Aside from keeping up with trends in the marketing world, a digital marketing agency also needs to be mindful of new and emerging tech offerings that can help improve its capabilities—not just in terms of its own internal processes, but in order to serve clients’ needs.
In the marketing world, progression is inevitable.
We see this all the time. Keep up with it or get left behind, as they say. Progression can involve implementing new software offerings like content management systems (CMS), business intelligence (BI), analytical software, social media management platforms, and so on. Just think about big names like Hubspot, ClickUp, Hootsuite, Mailchimp, Google’s BigQuery, vNEXT, and a swath of other popular names that were relatively unheard of even 10-15 years ago, yet are now utilized by a large percentage of digital marketers on a daily basis.
Of course, it’s tempting to get caught up in the hype of trendy new tech offerings, but it’s important to remain focused on what matters in the end: your clients.
WHAT DOES PROGRESSION MEAN FOR A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY?
How do we at Fiddlehead progress with new innovations, remain mindful of evolving marketing trends, and still stay rooted in proven core methods?
It is a complex pursuit.
Fortunately, we have a somewhat simple answer from our own Director of Technology & Analytics, Dustin Miller: “The core method to our madness is an insatiable curiosity of user behavior—why users do what they do when engaging,” he says. “The innovation lets us identify how to evaluate it all. We start with our curiosity and fit tech in to help.”
A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY DRIVEN BY CURIOSITY
Understanding user/consumer behavior is the foundation of marketing—this is not going to change. We are always trying to better understand why users click on certain emails but not others, why they spend more time on one part of a website but ignore the resources found on a separate part, or why they engage with social posts about one topic and quickly scroll past others. We want to know!
As Dustin said, our curiosity is insatiable. And that curiosity leads to different avenues for analyzing user behavior. The human element will never leave the equation. Still, an effective digital marketing agency also needs to leverage new tech when it is clearly useful in helping achieve the main goal for the client.
WHERE NEW INNOVATION COMES IN
Technology matters in digital marketing! We’ve come a long way from the days of simply counting visitors on a webpage (remember those website visitor tickers?).
We have a metric of our own: Does this new tech offering or viewpoint ultimately help us to better analyze and identify the very user behavior and engagement key to executing strategies that achieve the client’s end goal?
If the answer is “yes,” well, of course, we’re going to implement it, but we don’t merely fit new tools in; we make the tools work for us. New shiny things (i.e. new software and trendy platforms) are not necessarily bad—we always investigate to see if they will help with our goals and the client’s goals.
HERE’S AN EXAMPLE FROM THE SEO SIDE OF THINGS
Google updates its algorithms thousands of times per year. Each of these changes may impact different SEO marketing clients in different ways. The job of a digital marketing agency is to determine how to advise each client on how to adjust their actions in accordance.
There were, for example, some changes in how Google prioritized “guided recipes”—recipes that are structured to walk a user through the prep and cooking of a recipe using a very specific and technical format. While this had no impact on most of our clients, it had a sizable effect on one large food company client. This led us to advise modifying their recipes to comply with the new technical standard.
And the result? The client experienced significantly improved rankings for their recipes—along with the accompanying increases in traffic.
HOW ABOUT A TECH EXAMPLE?
Sometimes, adding something new to our technology stack can scratch a particular itch. Our analytics team provides tools to help account directors and analysts explore our clients’ marketing analytics data. This “exploratory data analysis” levels up their ability to provide unique and actionable insights for our clients, but getting this data live from APIs—such as those provided by Google Search Console or Google Analytics—often means long waits. (Not to mention those pants-on-fire lying progress bars.) These delays are anathema to curiosity: the itch must be scratched.
We evaluated several third-party tools but ultimately decided on deploying new technology to our infrastructure. Using open-source tools, we now ingest a copy of all that delicious data. It can now be transformed, analyzed, and visualized—all in-house and without those frustrating progress bars. Plus, as an added bonus, we can now archive swaths of historical data that would otherwise be unavailable to us over time.
New and shiny tech can be intoxicating, but there’s a reason they call it “the bleeding edge.” Our analytics team braves the bramble that covers the ever-changing technology landscape, and we find useful paths to carve out for the rest of our teams—and our clients.
WE USE INNOVATION AND PROGRESSION AS TOOLS UNTO THEMSELVES
Our primary objective for each client will always be to not only empower them with the insights and analytics needed to make the right decision but to also show them it was the right one to make. Have we made changes and progressed over the years when warranted? Of course. Will we do it in the future? Absolutely.
But one thing won’t change: We will continue to stay focused on providing value to clients and making them look like heroes. And that could involve a pen and notepad just as much as it could the newest analytics and charting software.
For more on how Fiddlehead uses honest, data-driven analysis and experienced judgment to remove friction from digital marketing decision-making, check out our Services.
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