For new businesses or those trying to grow their customer base, these online services can help grow brand awareness and generate interest.

For businesses trying to convert more of their site visitors into customers, an internet marketing company can help them boost their conversion rate, rank higher on searches, and more.

There’s no limit to what a good provider can do, but you need to find the right one that aligns with your business and goals while offering the quality service needed to make those goals a reality.

Market research provides a solid foundation for a marketing strategy by providing insights and data around the competitive landscape, your target audience, strengths/weaknesses, and more. It is a valuable service to utilize before diving into your marketing strategy so that you can ensure you use the right tactics to achieve your goals.

Search engine optimization services (SEO) are methods used to help your site rank highly on the results pages of Google or other search engines. SEO ensures your site will be one of the first ones a searcher sees when they type a query for something relevant to what you offer.

SEO methods involve researching and strategically incorporating keywords, optimizing meta tags, and refining the technical SEO on your site’s back-end to improve factors like page loading. It can also include local SEO services tailored to help your site perform better in searches geared toward your local area.

A digital advertising strategy can involve digital campaigns on Facebook that target specific demographics, Google ads that show up at the top of a search engine results page, or pay per click ads to help you bring more users to your website, to name a few. Ads are an excellent lead generation strategy that can capture the attention of potential new customers and introduce them to your brand.

Many businesses also incorporate content marketing into their online marketing strategy. Content marketing services usually begin with the content creation of high-quality blogs and guest posts, but these services can also expand into content analysis, social promotion, infographic creation, and SEO content.

By providing high-value content to your target audience, you’ll gain their trust and become positioned as an expert in your niche. For a person who frequently visits your site, it creates a more natural transition from visitor to customer.

Email marketing campaigns generate the highest ROI for digital marketers in today’s landscape, so it’s one of the most sought-after services out there. Email marketing specialists can create:

• Segmented lists to better reach different customer groups
• Email workflows to nurture customers through sales funnel from sign-up to the checkout
• A/B testing emails
• Email autoresponders
• And more

Responsive web design and development is another one of the professional services a digital marketing firm may provide. While web design isn’t necessarily part of marketing efforts, it’s often the first impression a user has with your business. Having a solid website design and layout can be critical in converting users to customers.

Web design as a marketing strategy may include developing eCommerce websites, re-designing a current website for a better user experience, or optimizing your current design for conversion.

Social media marketing is crucial for modern businesses. If you’re not trying to leverage social media platforms, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to tap into the digital audience where they naturally spend their time.

Within social media marketing, services break down into two distinct but related approaches:

• Social media management involves planning the content, responding to audiences, gauging analytics, and developing content strategies based on insights.
• Social media advertising focuses on paid ads through social channels. It can include paid ads on the platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) themselves or influencer marketing, using sponsored posts with influential people to capture your audience’s attention.

Conversion rate optimization is one of the newer marketing strategies that digital agencies now offer their clients. This practice involves optimizing a website to turn website traffic into customers at a higher rate by improving site navigation, opt-in forms, CTAs, and more.

Marketing with video can be a great way to boost your online presence and create a more robust digital footprint. This involves creating videos—how-to content, product demos, testimonial reviews—and deploying them across various social or digital channels.

You want a strong marketing team on your side. This might include basic strategy from the marketing director, a dedicated account manager to serve as the main point of contact, and a team of digital marketing specialists to handle the smaller tasks. Ideally, they have experience working on companies similar to yours with success.

You should also ask about their past online marketing work. You want to see a successful digital marketing campaign track record to prove that the agency can deliver and make your investment worthwhile. Many agencies will provide a list of past clients on their websites, making it easy to browse their sites and social platforms to gauge the success of their work.

The marketing agency you choose must have a strong industry reputation—you don’t want to work with a brand-new team taking on their first clients, and you also don’t want to work with a firm that past clients have had bad issues with in the past. You want to ensure you’ll be working with a team of marketing professionals with a glowing reputation.

A digital marketing specialist will design your website, run your social media accounts, and optimize your site for search engine results. If you’re going to trust them, they should be able to do these things exceptionally well for their own business, too.

Before you decide to work with any digital firm, do your homework. Check out their website and social media channels and see where they fall on search results pages on queries targeted towards them.

Are you impressed? Is the site compelling and easy to navigate? Are their social graphics high-quality? What is their social engagement? Are they at the top of a search engine results page (SERP), or are they buried somewhere on page 12?

Asking yourself these questions will help you evaluate the firm and determine whether they have what it takes to improve your digital presence as well.

Online marketing services fall under communications—they are advertisements, social media messages, emails, etc. So, if the agency isn’t great at communicating themselves, there’s a good chance they won’t be a good digital partner.

You want a team that responds to your requests at a reasonable time and keeps you in the loop of new developments as your strategy develops and gets implemented.