Looking at all the agency types available, you might find it daunting to decide on the marketing agency type for your eCommerce business. Should you go for an all-inclusive full-service agency that promises to meet all your marketing needs, an agency calling itself an “eCommerce marketing agency”, or perhaps pick and choose creative agencies as you need them? Indeed, does being an eCommerce business even affect your choice of marketing agency types, or are they all the same regardless of your business niche?
In this post, we are going to examine the factors you should consider when searching for the best marketing agency (or agencies) for your eCommerce company’s needs. Remember, as we wrote about in our post on Creative Agency Strategies to Consider as a Point of Difference from Your Competitors, that you will want to find agencies that fit well with your business’s core values and ethos. No matter how good an agency may be, it will be of little value if you can’t build a strong working relationship with it.
Marketing Agency Type for eCommerce Businesses. What Should I Pick?:
Specialist eCommerce Marketing Agencies
eCommerce firms can opt to work with virtually any agency type, depending on their specific needs. However, some agencies have set themselves up as specialist eCommerce agencies. They know the ins and outs of promoting online stores and understand the strategies and tactics needed to move them most speedily toward their short and long-term goals.
These agencies offer many similar services as other agencies, just fully focused on the online shopping sector. They typically have staff with in-depth knowledge of eCommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, alongside specialist marketing channels like Amazon Marketing and paid search channels. That doesn’t mean that they forsake traditional marketing channels, however, as some predominantly eCommerce companies advertise on television and radio.
You will often find specialist eCommerce marketing agencies offering a full suite of eCommerce services. These include:
- eCommerce Website Development
- Paid Media
- SEO
- Content Marketing
- Creative Services
- Branding
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Analytics and Reporting
Marketing Agency Types Suitable for eCommerce Businesses
Whether you opt for specialist eCommerce marketing agencies or are happy to work with agencies targeting a wider range of business types, you have many options.
Full-Service Agencies
As their name suggests, full-service agencies aim to be a one-stop-shop for their clients (eCommerce or otherwise). You come to them to create marketing campaigns for you of all types covering all channels.
It’s unlikely that most eCommerce businesses will use every service offered by their full-service agency, but they will probably be able to gain assistance with whatever type of marketing they want to engage in, without having to search for another agency.
For example, Disruptive Advertising is a full-service agency catering to businesses of all sizes (as long as they can sustain a campaign budget of at least $5,000). They don’t offer everything (they are firmly digital) but provide a wide range of services relevant to eCommerce businesses like SEO, Google Ads, social media ads, YouTube ads, Amazon, Google Shopping, motion ads, landing pages, email management, lead nurture, creative strategy, and site optimization. They provide a full-funnel marketing strategy leveraging the best platforms and services to help clients solve their biggest challenges and achieve their goals.
One of Disruptive’s customers was Wandrd who approached Disruptive because they were seeing stagnant growth, ads were not resonating with their brand, and it was unclear if they were showing to the right audience.
Disruptive entered a head-to-head competition against their then-current agency to prove their tactics. They introduced a Facebook strategy that resonated better with Wandrd’s target market and used an ads strategy that encouraged conversions, not just clicks. This increased ROI from 2.6x to 6.2x and monthly revenue increases by up to +295%, as seen in the results below.
On another occasion, Wandrd discovered a problem with their eCommerce store. The banner section of the shop page highlighted one product, while other products featured below the fold weren’t getting as much attention or sales.
Disruptive believed this was affecting overall purchases. After exploring several options, the agency chose to replace the one product featured in the banner section with value props. This resulted in immediate success with a 13.2% lift in cart visits. As shown below, the client also saw a 27% lift in purchases.
While other full-service agencies don’t necessarily present the same combination of services as Disruptive Advertising, they all try to offer sufficient analogous services so their clients don’t have to look elsewhere for future campaigns.
Specialist Types of Marketing Agencies Suitable for eCommerce Businesses
Often, you don’t need to work with an agency that offers a wide range of services. You may contract an agency at a time, focusing on one or two specific types of marketing.
1. Branding Agencies
Sherry Jacobi, CEO and Creative Director of Studiothink, succinctly defines the role of a branding agency: “A branding agency communicates your uniqueness, your voice, and your values in a way that is visually appealing. They create your presence in the marketplace by developing a brand that showcases your identity and influences consumers.” They create how your unique corporate values and identity are presented to the world.
Do eCommerce companies need to work with a branding agency? A clear brand helps eCommerce businesses establish a distinct identity and mission statement, helping them connect with their target audience and create a consistent customer experience.
Think about the problems eCommerce businesses face when selling on Amazon. They are trying to sell their products in a marketplace owned by a massive competitor, often alongside multiple smaller sellers. Often, there is very little to distinguish one competitor from another. By having a clear brand you can establish legitimacy in the minds of consumers.
Think about the advantages swing set seller, Backyard Discovery, has when selling their product on Amazon, compared to a generic swing set seller. They have built and established a clear brand, and thanks to their agency’s assistance created an attractive Amazon Store.
Source: amazon.com
Duck.Design has a mission to make graphic design fast, simple, and affordable; the way it should be. As their name suggests, their services are predominantly graphic-related. They include brand identity design services. Their branding services include creating some combination of a new logo and visual identity, a style guide, a presentation template, letterheads, business cards, desktop web design, app design, and digital graphics.
One of Duck.Design’s client was Prog School, which operates ProgKids. This teaches programming in the Minecraft world. This online school developed a special platform that allows kids to learn while playing. Duck.Design’s brief was to develop a new identity for the brand. The agency conducted research and analyzed the target audience, aiming to establish trust among teenagers (who loved playing games) and their parents (who didn’t want their offspring to waste their time).
Duck.Design combined these two moods within a graphic logo. They also created two mascots - Proggy – a cute AI-based robot helper for children – and Cat the Developer, and redesigned the program’s website.
2. Web Design and Shopify Agencies
A decent website and eCommerce store is essential for nearly all eCommerce companies. The only exception would be those operating wholly from third-party platforms like Amazon or social commerce platforms like TikTok Marketplace.
Many of these websites are based on Shopify, with there now being 4.8 million online stores using the platform. In addition, there are nearly 50,000 Shopify Plus stores worldwide. Shopify currently accounts for 25% of websites using eCommerce technologies, followed by WooCommerce (20%), Wix Stores (13%), Squarespace (11%), and Ecwid (6%).
Unsurprisingly, many marketing agencies now specialize in creating (and maintaining) these types of websites.
One such agency is Huemor, which specializes in designing and developing Shopify and WordPress websites, along with providing ongoing website support. One of Huemor’s clients was Retrofete, a fashion brand. Retrofete’s previous website had done a great job helping them but was now falling short of their customer's expectations and limiting their ability to grow.
Retrofete needed to deliver a website experience with a luxury editorial feel that excited customers. Like most eCommerce brands, mobile dominates Retrofete’s customer base, so Huemor made mobile the priority, ensuring that the browsing and shopping experience was effortless.
Allowing the customer to quickly find their perfect dress became the agency’s main obsession. This led to the most flexible category page Huemor has created, with options to change the number of columns, products per page, and several dozen detailed filters. Below are images showcasing the highly adaptable category page, illustrating the variety of customization options available to users.
Source: retrofete.com
3. Amazon and Other Marketplace Marketing Agencies
If you’re an eCommerce firm, you may have a presence on platforms like Amazon, eBay, or Walmart Marketplace. If that describes you, you could benefit from working with an agency specializing in eCommerce platforms.
Source: walmart.com
They will have strategies tailor-made to the relevant platform, helping sellers increase their sales using targeted ads, optimized listings, and specialized SEO knowledge.
Ad creation and campaign management are an obvious starting point. You can create your own ads on these eCommerce platforms (our Ultimate Amazon PPC Strategies and Best Practices shows you how to do so on the world’s largest online marketplace), but that takes time and resources you may not wish to devote to marketing.
Specialist eCommerce agencies know the ins and outs of PPC advertising and have specialist bidding strategies and other techniques to create ads that will be visible and enticing to your preferred customer base. They understand the algorithms and utilize customized tools and strategies to boost your product's visibility and increase sales.
They possess tools that can determine the most suitable keywords on which to bid for ads, ensuring that you aren’t paying for ads targeting irrelevant people on Amazon, Walmart, or whatever platform you use. They also understand the intricacies of options like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Display Ads on Amazon (and their equivalent on other eCommerce platforms), ensuring you can promote your products where the “right” people are looking.
The specialist agencies don’t just create campaigns for you and then sit back. They continue to monitor ad performance, analyze your data, and then make strategic adjustments to ensure your campaigns remain optimized.
Many Amazon and other eCommerce marketplace marketing agencies can also take charge of your stock management on these platforms, taking charge of your stock logistics. They ensure your products are always in stock and ready to ship to customers. They often monitor your product listings and customer reviews, handle customer inquiries, and manage returns.
An example of a specialist Amazon agency is Sellozo. You can contract them to manage all your PPC advertising. Their US-based Amazon experts use an in-house AI tool, to drive their clients’ advertising strategy and business growth. They offer comprehensive campaign structure and strategy support to optimize campaigns and ensure maximum performance.
A dedicated account manager manages each client’s Amazon ad scheduling. Their cutting-edge technology incorporates dayparting strategies and hourly ACOS data analysis. They believe in optimizing performance with campaign restructuring and A/B testing for higher ROI.
Sellozo recently highlighted three strategies they use to lower their clients’ Amazon ACOS:
- Carry out the "wasted spend check" - this involves identifying keywords that have not converted but have received a significant number of clicks. You should remove them from your campaigns to reduce ACOS.
- Take the “Anchor SKU Approach” - Identify the best-performing SKUs that meet your ACOS goals, and pause advertising for lower-performing SKUs. You then focus your advertising budget on the top-performing SKUs.
- Run “Hero Campaigns” - Identify your top-performing keywords that meet your ACOS goals and move them to their own campaign. Allocate a budget where you can spend freely on this campaign while maintaining profitability. You then place lower-performing keywords in a separate campaign for testing, with a smaller budget
Another specialist Amazon agency is Nuanced Media. One of their clients is Seat Covers Unlimited, which manufactures seat covers, dash covers, and other vehicle accessories for virtually every make and model. This makes for considerable variety in their range - indeed they had more than 200,000 products (800,000 SKUs) listed on Amazon when they approached Nuanced Media to help their marketing.
However, having such a large catalog can become unwieldy and daunting for potential customers. Inconsistent branding and use of sub-brands led to a confusing customer experience and hurt brand recognition.
Nuanced Media recommended reducing the product catalog by eliminating SKUs that hadn’t received a sale in the past year. They then Implemented a product feed application for consistent content across all eCommerce platforms. The agency recommended that Seat Covers Unlimited establish brand consistency and eliminate the use of sub-brands. They also added creative and descriptive images to set the client apart from similar products.
The campaign resulted in the client’s listing giving the #1 organic search result for “Truck seat covers”. They also saw a 269% increase in Ad Sales, a 39% increase in total revenue, and they doubled their conversion rate from 6% to 12% in under 6 months.
Source: amazon.com
eCommerce agencies can also help clients wanting to sell on other platforms. For example, UK agency, Marketplace Amp, assists clients selling on eBay and Ocado, in addition to its Amazon offerings. They can assist you with advertising, content strategy, SEO optimization, and strategy on each platform. Plant Theatre appointed Marketplace Amp to help take a share of the lucrative UK DIY and gardening market.
Source: marketplaceamp.com
Marketplace Amp took charge of eBay and Amazon sales. This led to increasing new-to-brand sales by 463.08% from the start of the gifting period to the end of the last quarter in 2020.
4. Social Media Agencies
Many agencies specialize in social media marketing. Typical services offered by social media marketing agencies include social media management, content creation, copywriting for social posts, paid social advertising, and video production for use on social media.
For example, SociallyIn offers influencer marketing, social media solutions, social media advertising, and more. One of SociallyIn’s clients was BEARPAW, a brand of footwear, apparel, and accessories. They wanted SociallyIn to help improve their social advertising efforts.
SociallyIn ran a catalog retargeting campaign through Facebook and Instagram to get interested purchasers to either complete a purchase or upsell an item during the winter season. They were able to achieve an ROAS of 6.23, turning $41,339.95 in ad spend into $257,636.75 in sales. The campaign led to 58,819 website clicks, as shown in the results below.
5. Social Commerce Agencies
Nowadays, some businesses sell directly on social media - social commerce. Brands can sell through their own Facebook page, X (Twitter) feed, or TikTok Shop without setting up another separate website. Social commerce allows product browsing, adding to cart, and checkout processing to occur within the social platform. It's a convenient, interactive, and all-in-one experience for consumers.
Agencies are now realizing the value of social commerce to their clients and adding the channel to their offerings.
The Snow Agency is one of the first agencies to recognize the power of TikTok Shop. There are four ways a brand can sell on TikTok Shop:
- LIVE Shopping - live promotions designed to increase sales and build your community
- Shoppable Videos - can send potential customers to your TikTok shop with embedded shop codes in your content
- Shop Page - an in-app catalog, that allows your audience to check out from within the TikTok app
- Marketplace - a dedicated TikTok marketplace, connected to your brand’s profile, where you can highlight products and promotions
The Snow Agency’s TikTok Shop solutions include setting up the ship, Shopify integration, Shopping Center optimization, creative brief development, LIVE shopping ads, video shopping ads, and reporting.
Source: thesnowagency.com
Stellar cultivated a brand new social audience for Sage Studios on TikTok to engage customers, demonstrate products, and generate D2C sales. They aimed to increase brand awareness, attract new customers, and deliver a fulfilling virtual experience to give customers a reason to return.
Stellar’s experts built a TikTok audience for Sage Studios through a series of captivating posts from machine tutorials and hacks to how-to guides and coffee recipes. Within three months, the account had one million+ views and 55,000+ likes. They then launched Sage Studios TikTok Shop, curating in-feed videos, influencer collaborations, and exclusive promotions.
Over Black Friday 2022, Stellar helped Sage Appliances deliver the biggest single brand live-selling event in TikTok EU history, generating over 300,000 product views and a click-through rate of 18.7%.
6. Influencer eCommerce Marketing Agencies
Although, as we’ve seen above, some agencies can build your social audience from scratch, it can often be easier to work with influencers who already have an audience of your target customers.
Even some eCommerce website platforms, like Shopify, have got in on the act, with their Shopify Collabs, where creators can customize their creator application page to reflect their unique brand and appeal to potential collaborators. This makes it easier for influence marketing agencies to find suitable influencers and creators for campaigns they run on behalf of clients.
Social media influencers already have an audience. Some have massive diverse audiences, while others have smaller, specialized, niche audiences. The secret to successful influencer marketing is finding influencers whose content is read, listened to, or watched by your target customers. It can be challenging to find such influencers yourself, but influencer marketing agencies are experts at discovering the right collaborators and coordinating partnerships with them.
Bloom Nutrition is an example of a brand that discovered the value of influencer marketing, thanks to its partnership with influencer agency, Ubiquitous. Bloom discovered that they were to feature on Amazon’s home page, so they wanted to take advantage of this increased visibility. They felt they could do this by engaging with a suitable high-profile influencer.
Luckily, Ubiquitous had the ideal influencer, Gabbie Eagen (bbyegan_), in their ranks. She was fun, exuberant, and relatable, and her content would resonate with Bloom’s target audience (women ages 18-35 in the U.S.).
@bbyegan_
Ubiquitous suggested Eagen and Bloom debut with “integrated videos,” where influencers create content integrating the product rather than creating around it. Her content was natural, relatable, and intriguing.
The day Amazon put Bloom on its front page, Bloom ran dozens of influencer activations (including Eagen’s). This push helped Bloom become the #1 Best Seller on Amazon Launchpad.
Eagen’s videos didn’t spend more than 20 seconds showcasing Bloom’s products. However, they proved that natural promotion is the best promotion. There is no need to force your message onto your audience to the point where they cease to listen.
7. Paid Ad Agencies
Paid Ad agencies predominantly offer PPC marketing services, for example through Google Ads or specialist eCommerce ads on marketplaces like Amazon. These can be particularly helpful in generating traffic to your store (or online marketplace listings) as you build up organic traffic. They can drive large amounts of traffic quickly.
One of Disruptive’s customers was Enso Rings. They wanted to quickly increase conversion volume and revenue without sacrificing profitability but realized they had to start growing the top of the funnel to increase brand awareness and generate demand for their product. Disruptive Advertising took on the challenge of targeting buyers at each stage of the customer journey with personalized ads and a tailored user experience.
First, they built audience-specific campaigns for display & remarketing and new search campaigns focused on their ideal target demographics. They then implemented product-specific bidding and search query targeting. Finally, they expanded the audience strategy across networks to target Enso Rings’ core demographics, focusing on 16 different buyer personas.
Disruptive quickly identified which personas and audiences stood out and maximized their efforts for these areas. Their ad creative was personalized and tailored to the audience being targeted. Below, you can view examples of these personalized ad creatives, specifically tailored to engage distinct buyer personas, as implemented by Disruptive Advertising.
8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Agencies
Although paid advertising can greatly increase the visibility of your eCommerce store, it would soon become prohibitively expensive if that was the only way you could generate traffic. You are also going to want to appear in potential customers’ organic searches. You might think that the “big guys” like Amazon have all the high spots in Google, but things aren’t as simple as that.
With excellent technical search engine optimization (SEO) you ensure that your store can appear near the top of many relevant organic searches. eCommerce SEO agencies focus on generating traffic to your website through organic means.
Technical SEO involves optimizing your website’s structure, code, and other technical aspects to affect its visibility on search engines like Google. In addition, SEO agencies can help you identify and target keywords and phrases that shoppers use to find your products.
SmartSites is a digital marketing agency based in Paramus, New Jersey. They consider SEO to be an important service, helping brands find new clients organically and grow a foundation for tomorrow. One of their clients is Cut Sheet Labels Marketing. Their easy-to-use website interface allows clients to customize labels to their specifications at significantly discounted prices.
Cut Sheet Labels provides online quotes and direct mailing. They gave SmartSites a double challenge: to design and build one of the first-ever Magento 2.0 sites, and to develop a creative SEO strategy for unique labels and categories. The result of their work was a 560% increase in organic search traffic and a 187% increase in page visits, as shown below.
9. Email Marketing Agencies
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of online marketing, and it is just as relevant for eCommerce stores today as any other business type. You can use email to share your content as well as deliver promotions to your customers. You can advertise new products, hold contests, and offer coupons.
You can use email in a range of ways, including monthly newsletters and automated drip campaigns. However, you must first create a healthy email list of recipients happy to receive your emails. Your eCommerce email marketing agency can work on your list hygiene to keep it relevant and valuable.
WEBITMD had a client, Mystic Journey Crystals, a high-end crystal shop that wanted to increase eCommerce checkouts and drive repeat sales with email marketing. The agency segmented its contacts into three lists based on previous purchase behavior and delivered two custom emails each month that drove sales from the very first email sent. The campaign resulted in an ROI of 175%, an average open rate of 34%, and an average CTR of 12%, as seen in the results below.
10. Content Marketing Agencies
Content marketing can be a very subtle way to build interest in your eCommerce store. You aren’t trying to blatantly sell products with your content, but you’re building up brand recognition for when your readers/viewers eventually need to buy the types of products you sell.
Content marketing agencies specialize in creating a wide range of content for your eCommerce website or associated social accounts. For example, they may operate a blog or YouTube channel on your behalf. Search engines love quality content, so content marketing agencies often overlap with SEO agencies.
Most importantly, Content marketing agencies fully recognize the potential of strategic content creation in enhancing brand visibility and engagement. Highlighting the effectiveness of this approach, our statistics show that companies with a blog on their website generate 67% more leads than those without one. By potentially initiating and managing a blog for your eCommerce store, these agencies aim to harness these benefits.
Ideally, you want your content marketing agency to help ensure you come across as an authority in your industry.
Siege Media took Shutterfly’s blog and grew it to generate $1,700,000 in traffic value. Shutterfly turns photos into photo books, meaningful cards, unique photo gifts, home decor, and more. Shutterfly launched a new blog under their “Ideas” subfolder but lacked the internal resources to get it up and running. They had the goal of building top- and middle-funnel awareness for their invitations, photo books, and other product lines spanning weddings, graduations, babies, and the holiday season.
The agency, using SEO optimization, created interactives, videos, product photography, blog articles, and more. They ran the content strategy and creation from end to end while actively scaling up content for Shutterfly, ultimately creating over 500 unique pieces over three years to generate over 2,500,000 monthly visits.
Source: shutterfly.com
11. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Agencies
Some agencies focus on maximizing your website's ROI using conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies. CRO is the process of increasing the percentage of users or website visitors who complete a specific action to increase the number of leads you generate.
You can improve your CRO through techniques like improving your homepage and pricing pages, including calls-to-action (CTAs) on your blogs, optimizing your landing pages, and carrying out A/B testing to determine the effectiveness of your website and eCommerce store.
Similarly, eCommerce agencies can optimize their clients’ listings on marketplaces such as Amazon, to ensure you stand out from every other Amazon seller, even if you’re selling a relatively generic product.
Nuanced Media has been perfecting its clients’ Amazon listings since 2010. One of their clients is Seat Covers Unlimited, which has more than 200,000 seat covers, dash covers, and other vehicle accessories for every make and model listed on Amazon. Seat Covers Unlimited enlisted Nuanced Media’s expertise to organize its catalog and identity and optimize its top sales opportunities.
The agency streamlined this enormous catalog (originally over 800,000 SKUs) to make it manageable, helping their fulfillment team with orders, giving them a better understanding of what their top-performing products truly were, and allowing them to use crucial 3rd party apps to boost the performance of their remaining listings.
This resulted in the client ranking #1 in the organic search for “truck seat covers”, a 269% increase in ad sales, a 39% increase in total revenue, and a doubling of the conversion rate from 6% to 12% in under 6 months, as shown below.
Wrapping Things Up
As you can see, there are multiple marketing agency types suitable for eCommerce businesses. Some agencies promote themselves as eCommerce marketing agencies, and these focus on those marketing services they feel are most relevant to eCommerce businesses. However, most marketing agencies will likely provide services to those selling online in some capacity.
The big decision you must make is whether to use one agency for all your marketing needs or to pick and choose agencies whenever you need assistance creating campaigns on a new channel. While only a small number of agencies call themselves “full service,” the reality is that many offer some mix of services that they believe are most compatible with their staff’s skills and their client’s needs, so it may be worth approaching any existing agency with whom you’ve built a good working relationship to see if they can meet your new marketing wishes.
