Digital Advertising: What Is It and How Can It Help You?

The most frequent question we get as a digital advertising agency is what do we even do? We hope to clear up some questions on what it is and how it can help your business.

Firstly, every digital advertising agency has a different specialty. Some agencies are overarching in their tactics, others specialize. We refer to these as boutique agencies and they typically specialize in either a particular vertical or tactic. For instance, some digital agencies specialize in lead generation or PPC; Media Rebel, however, specializes in all things digital.

After a couple decades in the industry, our founder Janice Becker created Media Rebel, using her knowledge and experience to improve the traditional agency-client relationship.

You can read further about her journey to creating the agency, and what our mission is here.

Read on to learn what a digital advertising agency is and If you’re uncertain whether a a digital agency is right for you and your business, read our blog explaining how we can help your company reach its digital goals here.

What Can Digital Agencies Do For You?

A digital agency’s purpose is to work with your business on a digital marketing strategy that is customized to your goals and objectives. These goals and objectives are the foundation for what tactics will align to achieve them.

For example, when a business needs to increase brand awareness through digital channels tactics may include; blogs, social media, and ads. Hiring the help of a digital advertising agency ensures the proper execution.

The digital landscape is changing daily. From new trends to new software, making it difficult for a business to stay on top of everything new.

A digital advertising agency stays up to date on what is developing in the digital world. Google Search has evolved, now offering a new AI-powered Generative Experience along with other tactics. Just as programmatic as evolved in connected TV, streaming audio, podcast advertising and more.

A digital agency's main goal is to continuously learn, grow, and generate new ideas for their clients' digital campaigns. This ensures that the campaigns are strong. An agency should always strive to improve and innovate to provide the best possible performance. Focusing on staying ahead of the curve and delivering successful results.

Today, with the increasing number of touch points and communication methods, the top of the funnel process is longer. This means a defined digital strategy is extremely imperative. Understanding that you can't stop efforts after just a short stint thinking it isn't working and hanging on for the long haul.

Aligning Goals and Objectives

Any investment of time and money should have a measurable goal. This way, you can monitor the success of your investment and optimize your strategy to improve your performance. From boosting brand awareness to increasing your mailing list, these goals are set together with an agency so that the decisions being made are appropriate to your goal.

The objective of your digital plan is an essential gauge of what KPIs (or key performance indicators) will be used to measure your strategy’s performance. These get complicated, but the important thing to know is that you must have measurable, time-sensitive goals to be successful. Your digital agency is the expert you need in understanding them.

Creating and Proposing a Plan

Hiring a digital advertising agency to assist your company will start with an investigation phase. This phase explores your needs, goals, and objectives. It formulates the strategy that will be included in the digital proposal.

An effective proposal will clearly outline the goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics, forecasts, and costs associated with the project. Adapting and adjusting the proposal is common, based upon several factors. The digital agency updates the original proposal so that you are aware of all changes.

Major discrepancies, particularly in costs, are a sign that the agency you are working with is not being transparent. Along with the lack of reporting that shows optimizations and performance metrics.

Understanding technical jargon like the industry terms, acronyms and standards is the responsibility of the agency. They assist in educating you, as a business, that may not be aware of their meanings.

Executing Strategy (creation of assets, content, and implementation)

Upon agreement of the proposal, the next step is to create the assets needed to implement the tactics.

This includes content for any social media, video scripts, audio scripts, blogs, etc. The digital advertising agency specializes in knowing what will best perform. This includes length of blogs, duration of videos, and content that drives performance.

The agency develops the assets and then sends them on to the client for final approval. Once approved, the agency will work on implementation.

Implementation can take several forms, depending on the tactics in the proposal. For instance, if it is programmatic the platform utilized will need an account created for the client. A pixel is added to the client's website to track the campaign's performance.

This pixel also allows ads to be shown again to people who have interacted with them. It helps monitor the effectiveness of the campaign and in retargeting those who have shown interest in the ads. This same principle applies to other platforms.

We assign the platforms and pixels, then add the campaign dates, creative assets, targeting, and budgets. With the development and launch, you may think that this is the final step, but it's far from it.

Monitoring, Reporting and Optimizing

Once the campaign is live, monitoring is done to ensure that the platform upholds the targeting objectives, audience, and performance metrics. The algorithms, regardless of using AI, can still make errors. You may want to target a CEO, and at times the algorithm can make errors in targeting an admin to the CEO. Some platforms, not all, allow for exclusions of these titles, therefore monitoring is crucial.

Creative fatigue can be a main issue. Not having enough creative assets can cause for your audience to see the same ad so many times that it is no longer effective. Some digital advertising agencies like Media Rebel, take this into consideration and work hard to anticipate these needs. Monitoring helps to ensure this doesn't happen.

Some digital agencies may have limitations in their ability to monitor. It depends on the system they have in place, their billing guidelines and if they have this incorporated into their plans.

Optimization is the process of making adjustments are made based off findings in monitoring. Some optimizations could be adjustments in geography, audience, budgets, and duration.

The Business-Agency Relationship

The relationship between business and agency can make or break their work together. No project will be successful if your agency doesn't understand you as a business.

Understanding the Client

Each business is unique, so an effective agency will spend the time getting to know their client. Knowing your brand, industry, company culture, and target audience gives us a clear understanding of your business’ needs. A digital agency like Media Rebel is especially useful for writing content, so we take the time to understand the personal brand and voice of our clients.

AI cannot replace the work of a digital advertising agency. Though it's a powerful tool in supporting digital advertising, it cannot properly account for the nuances of your brand. Some AI technologies deceptively tell you that they will do your digital advertising for you. However, these tools still require human input to correct errors and they only perform specific functions.

Transparency and Communication

As a business making a significant investment, you should be thoroughly informed on the important details. This does not stop at the moment you’ve approved a strategy proposal — it’s an ongoing process of open communication.

The biggest problems between an agency and business result in a lack of transparency about costs, decisions, and changes. Though costs can shift in some situations, the reasoning and potential for alterations should be identified clearly.

With a foundation of trust, you should never feel out-of-the-loop with the agency you hired.

Dishonest Practices

The foundation of Media Rebel is a reaction to dishonest practices in the industry that undermine the positive impact they can bring to other companies.

Over-billing

The last thing you want as a business is to receive a bill that is much larger than you had anticipated. When an agency isn’t forthcoming about the cost of their services and how that price-point is reached, it’s a major red flag. With transparency and honesty, every expenditure should be accounted for and justified.

Underperforming

It can be hard to tell if your agency is doing a good job for you without the right expertise. Metrics fluctuate over the duration of campaigns. Optimizations and monitoring assist in improving those metrics. If you continue to see a decline in metrics, this is how you know your agency is no longer serving you.

One of the most common areas of underperformance is optimization.

For instance, Google ads provides users with an optimization score. The lower the score, the less likely your ads will perform to their potential. Making adjustments increases your score thereby improving overall performance. Without making adjustments to optimize, the potential of your ad campaign will plummet.

Similarly, some agencies execute projects that make little sense for the industry, competition, and budget allocation available to them.

As an agency, it is our job to use our expertise to advise the strategy and optimizations. If a client is suggesting an ineffective plan, such as advertising nationwide with a small budget in a competitive market, it's an agency's responsibility to explain the issues with it and propose an alternative.

Rebelling Against the Norm

Working to solve these ineffective practices that have become commonplace in the industry is what makes us Media Rebel. Working closely with clients to craft effective strategies to reach their digital goals is our mission as an agency.

We don't develop strategies by the numbers or follow strict templates to cut corners. Developing a through understanding of our clients' businesses means we can approach each project with adaptability, flexibility, and scrutiny.

Every digital advertising agency is different, and many only focus on one particular part of the advertising process. What results is businesses needing to hire the help of several agencies to work on their digital advertising strategy. With so many involved parties, miscommunication becomes much more likely. Media Rebel relieves businesses of this burden, as we specialize in all things digital.

If you’ve worked with a digital advertising agency before, they might have used confusing, technical jargon. At Media Rebel, we consider this to be a fundamental miscommunication. If you don’t understand what we're saying, how are you supposed to make an informed agreement? Instead, we keep the technical terminology to ourselves.

Conclusion

With a better understanding of digital agencies, you can see the value in an honest and transparent company. If you're hiring a digital advertising agency, know what to look for in a strong business relationship. Settling for an agency that isn't meeting your needs will cost you precious time and money in the long run.

Click here for more information on the value of a digital agency.

If social media is a target area for your business' digital strategy, read our blog here.