Top 7 Digital Marketing Agency Categories

If you are starting a digital marketing agency, choose one of these

I have been doing a lot of research about different types of agencies and their offers. You cannot build a full-funnel digital marketing agency because there are too many moving parts in a business and you do not have direct control over the success of the business. The challenge with a full-funnel agency is that you will be taking on a lot of responsibilities without the authority to make decisions about the business.

There are two types of niche selection in the agency model. You can choose the kind of service that you are going to offer. Or you have to choose the industry that you are serving. Ideally, you have to choose both when you are just getting started. Offer one kind of service, for one category of clients. For example, my agency Deep Marketing will focus on lead generation and lead nurturing for B2C education clients.

I will not discuss the industries or markets you can choose in this post. I will make another post about it. In this post, let’s focus on the kind of services you can offer to your clients.

1. Lead Generation & Nurturing (Email Marketing)

Not all businesses need leads, but most businesses require good leads to make sure they make revenue and profits. FMCG products, very low ticket items do not need any customer education or sales to convince the customer to buy the product or service. Think about KitKat chocolate. The sales happen on branding and marketing, not because you have a good sales funnel for it.

Education, training, B2B consulting, automobiles, houses, and any product that requires customer education will require lead generation and lead nurturing. I keep nurturing my leads with content (this piece of content is also part of it).

My digital marketing agency: Deep Marketing will be focusing on the following things:

• Landing Pages that capture the leads

• Lead Magnet Creation

• Email and WhatsApp CRM Setup

• Nurturing via Email and Value Videos (VSLs)

• Applications that lead to sales appointments (Call booking flow)

• Ad campaigns that drive traffic to the landing pages (one-time setup)

When I am getting started, I will be focusing on only one category of clients - coaches and education companies. I have the most experience in it and I am confident I can bring results for my clients.

The Deep Marketing funnel forms the base framework for any marketing activities that the client might do in the future. It’s like the engine of the car. The top-of-the-funnel traffic methods might be like the fuel that makes the car move, but without the engine, the car is not going to move. Social media is like the tires you add to the car, but without the engine, the tires are not going to help the car move.

Clients might want SEO, Social Media, Branding, Sales, and so on, but we are not going to focus on it because those are separate responsibilities and have their own KPIs. Some KPIs are subjective and some are objective.

KPIs for an SEO agency might involve things like Domain Authority, Ranking, Organic Traffic, and Backlinks. They are objective KPIs. A Social Media agency needs to work on subjective metrics such as brand recall, positioning, and authority. Social media cannot help in direct lead generation for the amount of effort it requires but has indirect benefits such as authority building which can positively affect performance marketing and sales conversions.

I am choosing Lead Generation and Lead Generation as the niche for my agency Deep Marketing because based on my experience and skills, I feel this is the best category for me. That doesn’t mean that you have to choose the same. Many parts of the digital marketing funnel require attention. The next most important category is sales.

2. High-Ticket Sales (1-to-1 Closing)

Once the leads are generated and nurtured, they need to be converted into paying customers. Sales can happen via e-commerce portals as well but that’s only for low-ticket items. Any product or service that requires customer education is usually a high-ticket product. High-ticket products need 1-to-1 sales calls by a sales team.

A sales agency can offer the following services:

• Training people to become sales closers

• Helping businesses hire good sales closers

• Training the sales team of businesses to become better at closing deals

• Closing deals for other businesses for a commission (performance closing)

Many agencies in the world help businesses with these.

Some of them are:

• RemoteClosers.com (by Jayant)

• Closers.io (by Cole Gordon)

• PhoneSales.com

• TheSalesConnection.com

There are many openings for high-ticket closers on freelance websites as well.

3. Performance Marketing Agency

In Deep Marketing I need to set up initial campaigns such as display ads and search ads to get some leads flowing. Because if the leads don’t come then there is no way to understand the performance of the lead magnets and the email nurturing sequence. However, performance marketing is an ongoing work. In Deep Marketing, my initial setup will be for 2000 leads. After that, the funnel will be handed over to the client.

Many clients need ongoing performance marketing work. The responsibilities of a performance marketing agency include:

• Creating new ad campaigns (text ads for search and media-rich ads for display or social).

• Analyzing the performance of the ad campaigns and adjusting the daily budget

• Reducing the lead cost

• Improving the CTR

• Attribution of clicks to leads and leads to sales

• Identifying new media buying opportunities

• Split testing ad campaigns to identify the best winners

• Reporting the data back to the client

A performance marketing agency should focus only on one set of tasks and their client happiness will depend on the results of the ads, not the results of the business itself.

Many agencies make this mistake. There seems to be an irresistible desire to offer multiple services to multiple companies. Because of this, they become generic digital marketing agencies and not specific agencies known for one thing. Even if someone wants to start multiple agencies, I would recommend them to start it under different brand names so that the brand is known for one thing clearly and becomes the best at it.

I am focusing on the Deep Marketing agency right now. In the future, I might want to build a performance marketing agency and that agency will have its own CEO. That agency would be PixelTrack.

I tried to find some pure performance marketing-only agencies but did not find many. Most of them also provide other services such as content marketing and social media.

GrowMyAds.com is an agency that only focuses on one part of performance marketing and that’s Google Ads. I love this kind of focus.

Sokrati also focuses only on performance marketing.

One more agency that I came across just for performance marketing is AdLift.com. They are showing up on Google for search terms related to performance marketing. But later I noticed that they provide a bunch of services.

I am not saying if you provide multiple services, you will fail. Many “full-stack” digital marketing companies are successful. I am just saying that a brand name when it is associated in the minds of people with just one thing, it makes the job easy for the agency. Positioning is very important.

4. Newsletters and Community

In Deep Marketing, we set up the initial 30-day email sequence for clients which nurtures the leads into sales-ready prospects. Over a long period, a business amasses a lot of leads and most of them are ignored.

What I am doing here is a newsletter. I’ve had leads who entered my funnel 5 years back, never bought a single thing from me, and converted recently. Long-term nurturing of leads using newsletters is an ongoing process and I wouldn’t put it into the category of email marketing. The email marketing funnel that is built in Deep Marketing has a specific goal: get them to convert so that the cost of acquisition is liquidated.

Long-term nurturing using newsletters doesn’t have a direct ROI. It builds brand recall, improves trust and you end up getting customers without an acquisition cost.

With all the money I spent on ads and generated leads, the ROI is already realized with specific product launches. 95% of the leads will not buy immediately, but they will consume content and “pay” attention if not money. This builds up over time and becomes a strong asset for the business.

I do not know of many agencies who just focus on newsletters and community. However, one agency I came across is Inagiffy.news. And I am happy to see that they only focus on this and didn’t yield to the pressure of offering everything to everyone.

I like their clear headline. Newsletters and communities that last. I have experienced it with my own community. They last really long. By 2027, I would be nurturing my community for a decade.

If you know of any other agency that just focuses on newsletters and communities, leave them in the comment below.

5. Social Media Marketing Agency

The above four categories are enough for a business to run profitably. Though I post sparodically on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram - my best customers do not come from social media.

Social media is good for branding, visibility and building some familiarity with the brand. However, one cannot expect a direct revenue impact with social media.

Social media marketing agency services include:

• Creating content calendar for every platform

  • Reels for Instagram

  • Posts on LinkedIn

  • Twitter Threads

• Building creative content

• Engaging with community on social media

• Creating call to actions to convert social media audience into email subscribers (not that effective in terms of volumes but still important).

I have not been able to identify any agency that only provides social media services. Social media is part of their offer stack.

6. SEO Agency

There are three major top of the funnel categories for digital marketing agencies. Social Media, Performance Marketing and SEO.

There are many agencies who focus only on SEO because it’s complex and hard to execute an SEO strategy.

An SEO agency offers the following services:

• Building backlinks for the home page and internal pages

• Creating SEO optimized top of the funnel content (for example: Top 10 Digital Marketing agencies in Bangalore is a top of the funnel content attracting traffic form search keywords directly).

• On-page and technical SEO to make sure that internal links, site structure and page load speed are at it’s best. Without proper onpage SEO the content and back-linking strategy will not work.

Some examples of SEO only agencies include:

• BoringMarketing.com

• Victorious.com

• High Voltage SEO (hvseo.co)

• SEO Profy

If you look at the services offered by SEO Profy, they are focused only on SEO.

Another SEO agency is Victorious.com (nice domain) who is also focusing just on SEO.

An agency that provides all kind of digital marketing services along with SEO won’t be as good at SEO than an agency that focuses only on SEO. Or at least that’s how the market is going to perceive them.

7. Copywriting Agency

A copywriting agency writes good converting copy for their clients. Copywriting was a skill that was used in long-form newspaper ads.

Today, digital copywriting involves:

• Ad copywriting

• Ad image copy

• Long-form sales copy

• Scripts for video sales letters (VSLs)

• Email copy

The content that you are reading right now is not a copy. It’s just a blog post or a newsletter. The way copy differents from other forms of content is that a copy is designed to convert people into taking a specific action.

You can check our Facebook Ads Mastery Course landing page to understand what a typical long-form sales copy looks like.

I couldn’t come across any copywriting focused agencies apart from The Creative Copywriter.

I will be launching a copywriting agency with Vijay Kumar, our chief copywriter. Our copywriting agency brand will be Convert.in. This agency will be a part of MicroStartup’s portfolio companies. More about that later.

I hope this post gave you clarity about the approach that you have to take if you want to start your own digital marketing agency.

Points to remember:

• Focus on one thing for brand positioning

• Focus on one industry to start with before you expand

• Don’t try to provide all kinds of digital marketing services under one umbrella

Let me know what you think by replying to the email or leaving a comment below.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju