The 2025 Guide to Digital Marketing Services

Digital marketing is a lifeline for businesses, connecting them with their audience online where most people spend their time. Hiring a Houston digital marketing agency like 71Three can help your business leverage powerful digital marketing strategies to grow, profit, and succeed in the real world.

Short on time? TLDR:

Digital marketing services have evolved in line with the explosion of online technology in the past 20 years. The days when you could just write a paragraph for a small website and get on the first page of Google easily are long gone. 

The top spot on Google might still be the ultimate goal for many businesses, but there are plenty of profitable prizes to collect along the way with a highly targeted digital marketing strategy across multiple channels: 

• Make Use of Tools
  The strategies behind digital marketing aren’t complex, but optimizing them requires specialist tools, such as Ahrefs for SEO. You could give this a try on your own, but using these tools to their full potential hinges on experience and knowledge.
  
  
• Always Be Connecting
  We are living in a strange time where AI and robotics are starting to come alive (I see you, Optimus). Making genuine connections with real people is vital, as is showing your authenticity to an audience tired of perfection and gloss.
  
  
• Digital Marketing Is a Toolbox
  Businesses need to use multiple strategies to succeed. PPC and SEO complement each other for better visibility, while social media marketing and online reputation management help you connect with your audience and quickly stamp out small fires from unhappy customers. 
  
  
• Cost-Effective Solutions
  Digital marketing requires a full team to execute, and that expertise isn’t always affordable to SMBs. Partnering with agencies like 71Three gives you a full team without the expense of hiring, onboarding, and managing payroll.

Digital Marketing Is the Smart Route to Online Growth in 2025

It has never been easier – or harder! – to use digital marketing services to reach out to your target audience as it is now. Easier, because there are more powerful tools than ever to help you achieve your goals…

…Yet harder, because those tools are often complex and require expertise to use to their full potential.

So I wanted to write this comprehensive guide to help you in the approaching new year! Today, what matters is finding your audience and making a genuine connection. The best way to achieve this is by analyzing the data from your marketing efforts, learning from failures, and continuously optimizing while building on your successes. 

71Three is a Houston digital marketing agency that helps businesses like yours achieve their online marketing goals. Our team has the services, the tools, and the know-how to improve your bottom line.

We’re Not Your Average Houston Digital Marketing Agency

Some feel that the robots are taking over and squeezing humans out of the equation. 

71Three goes the opposite way. We focus on the people behind the screens with a highly personalized, human-centric approach that informs everything we do. Our clients are our partners, not just another cog in an optimized, automated wheel of operations. 

We understand that every business has its own unique challenges, as do the customers and clients that they serve. Our comprehensive, yet customizable services enable us to tailor our digital marketing to solve those problems, leading to accelerated business growth.

In other words, we’re not the big city agency that hands over the hard work to an intern after telling you that we only offer one package, “because that’s the package that works”.

We’re your partner, which means the health of your business is as important to us as ours. We work with you to make sure that our plans fit your business and its needs. 

Does AI Work for Digital Marketing Services?

Let’s address the big elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. It has been one of the biggest buzzwords around the world for over two years now. Many people have asked us if we use AI in our digital marketing efforts.

In one word? No. In three words? No way, Jose.

It’s not that we resist technology. If anything, we embrace it!

We love technology and we use it every day to help our clients get results. Without it, we wouldn’t even be in business! 

We simply don’t believe that generative AI – that’s tools like ChatGPT – is ready for professional work yet. We say that after extensively testing all of the tools out there. If something can help us deliver better results to our clients, we’re all for it.

But right now, we can’t recommend it. 

We want our writing to be rich with emotional connection and human fire. We don’t want to serve up robotic copy that sounds like everyone else. We want your business to jump out of the screen and get real attention. 

We believe that’s what you want for your digital marketing efforts, too. 

As AI takes over more and more human spaces, it is the human voice that will stand out and connect with audiences increasingly hungry for a human connection. 

Instead of focusing on AI, we focus on your brand voice and brand identity. We focus on the humans behind your brand – and the humans you want to attract to your brand.

We do this with engaging content that tells stories written by human copywriters. Our copywriters learn everything there is to know about your business and target audience, to produce unique content that feels real, not artificial. 

A lot of things that people call AI aren’t actually AI. They are just good old-fashioned computer algorithms and database magic. If you ask us about that kind of mislabeled AI, then we use it all the time. 

We use these tools because they work. They help us to get better results, faster. Many of these tools, like Semrush, another SEO tool, are the gold standard for professionals in the marketing space. 

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. This use of technology means that we have more time to focus on strategizing, creating, and building exceptional business experiences for you and your customers. 

Our focus is on how we can deliver the results that you are looking for. We strive for excellence in an era where mediocrity is often rewarded. Why follow the AI crowds when you can achieve human greatness? After all… it was in fact, humans, that went to the moon. Or did they?

Digital Marketing Services Are Key to Business Growth in 2024

Our clients can tell you how great we are as a digital marketing agency. But being a data-driven team, we’d rather convince you by showing you hard stats instead. 

Search Engine Optimization Statistics

SEO is what makes a business website a necessity in the 21^st century. Your website is a digital storefront on a road full of traffic being navigated by Google’s virtual GPS. SEO pushes your website to the top of Google’s search results, driving that traffic your way. 

It’s hard to understate just how important Google and other search engines are today, even for local businesses who might think that their physical presence is enough. The statistics say it all:

93% of all web traffic comes through search engines, with 46% of these searches looking for local business information. The best news? 30% of those specific local searches result in a purchase. 

Google serves over 255 billion searches a month, and 95% of that traffic will make a beeline for the first search result. This is true for all businesses, whether you’re a small local business or an internationally known household brand.

SEO might not be the newest or flashiest digital marketing strategy in town, but it is the biggest – and most competitive!

Pay Per Click Marketing Statistics

There’s just one problem with SEO. 96.5% of web pages see no organic search traffic at all. That means they either don’t show up on Google, or people don’t click on them. 

That sounds horrifying! But think about how many pages you ignore when searching for something, and how much content is published every day – most of it unoptimized, badly-written content (if not straight up plagiarized, it’s AI-generated). If you’re reading this, you’re already ahead of the game because you’re taking your online efforts seriously. 

Sometimes, it’s just impossible to hit the top of Google because a huge brand has all but made it their own spot. That’s where PPC (Pay Per Click) Ads come in. In 2025, digital ad spend is expected to increase to $799 billion, much of that spend on Google Ads.

There’s a good reason for that. 90% of internet users see Google Ads. 46% can’t tell the difference between organic SEO links or PPC ads – and that increases to 50% in the 18 to 34 age group! Regardless of whether they recognize an ad or not, 75% will click to find the information they want, especially when it directly answers their search query. 

And for direct profit? PPC website visitors are 50% more likely to buy something than those coming in from your organic SEO efforts. Google states that on average, every $1 spend on Google Adwords yields a revenue of $2.

Combining organic SEO with PPC is a powerful way to optimize your search engine appearance and maximize your ROI. While it’s easy to think of online ads as an expense, done right they are a powerful business asset for scaling your business’ growth and revenue.

Social Media Marketing Statistics

Social media might be fun, but it’s also serious business. No digital marketing strategy is complete without it. Social media marketing allows your business to reach a large audience, engage with new and old customers, and drive traffic to your website, decreasing your reliance on search engines.

5.17 billion people use social media, with each of those people engaging with at least 6 social media platforms a month, typically for 2 hours a day. No matter which platforms your business is on, posts and stories are powerful ways to reach out to your audience and increase brand awareness and recognition. 

Online Reputation Management Statistics

We all know how important reputation is in the world of business. Online, your reviews and star ratings can make or break you: 85% of internet users believe that online reviews are just as good as a personal recommendation!

Studies have shown that these ratings can have a huge impact on a business’ bottom line. On most online directories, adding just a single star can result in a revenue increase of 9%.

The good news is that a negative review won’t completely ruin your business. By responding professionally to negative reviews, you can show potential consumers that you value customer service. This isn’t just nice-to-have, as research shows that almost half of consumers are more likely to visit a business that responds to their negative reviews. 

The worst thing a business can do is ignore the negative review: 71% of consumers will simply lose faith entirely, believing that the brand cares more about its profits than their customers.

Nobody likes getting bad reviews. But approached correctly, it’s possible to turn bad reviews into an asset while limiting the huge damage they can cause to your brand image if left to fester. 

A Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency is the Smart Choice

There are a lot of moving parts to a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. It’s often not cost-effective to hire all the expertise in-house. On the other hand, lots of time and resources can be spent hiring multiple freelancers to handle different aspects of marketing – and they may also not have access to all the expensive industry standard tools you need.

An agency offering full-service digital marketing services is a better solution, providing an all-in-one service. 71Three is a full-service digital marketing agency that delivers all the benefits of having an in-house team with the flexibility and affordability of partnering with experts.

Our team covers the full range of digital marketing services and for less than the cost of hiring and training one full-time employee:

We also give you as much or as little control over the work as you want, assigning you a project manager who will manage and guide the expert team dedicated to executing your digital marketing strategy.

We believe this is the most efficient way to do business. It enables our clients to focus on their own products and services as our team works to drive more traffic to their business. 

Take Off with Expert Houston Digital Marketing Services 

We take a holistic approach in which we integrate multiple marketing strategies and blend them into one powerful plan. Every element amplifies the other. Our goal is always simple… to build powerful online visibility that pushes your business ahead of your competition. To see a full list of everything we offer, here is a simple and easy comparison chart for our digital marketing services.

PPC Digital Marketing Solutions

Times may change, trends may come and go, but one thing that continues to deliver results is online advertising, specifically PPC ads. Our team of ad experts have decades of experience working with online ads and have managed ads across all the major platforms. Our total ad spend over the years is over $150,000,000.

Those numbers reveal experience. The only way to know if an ad works or not is to test it out in the digital space.

Over the years, our team has learned what works and what doesn’t across multiple verticals and ad networks – not just Google Ads. Our experience and learning help to fast-track your next ad campaign’s success at a fraction of the cost by avoiding needless trial and error. 

In other words, if you really want to maximize the ROI of every dollar you spend on an online ad, expertise is non-negotiable. We know what works and what doesn’t.

The biggest benefit of PPC is cutting through the noise of online chatter and putting your brand right in front of your target market on the websites that they visit daily. 

After your ad is live, we don’t forget about it. We watch the performance of the ad closely, putting the data that ad networks provide through rigorous analysis. We then tweak those ads so that over time, you get better results.

Can you run a digital marketing campaign on ads alone? Yes, of course you can – but we don’t recommend it. Remember, holistic!

It all starts with understanding your brand, your audience, and the business goals you want to achieve with your new campaign. Putting all of this together, we start to develop ad messaging and visuals that will appeal to your audience.

As a full-service marketing agency, we make sure that your PPC efforts are balanced out and amplified by our organic SEO efforts, giving you a natural presence at the top of relevant Google searches.

SEO Digital Marketing Solutions

People like to complicate SEO, but it is a simple strategy at heart. It involves writing great content that will provide value to the people who read it. Google rewards businesses that can do this with top search results. 

No matter how complicated someone may try to make it sound, this is the essence of SEO. Our dedicated SEO team has been putting businesses and entrepreneurs at the top of Google search for over a decade. It all starts with in-depth keyword research that dives into your industry, your services, and your audience. 

Using the best keywords, we then start to build out a content strategy that transforms your website into a rich source of information and topical authority. We also look at your competitors, analyzing how they approach SEO to see what works and what doesn’t. 

Our goal, by using industry standard tools, is to start publishing content that helps Google to view you as an expert in your industry.

A word of caution and transparency! This takes time. Google moves slowly, so building a powerful SEO presence isn’t an overnight thing.

Our goal with SEO is to move quickly to give your brand comprehensive coverage and then track results using tools like Google Search Console to make sure that your content is performing. Over time, we optimize your content so it rises up the ranks – or stays pinned to the top of the search results.

SMM Digital Marketing Solutions

Social media has become a huge part of our lives. Even if you don’t personally use it, most of your audience does! This means that your digital marketing strategy absolutely needs to go social. 

Like SEO, social media marketing isn’t necessarily complicated – it’s just time consuming. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, it can easily be a full-time job. Someone needs to create content, update your business feed, respond to comments, deal with negativity, and analyze the data these platforms provide.

Video, graphics, writing, reading, responding, and reacting. It’s a lot. Unless your business revolves around social media, it can be hard to justify putting a lot of resources into it, even if you know it could help your business to grow.

Our team of social media managers can help you hit all the right notes in your social media goals without the time sink. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we also have the video editors, copywriters, and graphic designers in-house and ready to create all the assets you need for a standout profile. 

We take the time to talk with your audience and follow the latest conversations. Not just on your brand’s posts, but other people’s content! Behind the scenes, our data analysts pore through the marketing data that social media platforms provide to help us understand what content is performing – and what content isn’t.

Over time, this comprehensive approach to social media fine-tunes our strategy for more engaging content that drives more leads to your websites – and yes, we can also help with social media ads as well, using our PPC know-how to make sure your brand is seen as well as heard. 

Our clients don’t have to do anything other than check in every so often. We send frequent performance reports and can adapt strategies upon request. Our mission is to let you focus on your business so you can better serve the new customers that we send your way. 

ORM Digital Marketing Solutions 

The internet is a vast space with many dark corners – and those dark corners can create a lot of problems for the unwary business owner. If there’s one thing that’s true in life, it’s the simple fact that you can’t please everyone.

As much as businesses work hard to deliver a perfect experience to all of their customers and leave them satisfied, sometimes things go wrong. Most of the time, your normal business processes for dealing with unhappy customers will resolve the issue. But sometimes nothing works, and that’s when online reviews can hurt your business badly. 

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a misleading anonymous post on Reddit, an angry TrustPilot review, a lengthy complaint on BBB, or a devastating Google review that overshadows your online presence.

They all sting – and that sting can hurt your revenues as much as your heart.

If you haven’t noticed the review and don’t respond to it in a timely, professional manner that demonstrates empathy, then your audience will question your commitment to resolving the problem. 

For many business owners, responding to these messages can feel like a punch in the gut. Sadly, this can often lead to emotional responses which only make the situation worse by inflaming it. There is nothing wrong with getting upset about bad reviews because you care about your business, and you don’t like to feel like you’ve failed.

This is only a natural human response. You’re too close to your business, which may not give you the space you need to step back and make a calm and measured response. That’s why we believe it’s best to let other people who are less emotionally involved take over this process. 

That’s where our Online Reputation Management (ORM) services come in. We have specialist tools that scan the internet daily for mentions of your business. These tools warn us at once if something negative comes up. They also alert us to situations that have the potential to turn negative without careful management.

As soon as our team gets an alert, we review the message and contact you to let you know and to ask you what you want us to do next. We know that there’s a difference between people writing fake reviews to harm your business and genuinely upset customers. 

Whatever you decide, our writers will create customized, professional customer care messages that are designed to diffuse the situation. At the end of each quarter, we send a full report that details your online reputation’s performance. 

Work with a Top-Rated Houston Digital Marketing Agency Today

Do you dream of a day when you’ll be the rival that your competitors love to hate? 

A day when you don’t have to play catch-up anymore, because your digital presence stands out from the rest? 

A day when your marketing efforts are polished enough that you have a steady stream of highly qualified leads, all chomping at the bit to work with you?

If you’re still reading, then we’re guessing that your answer to all of these questions is a resounding yes. 

At 71Three, we can help you to achieve these business goals.

From bootstrap startups all the way up to enterprise, we know how to deliver the results that businesses like yours love to see.

Our location in one of America’s leading tech hubs has blessed us with access to team members who are some of the best at what they do in the country. We’re proud to offer our clients the ease of in-house expertise without the high costs of onboarding and training, enabling your business to grow faster without steep overheads. 

Reach out.

Most Frequently Asked Questions about Digital Marketing

What are the main types of digital marketing services?

Businesses who want to scale their business should be focused on social media marketing, SEO, PPC, and online reputation management. They should also make sure that their website design is optimized and consider starting and growing their email list. 

What is digital marketing?

• Digital marketing is the same as online marketing. It means the act of promoting a brand to a target market using the internet and other types of digital communication. While most digital marketing is done through search engines, emails, websites, online advertising, and social media, digital marketing can sometimes also refer to SMS messages and other multimedia. 

What is the most effective method of digital marketing?

• There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this since it depends on where your customers spend their time online and what they respond to best. We believe the best approach is a holistic, data-driven one that uses different types of marketing to increase reach while using data to validate our strategies. Over time, this approach refines your marketing strategy, making it more effective as a driver of business growth. 

What is a digital marketing agency?

• Digital marketing agencies are companies (like ours) that focus on helping brands market to their customers through digital channels. This typically includes creating, launching, and managing digital marketing campaigns through social media, online ads, videos, and websites. Depending on an agency’s in-house talent, they may have specialties.

Is it worth it to hire a digital marketing agency?

• This is a question only you can answer. Digital marketing agencies are experienced and have teams of experts to handle every aspect of a marketing campaign, yet their comprehensive services often come at a fraction of the cost of hiring your own in-house team. While it’s preferable to stay in-house, the cost-effectiveness and flexibility of agencies is tough to argue with for many small businesses.