I continue to believe that working in a web agency is a very good way to start in web marketing. This allows you to work on many mandates at the same time and normally with several different types of clients. We learn very quickly. Also, normally, the smaller the agency you work in, the more you can touch on various aspects of marketing.

In my case, I started in a small agency where we were less than twenty people. It allowed me to work with very mature clients, who had been doing business with the agency for many years, and to work with new clients where there was absolutely everything to set up. I was quickly able to reach a lot of web and marketing areas such as Facebook advertising, Google advertising, website creation and optimization, SEO, etc. It was a lot of work, but I don’t regret anything because it was enormously enriching.

Now, for you who have not yet worked in an agency or for those who have worked in other agencies, since each experience is different, here are several learnings that I would like to share with you today and which should you to avoid several beginners mistakes!

1. Establish your digital strategy first of all

During my work in web agency, I had the opportunity to create several complete digital strategies for different clients. It made me realize that this step is so important before starting any initiative. If you don’t know much about digital marketing, I advise you to delegate this task to an expert, but if you ever want to start on your own, here are some questions to guide you in developing your digital strategy:

– What are your objectives and key performance indicators?

– With what channels do you aim to reach them?

– What’s your investment?

– Who are the best customers for your business?

– What territory (s) do you want to cover?

– In which language (s) do you wish to advertise?

– What resources do you need?

– What’s the seasonality of your business and how to adapt your strategy to it?

– What are the steps to follow ?

Don’t hesitate to take inspiration from what other companies in your sector are doing, then use your own data to determine your territory, target clientele, language and platform in a thoughtful way.

2. Make sure you can track your results

Once your strategy is ready and it’s time to put it in place, one step that should not be overlooked is setting up your advertising accounts to be able to track your results. When this is the first time you do this, it’s quite complicated, but fortunately, there are many tutorials on the configuration of each platform on Google and YouTube among others. If you want to be sure it’s done right and avoid a headache, I suggest you ask a specialist to do it for you. Finally, this step will be essential in order to justify your investment in advertising and to be able to continuously improve your initiatives. For example, if you own a consulting company and are unable to measure the number of forms you receive through your advertising, it will be difficult to determine how much money you are ready to invest over the next few months.

3. The importance of having an effective website

By working with various clients, I was able to compare their results and ask myself a lot of questions. While two customers had roughly the same products and the same marketing strategy, one two performed worse than the other. Why? There can be many causes, but one of the reasons that often comes up is their website. The more I work with new clients, the more it confirms my observation. Your website plays a crucial role in the performance of your advertising campaigns. Think about it. Even if you have the best ads in the world, if your users arrive on a slow site, where there is little information and few calls to action, there is a very good chance that they leave it very quick. I understand that developing your website can require a significant investment, especially when you start, but I believe that this investment is very worthwhile when your product is validated. You can start slowly with which requires the least effort and get the most results, and then as you get good results, take the next step. Here are some elements to take into consideration to have a successful site:

– Make sure it’s fast

– Make sure it displays well on all devices (mobile, desktop and tablet)

– Ensure your users perform the desired actions using call-to-action buttons

– Ensure that the order of your sections is optimal

– Ensure that your images and videos are of high quality and that there are no errors in your texts

– Make sure your target customers quickly understand how you can help them from your titles, texts, images, videos, etc.

– Make sure to convince those who are hesitant to go further with your business using elements of trust such as badges, testimonials, logos of customers and / or partners, statistics, etc.

4. Optimize your advertising campaigns frequently

I quickly learned that it’s essential to optimize its advertising campaigns continuously in order to maximize its results. Please don’t just set up everything and let the universe do the rest. You may have unpleasant surprises after just a few weeks. Optimizing your campaigns can be done in many ways, but one of the easy ways is to test your ads continuously. You run several at a time and eliminate the poor performers after a while to make room for new ads. You repeat. Online advertising requires a lot of consistency if you want to keep a tight check on your return on investment. For my part, I like to create dashboards and checklists that I check on a weekly basis, because it helps me stay on track with all the advertising accounts I have to manage.

See my article How to optimize your Google Ads campaigns by clicking here.

5. The importance of advertising visuals

This point resembles point 3, but this time concerns your advertising visuals. These in turn will play a colossal role in your results. Of course, the ideal is to do business with a graphic designer specialized in advertising, but if you have to make your visuals by yourself, here are my tips:

– Put forward 1-2 important elements. For example, if you are offering 20% ​​off, put the 20% in large print or in color.

– Use attention-grabbing images or create animations to capture users’ attention even more. Keep in mind that most users view their newsfeed very quickly.

– Respect your brand image (colors, typography, tone, etc.)

– Avoid putting too much text

– Respect the recommended formats of each platform. A simple Google search will allow you to know the correct format (s) to use according to your current needs.

Finally, I learned a lot of technical things too, which I will not discuss in this article, but rather in small articles that I will eventually publish. I hope it still helped you understand the importance of the different elements mentioned in this article. If you start your advertising with that in mind, I believe that you are on the right track. Don’t hesitate to share your own learnings or to add elements to mine in the comments if you feel like it.