What a digital marketing agency actually does

The five jobs

Choosing the channels. Deciding what a business actually needs, which is the decision the situations page is trying to make possible without an agency.

Running each channel. The profile work, the ad account, the pages, the technical fixes. Each is a real discipline with its own weekly routine.

Making the channels share what they learn. The most undervalued job. A month of ads produces a list of the exact phrases that produced enquiries, and that list is the best possible brief for unpaid pages. Agencies that run channels in separate silos never do this, and it is free.

Measuring across all of them. Enquiries attributed to a channel rather than each channel reporting its own success separately. Without it, three channels each claim the same customer.

Saying when to stop. Pausing ads in a quiet month, dropping a channel that has never returned its cost, telling a client the site is the problem. No fee structure rewards this, and it is the clearest signal of an agency worth keeping.

Why full service exists, honestly

Two real reasons and one bad one.

The real ones: the channels genuinely feed each other, and coordinating three suppliers is a job somebody has to do, usually the client, usually badly. One supplier holding all of it removes that overhead and makes the cross-channel learning possible.

The bad one: it is easier to grow revenue per client by selling another channel than by finding another client. That is not dishonest, and it does mean the recommendation to add a channel deserves the same scrutiny as any other proposal.

The alternative

Several specialists, coordinated by you or by one of them. Usually deeper in each discipline and weaker at the joins, and it needs somebody in your business with the time to hold it together. It is the better structure when you have that person and the worse one when you do not.

What to ask

Which named person runs each channel, and whether they speak to each other. If one person runs all four, ask which they are actually good at, because nobody is good at four.

Who publishes this

SEO Agency Dublin, which sells search and paid search rather than the full set, and therefore has an interest in the specialist answer as much as the full-service one.