The Importance of Hiring An Agency With Deep Digital Expertise
When you work with an advertising agency, it’s tempting to have them take over every aspect of your business’s digital marketing. Having each piece of the marketing puzzle in one place streamlines projects, but your advertising agency generally isn’t the best choice when it comes to outsourcing website design and creation.
It might sound counterintuitive; ad agencies know how to turn a brand into a story that captures attention, after all. But stick with us for a moment, and let’s take a deeper look at the role of an ad agency vs. the role of your website.
What do ad agencies do?
It’s a simple question, but there’s a lot of confusion around advertising. For starters, advertising isn’t the same as marketing (and your website should be a marketing engine for your business.)
Ad agencies use a variety of strategies to create campaigns for their clients, including billboards, TV commercials, direct mail, mixed media, and more. Many agencies have, or claim to have, experience with digital marketing techniques, but most fall short of being a true digital agency.
Your website doesn’t need an ad agency, it needs data
The most effective digital marketing agencies root their practices in hard data. There’s no way to confirm if a website is effective at attracting customers without looking at the data, and there’s a solid chance your ad agency doesn’t have complete insights into the performance of your current site in order to deliver a new website that drives improvements in:
- Engagement
- Conversion rates
- Site performance across devices
Those examples just scratch the surface — if you want a high-performance website, knowing the numbers is critical. Complete data mining is imperative for strategic, effective website design. While ad agencies are skilled at creating stunning ad campaigns, they typically lack this type of digital data mining.
Who should you hire to build your website?
If ad agencies are out of the question, which service providers are best suited to build your website? When searching for an agency to create your new lead generating slice of the Internet, look for the following:
- A commitment to data. Look for digital marketing agencies that love crunching numbers.
- A commitment to go beyond basic data. It’s relatively easy to collect basic data, but you need more than that. Does your agency track return on investment by integrating with your CRM? Can they track website leads and phone calls? Do they offer custom integrations for the platforms you use to run your marketing?
- An understanding of the latest digital strategies. There’s a reason we always say, “go digital or perish.” With a constantly evolving landscape, your marketing agency needs a solid grasp on which tools, old and new alike, to use.
When choosing an agency to partner with, ask for proof of their data-driven practices. Quality service providers will be thrilled to show you what their clients have accomplished through their websites… and they’ll have the numbers to back it up.
Learn about Parallel Path’s digital transformation and website design and development services. And contact us when you are ready to Start Winning Digital.