10 Things Digital Marketing Advertising Agencies Do
Being an Advertising Agency is a lot of Work, but We Love it 💖
We are more than just an advertising agency located in Indianapolis and yes we have won some awards for the best advertising agency in Indianapolis. You’ve probably heard of advertising agencies but may not know much about what they do or why they’re important. Agencies are essential in the creation and 
execution of successful ad campaigns, but there are many other things that advertising agencies do that the general public may not be aware of, such as SEO, content strategy, and email marketing. Read on to learn more about the ins and outs of advertising agencies and why you should consider hiring one if you’re in need of their services.
1.) We Strategize Advertising Platforms to Use
When it comes to picking a platform to work with, it is never a one-size-fits-all. We believe that you need to be invested in several different platforms for a variety of reasons. First, you have to take the approach of putting all your eggs in the same basket is never a good idea. While Google and Facebook are behemoths they are not privy to falling down. Users could wear tired of them, and you have all of your investments in them. The next point is you don’t own any of them so you are at the mercy of the algorithm updates. You never know when you will get hit with one and need to move to another platform. And the very last point we want to make is they all vary in cost to advertise there. The most expensive channels can be cheaper if you had advertised upstream to the marketing funnel.
2.) We Build Funnels Across Platforms
We kind of lend to this one above but we use multiple platforms not just for the reasons above, but these marketing platforms all work differently at different stages of the funnel. For instance, Google search ads are at the end of the funnel where some are ready to make a purchase. Whereas Facebook ads tend to be more upstream in that when you browse Facebook you are not necessarily in the mood to buy something. Using both forms of ads helps you move someone down the funnel. An ad agency can help you get your brand out there through a variety of different media channels. This includes things like Google Search Ads, Facebook Ads, Display Ads, Native Advertising, and YouTube ads.
3.) We Build Remarketing Audiences within Platforms
This one we often see some get confused on. In a nutshell, remarketing is online advertising that allows you to promote your products and services to people who have already interacted with your business. For example, after a user visits one of your websites, he or she might see an ad from you on another website in a different browser window.
Remarketing can help you connect with visitors who have abandoned their shopping carts or users who simply missed earlier engagement opportunities. Remarketing is also done within each platform and across platforms. It is not something that is just bought with one platform or another. We can remarket at different stages of the marketing funnel. It’s our job as an advertising agency to determine where your buyers are and spread the budget across them!
4.) We Create Buyer Personas
After interviewing you (possibly your team) and reviewing the data we come up with what is called a buyer persona. What is a buyer persona? In the simplest form, it is the targeted audience of your marketing efforts. Since buyers are often influenced by their peers when making buying decisions, it’s important for us to define what typical buyers look like so we can create ads that speak to them directly. Our buyer personas are based on actual research about your ideal client, but then fleshed out with details about where they live, what they do in their free time, and what they buy in their spare cash. Over the years you have developed who typically buyers your product or services. If you haven’t tracked it, a lot of free platforms such as Google Analytics are tracking this for you. We will review these platforms to start to gather how we should begin our research in audience choices.
5.) We Research Audience Choices
Every platform out there has different ways to advertise your audience. It is our job as your advertising agency to look at each platform and see how we can get to the audience that is best suited for your product or service. Once we have researched these different opportunities to get to your audience, we can see how large of an audience one given platform might have. This allows us to make the best moves with your marketing ad budget.
6.) We Create, Analyze and Move Advertising Budgets
This is always the million-dollar question, how much advertising budget do I need? The answer usually lies in the tortoise or hare situation. How fast do you want to figure out what works best? The more advertising budget that you have the more data that you have coming in allowing you to see what is working or what is not. More advertising budgets also allow you to spread money across different parts of the funnel ensuring you have no broken stages of the funnel.
If you have a small budget then you can’t do as much and perhaps might just be pushing money at one stage or the other. While smaller budgets can work you should lower your expectations of how quickly it will work. Often while analyzing and optimizing results we will move money from one channel to another as we are seeing better results. So although we will start with a well-researched plan, we always let the data tell us where to go next.
7.) We Set Up Data to Ensure We Can Measure Results
That brings us to the data, 95% of the time, we do not see that data has been set up properly to understand properly what is going on with not just your advertising campaigns but well all of your marketing. Each platform of advertising has its own somewhat complicated way of tracking marketing success within its platform. The data will never match across platforms as they are always trying to give themselves credit and each platform usually has its own attribution or way of crediting data.
We rely on using multiple platforms to triangulate what is working and what is not. One of the most underused and free tools out there is Google Analytics which can give you a decent view of your overall marketing. But there are other platforms such as Hubspot and Sharp spring that can take it to the next level.
8.) We Design Ads
If we don’t design beautiful eye-stopping ads, then we fail. We need to match the ads to the buyer personas and audiences that we have developed earlier in the development of your campaigns. Design is one of the items that are in the eye of the beholder, so while we think we are pretty good at it, we are always testing to see what is best! You can rest assured that we will test images, color, and also different types of ads. We are skilled outside of just regular image ads and can also create animation and video ads for connected TV ads as well!
9.) We Design Ad Copy for Content
Sometimes it’s not just the design that captures your audience but the words that you use. The goal of your ads is to get someone to stop thinking and proceed to the next step of your funnel at your website and this is where ad copy comes in. We design all types of ad copy from search ads, social ads to audio ads. Different words evoke different feelings, and they must be tested for efficacy. We also like to test the length of ad copy from short and sweet to long and drawn.
10.) We Analyze Data All Day and Optimize Where the Funnel is Broken
This is where the muscle meets the road. There are hundreds of data sets available within each platform that tell us where someone has not moved on to the next steps of interacting with ads. All the way from impressions, have they seen the ad, frequency; how often are they seeing it, click-through rate do they click through and so on and so on.
We analyze the data and make continual optimization to improve the parts of the funnel we believe to be broken. We then have to make sure we have enough data to make a decision on if that optimization was enough to move someone down a funnel. All of these small movements are repeated across platforms to adjust and optimize to get the best results.
11.) We Analyze Landing Pages for Missing Information
Yeah, we threw in an #11 because we are overachievers here. Our job does not stop after someone has clicked through on an ad we must then evaluate what happens after they get to the website. What determines a good landing page? Did they bounce out of the website and not click or go anywhere. How long did they stay on that page? How far down the page did they scroll? Did they go on to another page and if so where? We have ensured from the onset that we are choosing landing pages that match both the audience targeting and the stage of the funnel they are at. If a proper landing page does not exist we can help with one!
Every year there are thousands of new products and services are introduced to the market. Most do not survive their first year in business. Of those that do, very few continue to survive for more than ten years. Successful advertising agencies are an essential part of any successful business venture.
Platforms We Advertise On
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