’ customers and lead them to a conversion, whether that’s a follow, a like, a buy, or a share. A good digital agency can do this for you, too, regardless of your industry and target audience.

6. Leverage data and analytics

You’ve probably heard the oft-repeated phrase that “content is king,” and that may be true—but data and metrics are definitely queen, in that case. An effective marketing campaign is always backed up, and influenced, by numbers.

Trying to track all of your essential marketing metrics across every platform can get confusing, fast. Open rates are different from click-through rates on your emails, sessions and visits can differ on your website, and every social media platform has its own best and worst set of metrics.

When tracking all of this data yourself, the best outcome is that you spend a lot of time doing it but glean some insights. The worst outcome is that you spend a lot of time doing it and interpret it incorrectly—leading to ineffective marketing decisions that result in lost revenue.

Digital agencies can set up the appropriate tracking methods for each campaign and channel, and then either monitor the results for you or show your team how to do it going forward. This expert guidance can be the difference between saving time and revenue or having to scrap a campaign and start from scratch.

How to choose the right digital agency

There are lots of great digital agencies in this world—including agencies on Upwork—but not every agency will be the right fit for your business.

When you start meeting with agencies, don’t be afraid to ask them questions to make sure they’re the right fit. This is as important to them as it is to you.

Questions to ask a digital marketing agency before signing a contract

• Do you specialize in B2B or B2C marketing?
• Do you provide search engine optimization (SEO) support, search engine marketing (SEM) services, social media management, or all three?
• What is your agency’s main area of focus?
• What platforms and channels does your agency have experience working with?
• Have you worked with clients like us before?
• Do you typically work with large or small businesses?
• How many team members do you have working with your agency?
• What social media channels do you use in your campaigns?
• What kinds of results are typical for your clients?
• What information will you need from me to get started?
• What’s your approach to project management? What tools will we use to collaborate?
• What kind of access will you need to our accounts or internal systems?
• How will you be measuring the success of our initiatives?
• What’s your pricing structure for projects like this?

You can also ask to see examples of the agency’s work and testimonials from past clients, if the agency doesn’t readily provide or publicly share them online.

Find the right agency on Upwork

Choosing the right digital agency will help you save valuable time and money—especially when you hire an agency through Upwork. When you create a job post in Talent Marketplace™, you can specify that you’re interested in working with agencies.

If you’d like to learn more about working with me directly, I’d be happy to talk with you about how my digital agency can help with your next launch—just log into your Upwork account and send Web Rocket Media a message.