As a media
agency competing in the dynamic digital landscape, it essential to cover all
the bases in the digital marketing space to maintain that competitive edge and
retain clients over longer tenures. Agencies operating in the Search Engine
Marketing space need to be aware of these critical nuances if they are to attend
to client preferences and retain them. Clients are now realising the importance
of Search Engine Optimisation more than ever and expect their marketing
agencies to provide effective solutions in this area. Agencies need to be aware
of the products and services expected in this space and provide solutions to
manage client expectations.
Here are some of the key trends that if adopted can
provide that quintessential competitive edge to your agency.
1. Develop a service portfolio: Search Engine Marketing includes a plethora of services which are
constantly evolving and need to be incorporated in your service portfolio.
Restricting yourself to one or two types of services such as PPC and SEO cannot
sustain your client base over the long term. Being the Jack of all trades is
the route to take when it comes to Search Engine Marketing services. Being able
to provide solutions for Paid Search or Google Paid Search will help ensure
your clients stay with you. This means that your agency needs to be able to
provide a majority of digital marketing services including social media
services, website creation and design services.
2. Hardware matters: The onslaught of mobile devices such as phones, tablets and wearable
gadgets is constantly changing the way people search. The next innovation in
search is just around the corner and you need to be able to understand the way
users search for content. Thus, it is essential to be able to provide solutions
which can help manage your client’s content on desktops, laptops and mobile
devices. Moreover, search ranking can be greatly influenced through content
optimisation for mobile and desktop machines. Providing services for such
optimisation will definitely contribute to your agency’s clout in the market.
3. Go Local: Mobile
devices allow geo-specific searches based on device-location as opposed to the
traditional approach of IP mapping. As a result, mobile devices have been
increasingly used to search for local information. Your agency must be able to
provide solutions to ensure your client is able to tap this trend.
4. Social Media solutions: Marketing through social media is the most popular service requested by
clients all over. To be able to be provide this much-in-demand service
efficiently, reflects on an agency’s astute business sensibility. This is also
one of the easier services to include in your portfolio and goes a long way in
ensuring client satisfaction.
5. Software matters too: Clients usually look for a one-stop solution to all their digital media
needs for the simple reason that content needs to be well integrated and
consistently delivered across platforms and devices. It is for this reason that
digital media agencies need to be able to also provide software solutions to
their clients. Having a technical arm to support software solution needs adds
to your agencies credibility in the market and helps deliver your services in a
cost-effective manner by leveraging synergies.
6. Earn brownie points with a creative touch: While Search Engine Marketing is a tactical
game, having a creative team on-board will give you that additional fire-power
to beat competition. Being able to provide services like design of landing
pages, ad design and content presentation is equally important for search engine
marketing agencies.
7. Contents of the package also count: Now that you have managed the packaging and
delivery of content, it can never hurt to be able to develop or create content
for the client as well. This is in the interest of the agency as well, since it
can help you plan your marketing strategy with minimal dependencies. Content
development will give you a chance to optimise search results better by
understanding the nature of the content and access modes for the content.
Content can be in the form of images, videos, infographics, podcasts or
presentations depending on the nature of information and the target audience.
We hope
these seven commandments help you become one of the client’s favourite and you
soon grow as a flourishing agency with coolest brands in your kitty. Do comment
or share if you have more points to add to the list.
