Essential in the digital sector, web marketing agencies are more and more numerous. At the heart of new and constantly emerging technologies, their role is to support companies in their digital strategy, particularly in terms of traffic acquisition. Through an expert mastery of the levers (SEA, display, retargeting, etc.) they are able to offer a wide variety of clients targeted and tailor-made campaigns with a real culture of results!
Between a professional experience with the advertiser or in a web marketing agency, what are the differences? What key skills allow agencies to develop and how does day-to-day work take place? Miguel Marques, CEO and co-founder of the Ad Quality agency tells you everything!
What does a web marketing agency actually do?
The goal of the agency is to direct a maximum number of Internet users to a given website. Traffic is indeed really the sinews of war today, the Holy Grail that all companies want to increase. The consequences: stimulation of sales for an e-commerce site, increase in advertising revenue for an information site (the increase in visits will induce an increase in the number of advertisers) etc.… in short: growth in activity !
How does the agency respond to a client’s issues?
We are in constant contact with the customer! There is a very strong commercial aspect, beyond the technical aspect. We are aware of all the latest trends in terms of digital and SEO : the agency has the ability to understand any problem and find the right solution! We have a real culture of results. Concretely, the work with a client is done in several stages:
develop a strategy with him, according to his positioning and his sector of activity: we determine a budget, objectives, for example on the frequentation of his site, the profiles to be generated thereafter, etc.
determine the most relevant acquisition levers to use: display, Google Ads (ex-Adwords), FacebookAds, Social Media, etc.
Depending on the client, the assignments can be very different: some will be short (only a few months), others will require long-term strategies and may last several years!
Why choose to work in an agency rather than with the advertiser?
Joining a web marketing agency when you come out of school and have little experience means above all having the opportunity to cover different types of customers . That’s the real plus. By working directly for the advertiser, the experience is reduced: objectives and unique problem, angle of view of the restricted sector, etc.
The agency thus allows you to broaden your horizons. We discover various types of business, issues specific to each brand and there are many interlocutors. This is an opportunity to work with large groups such as startups. For example, at Ad Quality , our clients come from a wide variety of backgrounds: BNP, Teddy Smith, Quechua, Rue du Commerce, Voyageprive.com , Aramis, PixMania. You come out with a global vision of what is being done, a business knowledge that will always be useful for the rest of your professional life.
Concretely, what do we learn in an agency?
The resulting advantage is that you develop technical skills on the various acquisition levers. And as it is a discipline in perpetual evolution, we learn every day!
La tendance étant à la spécialisation elles privilégient deux ou trois outils pour s’assurer une meilleure efficacité. For me, Adwords is the nerve of the war in digital because it is the lever that is most positioned in terms of performance: it represents 50% of Google’s turnover! By focusing on it, we don’t scatter and this allows us to strengthen our mastery of this marketing tool. Google and Facebook are careful that we are really at the forefront and they send us their own agency managers to train us! (Besides, one of the two other founders of the agency, Cem, worked for 10 years at Google in charge of the retail division).
Let’s say that in an agency you really learn the basics of the trades which can be a very good entry point to go work with the advertiser afterwards.
What qualities do you develop there?
At the technical level as explained above, we have technical know-how and knowledge of digital marketing tools.
A very good personal organization because you learn to manage a client portfolio. We work on several clients at the same time, with various deadlines and issues. You have to be able to follow up effectively and on time!
It is also essential to have good interpersonal skills. And since, ideally, the idea is to build customer loyalty, we also develop a certain commercial spirit!
We develop a strong team spirit: sharing knowledge is very important and everyone helps each other
We can even talk about an entrepreneurial spirit! Managing projects, discovering business issues, sectors… it also means being at the heart of business dynamism.