The growth of online marketing created an industry where vendors supply tools to support the entire process—from idea to execution to analysis and feedback.
The question is: which tools should you choose?
You have a choice between traditional online marketing agencies that sell branded search, social media, and paid media packages as a service (SMPPSA), and digital marketing agencies that provide you with software, platforms, and people to execute your online marketing campaigns for you.
While it’s true that both offer tremendous value, not all agency services are created equal. To help you make the right decision, we analyzed the leading vendors in the market and compared them based on 14 key metrics.
How Do I Choose the Right Agency?
It’s essential to understand what will make your agency stand out among your competitors. One of the best ways to do that is to ask prospective clients about their experiences with other agencies. You can also review online reviews or speak with your current clients about their experience with different agencies.
Aside from ensuring you choose an agency with a good reputation, you should look for an agency that can provide a variety of services or has specialists in different areas. For example, does the agency specialize in SEO or paid media or social media marketing?
Check Out These Marketing Agency Tools Carefully
Once you’ve found an agency with a good reputation and that can provide a variety of services, the next step is to evaluate their offerings based on the tools they provide. Remember, not all agency tools are created equal. Some are highly specialized and may only be of use to certain agency sizes. For example, HubSpot is a marketing tool that’s highly specialized to the marketing industry and can only be used by large agencies. It’s essential you understand the specialized tools your chosen agency offers if you want to get the most out of them.
Here is a comparison of 14 key metrics between the top two vendors in the market, HubSpot and Mad Mapping. Take a look and see if one of these tools is a good fit for your agency.
Key Takeaways
An agency that can provide all of these services and more is the ultimate strategic partner for any business. They should be your first choice when you’re looking to grow your business online. Even if you don’t need a traditional agency to execute your online marketing plans, you should still choose one of these companies based on their impressive track record.
Why HubSpot?
With HubSpot, you’re getting a complete integrated marketing solution that’s easy to use. The platform serves as a digital marketing hub that centralizes all of your social media activity in one place, so you can easily monitor and engage with audiences across all channels.
In addition to providing a variety of services, the company was founded by marketers who realized the value in having all of your digital marketing information in one place. This includes your website analytics, social media information, and email marketing strategies. Having all of this data in one place means you can easily analyze and act on any information gathered. This level of transparency is invaluable to a business owner or marketer.
Why Mad Mapping?
Mad Mapping is a marketing agency specializing in SEO, content strategy, and paid media. They take a more old school approach to digital marketing by bringing their own specialists in niche areas such as SEO, content strategy, and paid media to serve as your agency’s consultants. As a client, you’ll have the opportunity to engage with them directly through phone or email to get the most out of your agency’s services.
Agency management tools such as Mad Mapping’s Digital Marketing suite give you the flexibility to scale your agency as you grow. This way, you can provide high-quality services to your customers without worrying about hiring and training new employees.
Which Marketing Agency is Right for Me?
The ideal agency will have a good reputation, be able to provide a variety of services, and have tools that can be integrated into your everyday workflows. To learn more, check out our inbound marketing agencies here:
The Inbound Way
The inbound marketing agency model promotes customer centricity throughout all interactions with a company. They work with you to understand your customers’ needs and the problems you’re trying to solve. They then design marketing programs to amplify your business’ unique selling proposition (USP) and identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure the success of your program.
The goal is to have all of your marketing information—from social media posts to website analytics—in one place, so you can easily find and analyze the data. This way, you can constantly improve your approach and have a better understanding of what’s working and what needs to be changed.
The inbound approach to marketing means your agency will work closely with your business units (BU’s) to understand and serve your customers’ needs. In an increasingly digital world, this type of collaboration is becoming a necessity for any business.
Marketing Automation
The use of automation in marketing—from email campaigns to website landing pages—is becoming a standard practice. As you might expect, marketing automation tools provide you with a variety of automated marketing activities that you can set up and manage via an easy-to-use dashboard. This makes the entire process much faster and more efficient. You can’t say that about many other aspects of digital marketing. For example, creating a new landing page and getting it live on your site can take a lot of time.
Automation in marketing tools makes the process much simpler and more streamlined. To be truly effective, you need to have the right tools for the job. Marketing automation tools target different audiences—ranging from enterprise level businesses to bloggers and social media influencers—and come with a variety of features designed to increase your productivity.
Predictive Analytics
It’s critical to keep up with the ever-changing world of digital marketing. To do that, you need a solid understanding of which methods are effective and which ones aren’t. This is where predictive analytics tools can help. These tools take data gathered from previous campaigns and transactions and use it to predict how future campaigns will perform. This enables you to take a data-driven approach to marketing and, as a result, improve your performance.
Predictive analytics tools allow you to test different approaches to reach your audience and determine which ones are most effective. They provide you with the information you need to make critical decisions and create more successful marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is more important than ever for digital marketing. This type of marketing promotes your products and services through the content you create—such as blogs, white papers, and eBooks.
Typically, content marketing is considered a subset of paid media because it involves producing and publishing content to attract, retain, and engage customers. In today’s world, however, content is king—especially for SEO. Thanks to the content marketing world championship (CMC) and other competitive content marketing events that highlight the best content in a variety of niches, content is more important than ever to ensure your website shows up when Google searches for your product or service are searched.
The content you create should reflect your brand values and the voice of the people your target audience. To get started, simply choose a content strategy for your business and start creating. For example, if your brand values are health and fitness, you might want to create content that focuses on those areas—such as an eBook describing the best meal planning apps for weight loss, or a blog post sharing information about the latest studies on the health benefits of chocolate. You’ll likely find that your existing customers are more engaged with your content than your competitors’, and it’ll inevitably lead to increased customer loyalty and growth.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of improving the popularity of your website or blog so that it appears higher in search engine results when searched for keywords or phrases that are relevant to your business.
Many businesses avoid SEO because they think it’s difficult to understand and requires a lot of work. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, you’ll need to learn the basics of SEO—such as how to use keywords and how to create content that’s relevant to your users—and then, you can simply find a tool that does all the work for you.
There are several SEO tools available that can automatically find the most effective keywords and phrases for your business. Once you’ve identified these keywords, you can add them to the content on your website or blog. Then, when someone searches for one of these keywords, your website will appear higher in the search results than your competitors’.