Many people use digital marketing agencies and do not know it. This is because these agencies do not often market themselves as such. They are in fact a very commonly used resource in all aspects of online marketing.
One of the most common forms digital marketing agencies take is that of a website design company. Almost every business and many private people have a website of some description. Any one of them that has had the site designed by a professional website designer has made use of digital marketing agencies and did not even know it.
A good website designer will make the job of other types of digital marketing agencies a lot easier. If they are not very good, they will be sworn at by other companies trying to do digital marketing for the website.
Digital marketing agencies are also involved in search engine optimisation or SEO. Search engine optimisation is done to allow search engine like Google and Yahoo know that the website exists and what it is all about. A search engine optimization campaign will target selected keywords and try to get the website to appear in the first position for those particular keywords. What keywords you choose and how much it will cost depends on what your business does and how much online competition there is for that keyword.
Another thing these agencies offer is the pay per click campaign. This is a service offered by Google where companies select certain keywords and pay an amount for every time a searcher clicks on their advertisement placed at the top of a page of searches. This can get very expensive and may not help increase your sales it is done incorrectly. Many people do not even pay any attention to the advertisements at the top of the search listings, but would rather go down the page to find a relevant site.
You can also commission digital marketing agencies to design and place banner advertisements for your company on other websites. This does not necessarily work very well because of a phenomenon called banner blindness. This is when people ignore the banner advertisements on websites completely. So this could also be as nice to have, but expensive method of marketing your products and website.
The last method digital marketing agencies use to promote your website and products is email marketing. This is the process by which a list of email addresses is generated, either from the site itself or bought from a company which specialises in generating email address lists, and then the list is bombarded by emails giving the person information about the products and company funding the campaign. The problem with this is that the emails often get tagged as spam and your company gets added to the ever growing list of spam mailers. This means that your emails get blocked and your regular customers may not get your emails.