Behind every successful digital campaign is a great marketing agency. Thanks to the internet and its growing involvement in our lives, internet marketing companies have come a long way in the past decade, and have begun to hone in our on and innovate in the realm of digital marketing.

No matter the agency is a team of dozen people or 100+ professionals, or was founded as a traditional or digital marketing agency, every creative group brings its own aesthetic to its work. Here’s a look at the top 8 internet marketing agencies that house some of the brightest industry experts that work as a team to come up as a digital strategy incorporating marketing, graphic design and website development.

1. Blue Fountain Media

Based in NYC, Blue Fountain Media is a digital agency that was founded with the premise that client results and stunning design go hand in hand. The company holds expertise in offering 360 degree solutions from strategy and design to digital marketing services and development with ROI as their factors for success. The clients of thisinternet marketing services company range from world-renown names like AT&T, P&G, and NFL to emerging companies looking to grow their online presence.

2. New Digital Noise

New Digital Noise was founded with a challenge to create contents which maintains top of mind awareness while encouraging audience to visit Australia. The team of professional digital marketers at New Digital Noise is backed and supported by a young and enthusiastic CEO, Andy Ann, having years of experience in developing some really innovative and stunning marketing campaigns for the clients as well as the viewers. At the beginning, their team rolled out a content strategy plan with an aim at increasing the organic reach rate on Facebook. They took the marketing to the next level as their instilled a sense of crazy, humour ideas and sensational contents into the featuring intriguing animals, buildings, food…etc.

3. FI – Fantasy Interactive

Having years of experience in serving clients with the most interactive and innovative digital marketing campaigns, FI has earned its highly respected reputation as a full service agency by creating beautiful digital experiences clients that include from start-ups to Fortune 500’s and include brands such like Microsoft, Porsche, USA Today, and Wacom. Having its offices across various countries including New York, London, San Francisco, and Stockholm, this multi marketing internet marketing services company not only gets the job done, they help fix the inherent problem. What’s great about Fi is that their marketing campaigns are designed to deliver increased traffic, enhanced brand loyalty, and higher acquisitions at lower rates.

4. Single Grains LLC

There’s a reason that Single Grains has managed to make way in this countdown. The company is an integrated digital & SEO agency, delivering a perfect combination of Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (PPC), and Conversion Optimization services to global clients. Their team of experts is aimed at providing clients with only the highest standard of digital marketing services including SEO, SMO, CRO, and SMM. Having worked with global leaders like Sony, Yahoo, Intuit, and Sales Force, their our reputation precedes them. For Single Grains, communication is the key and the relationships they build with clients ensure the finished project is the precise end result of what they had in mind.

5. 360i (USA)

360i is one of the most trusted digital marketing companies, that is aimed at driving delivering results for the Fortune 500 brands by helping them achieve their desired goals – increased brand awareness & sales. The 360i is a highly strategic creative internet marketing services company that brings together digital specialization – in strategy, social, influencer marketing – with a deep understanding of how your target audience discover brands and share stories across all channels.

6. Huge

Although Huge managed to achieve No. 6 in the countdown of top internet marketing companies around the world, but it’s no less than the above mentioned in terms of providing innovative business strategy, design, marketing and technology services to world’s largest brands and best-known businesses. Huge helps companies become trusted parts of people’s lives by creating products and brands that people love.

7. R/GA

Founded in year 1977, the company is one of the leading marketing agencies, focused on digital marketing and has transformed global companies into brands in the over 30+ years. The company blurs lines between traditional advertising & digital innovation to bring innovative perspectives to challenging problems.

8. Big Spaceship

And lastly, here’s the leader in digital marketing industry. Big Spaceship is a New York based internet marketing services company, having its presence across the globe with clients including from start-ups to leading companies globally. The evidence is in the work, the projects always feel unified on every level and the company keeps on pushing the expectations and capabilities of the web.

Are you finding a creative marketing services company? Check out some of the award-winning creative cases we have done!

On the 26^th September, HSBC Commercial Banking successfully held it’s very first Digital Summit in Hong Kong. Under the heading ‘See Beyond, Grow Beyond’, the event provided an audience of 7000 people with insights into the process of digitalization and future opportunities to businesses. Interestingly, the idea was born 1 year before inside a bootcamp held by NDN’s Digital Marketing Academy.

Equipped with the necessary expertise and experience, leading professionals from the digital technology industry, including Mr. Yat Siu, Founder & CEO, Outblaze, Mr. Robert Burton, Executive Vice President, Li & Fung (Trading) Ltd, CEO and Founder Cherrypicks, Director and Co-founder of Gogovan etc ., shared their knowledge on how to facilitate and streamline work processes with digital technology- a knowledge that the majority of businesses in Hong Kong lack. HSBC’s purpose was to inspire businesses in Hong Kong to recognize the need to adapt to digital mega trends, as this would be the ultimate key for success. Under going a digital transformation will allow them to grow sustainably in the future, driving their businesses forward.

The idea of holding this summit in Hong Kong was born in the course of a full-day boot camp hosted by the NDN Academy. Not only did the boot camp enhance HSBC’s understanding of the digital world and digital behaviour, the workshop helped them to explore new ideas to meet their customers’ needs. Therefore, instead of creating an idea for HSBC, the idea itself was a successive result of the boot camp!

The decision to hold the summit reflects a strategy of thought leadership where the sharing of knowledge enables growth and innovation across businesses. A key finding of the boot camp was that business owners and people of the top management would appreciate quality information content. That made the Digital Summit the ideal solution. It provided information that the target audience could use and spark off a discussion to generate new ideas. This happened immediately after the first session of talks. CEO and Founder of NDN Group Mr. Andy Ann moderated an afterward discussion round of how to leverage technologies for business growth.

Our Academy endeavours to transform every one into a digital expert. Contact us for customized trainings which meet your company needs.

Not using marketing automation today is a crippling setback for businesses.

Marketing automation helps your small business tap right into the power of technology, and systematize lead generation. For business owners continuously strapped for time, cash, and resources, it’s a blessing.

IDC group, in fact, opines that if you don’t use marketing automation, you are already behind the 8 ball. See Source.

Marketing automation is an interplay of a set of processes, systems, and strategic concepts all working together to meet the goals of your business, without you ever lifting a finger (at least, that’s the goal of every business that seeks to automate the marketing function).

Marketing automation is not truly hands-off, “set-it-and-forget-it” endeavor:

• It demands development of systems and processes.
• It requires onboarding of team members, employees, staff, and vendors.
• After it is set into motion, it needs testing, tweaking, and re-deployment.

If you manage to do it right, however, marketing automation truly works wonders for your business. At best, here are four different practical use cases that it has the power to influence:

According to Email Monday, a lead generation survey (2014) reveals that more than 26% of marketers surveyed use marketing software to automate and manage lead generation.

Also, more than 36% at least tried using marketing automation software.

The Aberdeen Group’s State of Marketing Automation report 2014 states that at least 70% of businesses, however, swear by the efficacy of marketing automation and are in the process of using a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).

Marketing automation bring efficiency into your sales processes, aligns marketing efforts with that of sales, and obviates the need to do many tasks manually.

By automating most of the digital marketing channels where manual labor is either enhanced or removed completely, the entire digital marketing engine gets to run smooth, efficiently, and relentlessly.

Blog posts happen on schedule, social media accounts are flush with content, and emails go out automatically based on user-generated triggers.

Since manual input is not necessary and because systems and processes are more reliable with automation software taking over, brand awareness is more pronounced and continuous.

What price do you pay for that?

One of the most critical areas of marketing where automation really shines through is lead nurturing by engagement.

Since not all your customers are ready to pay the moment your ad shows up, email marketing is the best way to keep your leads nurtured.

Why, you ask? Nurtured leads are more sales ready. On average, DemandGen reports that sales opportunities increase by 20% compared to non-nurtured leads.

The more nurtured your leads are, the more “trusted conversions” you are likely to see.

Do you have a social media crisis plan? Most businesses do not and that can lead them vulnerable to big problems. In social media, anything can spread like wildfire and even the smallest misstep can turn into a huge debacle.

It’s always best to be prepared ahead of time and have a plan for how to handle a social media crisis so you can protect your brand’s reputation. Follow our five steps to managing a social media crisis to create your plan.

Before you handle the problem, you have to know that a problem is occurring. It’s critical for your business to use a social media listening tool and constantly monitor your social channels. You can set up your brand name as a keyword so you are notified when anyone is talking about your brand on social media. There are many social listening tools now that make this process automated and easy to monitor. Some of the more popular ones include Hootsuite, Social Mention, and Mention.

The first step you absolutely need to take if a crisis breaks out is to respond on the platform where the crisis began. For example, if a viral tweet is running rampant, respond on Twitter. You can spread your message to your other sites but begin addressing the situation where it began. Silence will only make fans and followers more suspicious. The best course of action is to respond and then try to take the conversation off the public forum. If it is one individual person who is having an issue, provide a contact number or email and find a way to have the conversation offline. This way you can handle the situation without the entire world watching your every response.

Take responsibility of the issue immediately, even if the issue is not your fault. Trying to share the blame will not work in your favor. Accept responsibility, ask forgiveness and be committed to it. Don’t make the situation worse by apologizing for the sake of apologizing and then never fixing the problem because in this day and age, the truth will come out. Transparency is key.

This is when you take back a little bit of control of the situation. Create a website or a page on your website, with all of the information on the crisis. Include your acknowledgement and apologies, key facts, how the company learned of the situation, who responded, how you responded, next steps and contact information. This tactic will help you save you time and allow you to direct anyone with questions to the source instead of answering questions in real time. It also shows you are committed to fixing the problem.

Once you have handled the immediate situation, circle back with your team and use it as a learning moment. Evaluate what worked and what could have been done better. Look at response time, who was involved and determine if you were missing any steps in the process. Document everything and use it to strengthen your social media crisis plan and your social media activities.

Hopefully you will never need to use this social media crisis management plan. But in this day and age where information spreads at the speed of light, it’s essential for your business and your reputation that you are prepared to handle any social media situation.

Are you looking for result-oriented ways to gain popularity on social media? Contact us to schedule a free consultation!

Anyone in business knows the higher up you get in a company, the less it is about the little details and more about the digital strategy. But when it comes to digital marketing, many companies want to hear what the return on investment, how it is helping the business, and why they should continue to pay for it. Your boss cares less about the little details and just wants the big picture. Many times your boss will have plenty of prepared questions they want you to cover in your meeting. These questions include:

Instead of answering this question point blank, give them the stats first including:

• What is our cost per lead?
• How many leads are we generating?

When it comes to these statistics, you are going to want to give them the number of leads your digital marketing efforts are generating and how much you are spending overall. This lets them compare it to their traditional marketing and sales acquisition cost to see if it is better or worse. We suggest you also know these numbers to be able to compare them, in order to come up with a digital marketing budget.

When it comes to your digital marketing efforts this can be a loaded question. It is best to keep it to terms your boss will understand. Using a bunch of acronyms like PPC, SEO, SEM, and SMM can only lead to additional questions. You also want to make sure you are only describing the pieces that are working. You don’t have to include all the modern techniques that have either failed or you are considering trying. If you think it will succeed, your boss will too.

Depending on the type of boss you have, some will care about your digital marketing efforts and others will not. More and more companies are starting to realize the power of digital marketing. But if you have a boss that asks this question, it is best to be prepared with a short simple answer, that is in terms they will understand.

A few example answers could be:

• Digital marketing is a great way to interact and engage with your customers on a new level.
• More and more customers are looking online for information about products and services and we want to make sure that our information is available to them.
• Customers are more likely to purchase from a company that has a current digital presence including social media sites and a blog.

This may seem like a curveball question and that is exactly what your boss is hoping for, to catch you off your game. Many presenters choose to not touch this question because the answer seems obvious to them. But by not having an answer prepared, your boss may feel he can replace you with someone else who can do it for much less, for example, an intern. This is your opportunity to tell him how you are contributing to the bottom line and how your unique knowledge of digital marketing applies directly to your industry. Your boss will appreciate how you tied back your knowledge specifically to your company’s statistics and industry.

As a digital marketing agency, we have prepared many of our clients for this discussion with their boss. We understand that the higher you go in a company; the more focus is put on the bottom line. That is why we make sure our clients have solid, measurable goals that are set for them to be able to take back to their boss and prove the value of digital marketing.

Sound like what you have been looking for? Contact us today! We can get you the measurable results you have been looking for.

Over the last few years, Facebook has made changes to their algorithms making it more difficult for businesses to reach their audience without advertising. (Of course there’s exceptional cases) Luckily Facebook marketing is a powerful form of online advertising and you can see great results from it. If you’re just getting started, follow our 3 simple tips to get more from your Facebook advertising!

With digital advertising, it’s easy to reach a wide audience but you may not see a high return if you are targeting the wrong people. Facebook advertising allows you to create custom audience so that you can target those most likely to become customers.

Facebook also allows for retargeting so you can target individuals who have already shown interest in you and your company. You can create an audience from your email list, from your Facebook fans or individuals who have visited your website. Facebook will even allow you to create lookalike audiences. This allows you to find users who are similar to those who already like your page or subscribe to your emails, which allows you to target individuals who are more likely to become your customer.

Read more: Jumping into Paid Ads? Here’s what you should know

With any banner advertising, the image is going to be extremely important. Facebook is a very image focused platform so you’ll want an image that stands out. Close up images of people smiling and ads with bright colors do very well on Facebook. Avoid blue and white graphics because they could blend in with Facebook’s color scheme.

Great ad copy is also key with digital advertising. You are limited to the amount of words you are able to use so you must be succinct in your message and still grab attention. We recommend being direct with your copy and explaining exactly what someone can gain from your product. Most importantly, have a great call to action. A call to action is one line of text that instructs the reader to do something in response to your ad. Using words that express urgency or excitement like “Get your copy now!” or “Don’t miss out on the sale” to get your users to act.

Read more: 5 Reasons to Hire a Digital Advertising Agency

Facebook is a great choice for online advertising because it has relatively simple buying process. You don’t need advanced marketing knowledge to start using Facebook ads. Facebook is a type of programmatic advertising, which means you can put in your either a daily budget or an overall budget and allow Facebook to manage your ad for you and determine when it will be shown.This way you do not need to be managing your ads 24 hours a day.

You have a few options for choosing how you want to be charged for your Facebook advertising. Similar to traditional banner advertising, you can choose Cost Per Click, where you will be charged for each click your ad receives, or Cost Per Impression, where you will be charged for each impression (or view) your ad receives. What you choose will depend your unique goal and it’s best to identify that goal, whether it’s more Facebook likes, website traffic or actual sales. Facebook has all of these options built into it’s ad platform to make it easier for you to choose your bidding method.

When you first start out, we recommend using a low budget so you can see what works and what doesn’t work for your ads and increase your budget as you start seeing more success. Of course, it takes time and resource to optimize ROI through trial and error. No matter what your goals are, our experienced professionals are always ready to help.

Do you use Facebook advertising? What have you learned from it? We look forward to reading your comments below!

Social media is gigantic, and across all channels, there are more people out there actively engaged on social than the population of China and India combined. According to BrandWatch, there are over 2.3 billion active social media users and more than 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media accounts to help sustain their brand presence.

About a million new active mobile social users are added everyday (that’s about 12 each second).

Facebook now has over 1.65 billion users. Google+, LinkedIn,Twitter and WeChat have 300, 300, 320 and 800 million users each,

Social media is too important for your business to avoid, but it’s still not “media” in the traditional sense.

As Jay Baer of convinceandconvert puts it, “There’s social in social media” and that’s the central theme of strategic use of the social web for business.

First, a few rules:

1. Spamming is not only allowed on social but it also ruins your reputation.

2. Get social on your networks – manage small talk, make small conversations, and always respond to others.

3. Strive to build your network. Really get to know people, on a first name basis.

4. Share content that you publish (on your blog) and others’ content that relates to your business niche.

5. As for generating leads, develop a systematic workflow that helps you make sense of the chaos that social is. For instance, on rare occasions that you promote your product or service, send social traffic to a landing page.

As a business, here’s what social media can help you grow your business and drive sales (and it’s just now how you think it’d work):

On social networks such as Twitter, magic happens when you start using hashtags within your regular updates. Much like an open room full of people, your Tweet updates with hashtags are like public announcements.

Everyone gets to see what you update, and this is what gets your twitter handle (which is also your business name on Twitter) a lot of impressions.

How does that look like, you ask? Here’s a sample:

In the example above, you’ll notice that it’s a relatively new twitter account but you can see how impressions, number of tweets, profile visits, mentions, and followers grow over time just by keeping your social account active.

It’s easy to start putting up a string of updates on social media networks, but that won’t fetch you much. Instead, focus on both updates and also building real relationships. As a business, you’ll have a lot of people already mentioning and talking about your brand.

If not, people would talk about the particular problem you solve with products and services. Get talking, provide help, share insights, and work to get to know them on a first name basis.

Of course, you are on social because you want to generate leads for your business. By boosting your branding and impressions, more people get to know about you thereby increasing your chances for generating leads. Then, the actual relationships you build will also help build your pipeline.

To get even better results, use the 40:30:20:10 principle, and this is how it works:

Out of your daily set of social media updates:

• 40% of the updates should be content that you believe is interesting for your fans and followers.
• 30% of the updates should your own content ( blog posts, infographics, other media)
• 20% of the updates can include engagement, small conversations, and more.
• Only 10% of your total updates should be directly related to generating leads, ads, and more.

Social media demands a lot from you and can only deliver if you keep at it for long, without expecting much from it – that’s the nature of the beast.

How do you use social media for your business? Tell us all about it.