Digital Marketing Services

You’ve probably heard this before, but … it depends. As a very rough guide, you can expect to see your marketing strategy yielding positive signals within 3 months. (‘Positive signals’ can, depending on your industry, range from strong, consistent revenue to stable increases in sales pipeline.)

Factors that affect that timeframe include:

• your industry (industry forces will shape your sales more than marketing ever will)
• your budget (if your competitors are investing 3 times more than you, don’t be surprised if you don’t get traction)
• your output (not approving content, ad copy, or web pages quickly means results will take longer)
• your business (some organisations have deep marketing holes they need to dig themselves out of)
• the landscape (new regulation, changes to algorithms, emergent technology, and other external factors can all impact your marketing).

If you want to see results as quickly as possible, land the basics (like having a clean CRM), invest 10 to 20% of your annual revenue in marketing, keep your strategy tight and focused, and work with your marketing team to get things done efficiently.

We know digital marketing has its share of bad actors. Many of our clients have come to us precisely because we are different. In our experience, agencies can be ‘bad’ for a few different reasons.

1. The agency is barely functioning because their margins are too low. They can’t afford to deliver quality marketing, so they cut corners and focus on getting things out as quickly as possible. Their clients, naturally, aren’t happy and want revisions – which the agency will often have excluded from its scope of work. The only way that sort of agency survives is by constantly luring in new clients with big promises and cheap packages.
2. The agency doesn’t know what they’re doing. This often happens when a founder starts a business around one service (like graphic design or web development), then tries to scale into a full-service firm without having any knowledge or experience in those areas (or hiring people who do). The result is marketing that’s good in some areas and mediocre to downright bad in others.
3. The agency doesn’t care about you. This scenario typically occurs at larger agencies with multiple layers of account management. The marketers working on your account have no understanding of your business, the account managers have huge portfolios of clients that they flit between, and the agency’s leadership is focused on new sales, not client satisfaction.
4. The agency is fine – but they’re not good enough to solve complex marketing problems. They can deliver results by plucking low-hanging fruit, but, as soon as they’re asked to do something like increase market penetration in a saturated vertical, they’re just not competent enough.
5. Sometimes, it’s not the agency’s fault. Even the best marketers in the world can’t get results with a shoestring budget, a lack of information about brand and offerings, or a client that won’t come to the table. Ignoring advice, forcing every deliverable through a dozen unnecessary revisions, and not responding to messages for weeks are all good ways to kill your marketing success. (Of course, if you’re bothering to read this FAQ, you’re probably not that type of client.)

We’ve built iOnline so that none of those categories apply to us.

1. We charge reasonable rates that both our clients and us can afford. We aren’t the cheapest agency in Australia, but we aren’t the most expensive either. That means we can pay talented people who are experts in their domains – and not flinch when a revision request comes through.
2. We started as a web development agency, but we’ve scaled deliberately over more than 24 years. We’re now a full-service agency with in-house specialists in every service that we deliver.
3. We care about all our clients. Our leadership team is personally involved in every project, and you’ll never be ignored or de-prioritised in favour of bigger or newer accounts.
4. We’ve cut our teeth on solving hard marketing problems (and we’ve done it for businesses of all sizes). That includes everything from developing custom software that saves thousands of hours a year to quadrupling website leads for small service businesses.
5. If we feel like we aren’t a right fit for your business, we’ll be upfront with you. We have a strong base of existing clients, and we’d prefer to part ways early than invest in a relationship that isn’t going to work.

Digital promotional channels your brand could work with include:

• organic search (via search engines like Google, YouTube and ChatGPT)
• paid search (via search engines like Google, YouTube and Amazon)
• organic social (via platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram)
• paid social (via platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram)
• email
• display ads (via networks like Google Display Network)
• third-party marketplaces (like Amazon)
• third-party directories (like Yellow Pages)
• digital PR
• paid influencer/thought leader partnerships
• RSS feeds
• native ads and sponsored content
• partnership and affiliate marketing.

Keep in mind that your website is not a channel. It’s an asset. If your site didn’t have an RSS feed, wasn’t crawlable by search engines, and wasn’t promoted via other channels, your ideal customers would never find it. Your website is like a storefront. Channels are the roads that link your storefront to your customers.

The 95:5 rule is a heuristic that you can use to calculate how many buyers are ready to buy at any one time. It was developed by Professor John Dawes of the University of South Australia. The name ‘95:5’ came from research that showed, for some B2B markets, just 5% of buyers are in market in quarter – and 95% are not. For example, if 1.5 million businesses in Australia need IT solutions, only 75,000 would be looking for a new IT provider each quarter. In other words, 95% are not looking to buy.

The 95:5 rule isn’t literal, though; the actual percentage varies across categories. You can work out your category’s percentage of in-market buyers at a given time by surveying your ideal customers. Ask them how frequently they buy your offerings and/or switch providers. For example, companies might technically ‘purchase’ an IT provider every 12 months by renewing their annual contract – but they might only switch providers once every 3 years on average. That means only 8% of buyers would be in-market for IT services every quarter (or 2.7% per month, or 0.7% per week).  

The basic takeaway: the vast majority of buyers are not looking to buy right now. That means, as a business leader, your marketing focus should be weighted towards educating out-of-market buyers and building brand awareness – not just harvesting the ~5% demand that all your competitors are fighting over. Because of the way buyers make purchase decisions, you’re more likely to be selected as a vendor if they’re already aware of you when they’re ready to buy.

Digital marketing is exactly what it sounds like: marketing that takes place in digital environments. Specifically, that means:

• creating messaging for your products/services, including category creation
• providing pricing and discounting advice
• identifying best-fit digital marketing channels such as organic search (SEO), paid search (like Google Ads), organic and paid social (like LinkedIn and Facebook), email, influencers and thought leaders, e-commerce platforms (like Amazon), and third-party media
• educating your ideal customers about the problem you solve, your product/service category, and your brand’s products/services using the channels previously identified.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. Some people think marketing is the ‘arts and crafts’ department, that all digital marketing agencies do is create websites and pretty graphics. Statements like that couldn’t be further from the truth. Marketing is an essential part of literally every business (without some form of marketing, you won’t have any revenue) – and, in a digitally native world, digital marketing is especially crucial.