How to Successfully Collaborate With a Digital Marketing Agency?

Hiring the best digital marketing agency is not enough!

After all, working with a digital agency is like riding a tandem bicycle! You may team up with the top digital marketing experts but without proper communication and coordinated efforts, building your brand presence may seem a distant dream.

Many brands and renowned businesses realise that collaboration with a digital marketing agency isn’t always straightforward. Especially when both parties are stuck amidst megabytes of content, creatives, brainstorming, meetings and multifold communications happening between them.

Immensely overwhelming, isn’t it?

Well, it can be simplified. The most brilliant minds at the best digital marketing agency in Ahmedabad have compiled this guide on how businesses can establish a robust partnership and collaborate effectively with their marketing agency.

Read ahead to know more!

WHAT CAN BRANDS DO TO COLLABORATE EFFECTIVELY WITH A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY?

The daunting question has kept many business owners wide awake, after all, a small miss from their team can also cost heavily to the brand.

We have compiled a list of things you can do to improve your compatibility with a digital marketing company. They are as follows:

• Set your marketing goals
• Communicate your expectations
• Identify team responsibilities
• Establish a clear communication process
• Provide access to relevant information
• Analyse results and refine strategies as needed

SET MARKETING GOALS

Before you dip into the pool of digital marketing agencies, take some time and define what it is that you want to achieve. Because the first step towards an effective collaboration comes with communicating your defined goals and objectives to the marketing agency.

Consider unravelling questions like:

• what goals you have in mind,
• how will you measure the performance of the campaign,
• how will you record the learnings from the campaign.

Making sure that both parties are on the same page helps ensure that all the efforts are directed through a tunnel leading towards the same end goals and prevents any misunderstandings.

COMMUNICATE YOUR EXPECTATIONS

It’s important to set clear timelines, milestones and expectations while hiring an agency for digital marketing in Ahmedabad or Amsterdam. This will allow everyone to understand what’s expected and by when so that teams are held accountable and deliverables are met on time.

Projects should also have a scope or agreement outlining who is responsible for delivering what, as well as any overhead expenses.

The expectations once defined, like the north star, help the agency navigate and sometimes even alter strategies mid-course to deliver the results promised.

IDENTIFY TEAM RESPONSIBILITIES

Your second step is to identify who from your team will be responsible for which tasks and make sure everyone understands their roles before starting the project.

As the top digital marketing expert in Ahmedabad, it is clear that having someone from the brand as the point of contact helps keep communication organised and efficient, while also ensuring that all responsibilities are divided appropriately.

This also means deciding who will be the point of contact for the agency to reach out to for project details, images and any kind of resource. Who is responsible for the creative approval, who is next in line in charge if the end authority isn’t present, etc.

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Marketing on Snapchat! Yeah..we’re not kidding.

Early in the morning, the alarm goes off. That familiar ringtone on your smartphone starts to play. You move your hand to look for your phone and turn it off instantly. And now that you have your phone in your hand, you click on the small yellow box with a cute ghost in the centre.

Now, chances are you may not relate to this routine nor identify the small yellow box. However, 144.35 million people in India do recognise it, making it one of the top 15 most-used social media platforms in the world, popularly known as Snapchat.

And with India having the highest number of users active on Snapchat, it becomes a significant platform for marketers to invest in and consequently opens the gate for Snapchat marketing. So here’s a refresher for you all by marketing experts at Flora Fountain, a digital marketing company in Ahmedabad.

Before we dive into details let’s break the ice with Snapchat.

WHAT IS SNAPCHAT?

Back in 2011, Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, three students at Stanford university launched an app called Picaboo. The name was a riff on the childhood game Peek-a-boo and the symbol was a ghost on a yellow background. In 2012, the name was changed to SNAPCHAT.

It was an app which allowed people to send and receive any picture, video or message a.k.a. SNAP that would disappear in a period of short time. The app originally focused on private, one-to-one photo sharing. The features to send videos, live video chatting, messaging, creating caricature-like Bitmoji avatars, and sharing a chronological ‘story’ were added later.

WHO IS ON SNAPCHAT?

A distribution of global Snapchat users by gender (as of April 2022), showed that over 50% users of this instant picture and video sharing app are women. Here’s one more interesting fact for Indian brands: The country with the most number of Snapchat users is India, followed by the United States and France. Most of these users are aged between 18 to 24 years old, forming an interesting 39% of the total user base.

This, because Snapchat is a mobile-first social media application and more and more youngsters prefer spending their time online on their mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.

WHICH MARKETS ARE MOST RELEVANT TO SNAPCHAT?

Snapchat has many interesting features which were a first for social media users. Remember, stories were introduced by Snapchat before Meta (then Facebook) blew it up on all their platforms. Media outlets and food brands continue to leverage the power of Snapchat stories to target their audiences. For instance, every time you open the stories Discover section in Snapchat, you will see at least one Zomato Ad and one Cosmopolitan or E! article in the sponsored stories.

Fashion brands have heavily leveraged the Bitmoji outfit features, with prominent players like Ralph Lauren, Converse, Crocs regularly featuring their new products for users to digitally try using their Bitmoji Avatar and show it off among their followers and friends.

WHY USE SNAPCHAT FOR MARKETING?

Now that we have a general grasp of what Snapchat is, let’s look into how Snapchat can benefit a business by being a part of their digital marketing strategy.

A NEW WAY TO ENGAGE!

Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube – these might be the usual social media platforms that you might have invested in for digital marketing. And your competitors are probably doing the same too. So, advancing your content and social media marketing strategy by investing in Snapchat marketing will not only set you apart from your competitors but will also bring engagement to your brand.

You can make your content stand out with features like drawing over Snaps and adding music and polls. For instance, National Geographic compiled snaps and promoted Snapchat users to visit the website by creating stories similar to what they share in their articles.

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On And Off: Your Brand’s Guide to Creating an SEO Strategy

93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine like Google.

75% of users never go past the first page of search results.

Knowing such facts is one thing, but internalising them and then acting on them is what helps a brand really shine online.

SEO or search engine optimisation empowers brands to do that. The process of optimising a website to improve its visibility and rank in search engine results is known as SEO. It is a detailed plan which on execution helps a website improve its search engine ranking in order to capture more organic traffic. This plan is built on two different foundational pillars like on-page and off-page SEO. In order to fully optimise a brand’s SEO strategy, a thorough understanding of these two pillars become extremely important.

The difference between on-page and off-page is quite simple. On-page as the name suggests are all the activities done ‘on the pages of your website’. Whereas off-page means all the activities done ‘beyond the pages of your website.’ Of course it’s more than just these two lines.

Read on as Flora Fountain, a top SEO company in Ahmedabad, India, is here to help you get a better understanding of all that SEO jazz.

Let’s jump in!

ON-PAGE SEO

The process of optimising individual web pages in order to rank higher and garner more relevant organic traffic in search engines such as Google and Yahoo is known as On-page SEO. It entails optimising both the content and HTML source code of a page. From creating content with keywords, optimising title tags, meta tags, and internally linking relevant pages as per the URL structure, everything that takes place on the website falls under on-page SEO.

CONTENT AND KEYWORDS

You might already know all about content and keywords, but a refresher never hurts!

Content is indeed the king QUEEN! Most brands, despite knowing this, fail to optimise content. SEO includes looking for the keywords that your audience is using to search for information on the internet, and then creating, optimising, and regularly publishing website content around these keywords. Content also includes the kind of images you put out on your website. So you need to optimise them as well. Make sure that they are not larger than they need to be and are in the right format (JPG and PNG).

The experienced SEO team at Flora Fountain, the best digital marketing company in Ahmedabad, India, also understands how to optimise existing content, in order for a brand to increase its organic traffic.

TITLE TAG AND META DESCRIPTION

The main heading or the title of the web page is a title tag. And the short description that appears under it is a meta description. Title tag comes up on the search engine results page (SERP) and is a very important factor for the success of on-page SEO. And because Google search engine usually picks up only about 65 letters or characters from the title tag, a brand needs to choose every word, even letter, very wisely! Meta tags on the other hand describe the content on that page but, more importantly, it’s written to help your web page stand out in the list of SERP results. Keep the meta description under 155 characters to ensure your entire description is shown in search results.

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Brand Voice: The What, Why & How It Matters

Imagine entering a family event and meeting your reticent uncle who doesn’t talk much until you ask or tell him something. But then you meet his enthusiastic world-traveller son, and you both just can’t stop talking and exchanging notes on shared interests established during the conversation! Now think about it, do you give the same attention to both of them? Are you equally engaged talking to both of them? The answer, of course, is no. Just like your uncle and cousin have different personalities and voices, on which your level of engagement with them differs, just like that, brands too can have different voices based on their personalities.

But the million-dollar question, does your brand need a voice? And is it ready to have one? But what even is a brand voice?

Read on to find out answers to these and many more questions from the best known branding and digital marketing company in Ahmedabad.

WHAT IS A BRAND VOICE?

Every brand has a defining persona that leaves a lasting impression on the audience it interacts with and the customers it serves. This happens through the various ways it communicates with them, through advertisements, social media posts, branding activities, promotions, etc. The language it uses, their flow of words, the personality it imbibes on, is what comes together to form a brand voice that makes people remember the brand and talk about it to others, hence ‘spreading the word’ about it.

HOW IT MATTERS…

A brand’s distinctive voice makes it consistent, memorable and recognisable. A brand increases the awareness of its product, services, ideology, mission and vision through its voice. With the digital landscape now massively crowded, it seems like a competition of who is the loudest. But when a brand maintains its consistency in voice through its words, graphics, pictures, it stands out amidst the din and people are able to identify it out of the crowd.

DEFINING A BRAND’S VOICE…

Don’t know what your brand should sound like? Worry not… everyone starts somewhere, even Coca Cola did. The branding and content marketing teams from one of the best branding companies in Ahmedabad has these five tips for you to figure it out and get started.

IDENTIFY THE BRAND’S AUDIENCE

Every brand must ask this question to themselves first, “Who are we serving?” This question unravels many aspects of the ideal customer a brand wants. It further brings out more questions like, what is their age, what language do they speak, where do they live, how much do they earn and spend, who do they hang out with, do they travel and where, etc…

When a brand starts to find answers to all these questions, they come up with the persona of their ideal customer, and that helps them target and speak to the right audience in the language that resonates with them. For instance, a Taj hotel will speak impeccable English in their posts, but a local café like Eleven11 in Ahmedabad would prefer using slang, puns and jokes in their communication. You get the drift…

BE CONSISTENT, AND DOCUMENT EVERYTHING ABOUT IT

The success of a well-defined brand voice lies in the consistency of its application. And to maintain this brand voice, it is important to document every important feature and aspect that defined it in the first place.

This brand voice document must mention the company and brand’s mission, vision, the personality traits of its ideal customer, their vocabulary, the brand tagline & the story behind it, some examples of the correct usage of brand language, and mistakes to avoid.

This practice will be helpful for multiple departments, from the strategist racking his brains over the next promotional campaign idea, to the rookie writer who will be writing for the brand’s social media and marketing copies, to not got astray.

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5 most common Digital marketing myths busted

“I have a small business; I don’t have to do digital marketing right now”

“Email marketing? Does it even work today?”

These are some of the most commonly used rebuttals by entrepreneurs when they are asked to hire a digital marketing agency for their businesses. Now, they either don’t know what digital marketing is, or have heard and believe in the various misconceptions around it.

But, what are these misconceptions about digital marketing, and how are they detrimental to businesses, if not busted? Read on to know the 8 most common digital marketing myths.

1. DIGITAL MARKETING IS ONLY FOR BIG BUSINESSES

Digital Marketing provides all businesses, big or small, with equal opportunities on the internet. With a well-researched and proven digital marketing strategy, small businesses can compete with big brands online, allowing it to reach a wider audience despite having a standard marketing budget for it. A Forrester study states that post pandemic, businesses should ideally spend around 46% of their total marketing budget on digital marketing now.

In today’s day and age, digital marketing is an indispensable strategy for every business no matter what size it is. Because whether it is a smartphone or a roll of toilet paper, people are now looking for them online first.

2. NO NEED TO INVEST IN SOCIAL MEDIA

One of the biggest mistakes a business can make in today’s time is to believe that their customers aren’t on social media. According to a study on Statista, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide in the year 2020. These numbers are projected to jump to almost 4.41 billion in 2025.

Having a presence on social media gives businesses the opportunity to promote their products or services to their ideal customer base directly, interact with them more, stay on track with the trends and even sell through these platforms. The possibilities to attract potential customers and generate leads through targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are endless.

3. DO IT, ONLY IF YOUR COMPETITION IS DOING IT

Now, let us make it very simple here. If your competitors are doing digital marketing, then you should do it too. But, if none of your competitors are online, be the first one to be. Grab that first mover’s advantage and make hay as the sun shines bright.

A brand should stay ahead of the curve when it comes to digital marketing, as not going digital means missing out on a whole new world of new customers a brand can reach. And digital marketing is not just promoting products and services on social media. It includes, email marketing, targeted digital ads, SEO and much more.

Here’s a sneak peek into the various activities done by Flora Fountain, a digital marketing company in Ahmedabad India.

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