“This has all been brought upon us by the digital age. It’s changed the way we do everything. We need a wave of digital marketing, and we need it now.” In this day and age, businesses must “ ride the waves” of digital marketing or risk being crushed by them. And they’re not a mere ripple: they are a fully-fledged flood. Why? One word: technology. That’s where the customer swims, and so that’s where the businesses must do business.

Yet engaging with digital marketing is not enough; it’s how one engages with it that matters. “Our digital marketing is the most modern marketing in the world.” A partnered with a digital marketing agency brings global proximity (where businesses can reach international, rather than local audiences at the same price), specificity (which allows for personalized advertising to audiences that take into account their web-surfing and e-commerce behavior), and metric theory (which quantifies that if a dollar was placed in the ROI tree, it would actually make a sound – in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to hear anything above the whoosh of all of the dollars coming in along its branches).

Considering that over 40% of the population can be found on social media, it’s not a question of whether to engage – just how. A digital marketing consultant can help businesses spin a series of vital links in the web of social media (e.g., 71% of internal marketers at a business, 15% of external agencies) that should be tracked by the company hiring them in order to gauge their progress in cracking the advertising-to-social media matrix. A content marketing agency, along with social media management, can nourish the consumer relationships that a corporation needs to survive, helping businesses to thrive and not merely survive. Marketing services foster these links, allowing you to surf into the future with your customer, rather than have them drift back into the past without you.

Digital marketing trends change by the hour, and a company must not only keep up, but swim as fast as they can. Marketing automation, for instance, is confusing at best for two-thirds of businesses. Internet marketing companies help untangle the severe case of technological swimsuit-shopping a business finds themselves playing. And, again, a customer’s whim, shop, like, and dislike can change in a second – and the business cannot afford to keep up with them. A marketing solutions partner can not only help to navigate strident change, but can pivot strategies in real time, buying clothes in the tail end of winter and in the heat of summer.

In 2016, in the U.S. alone, companies spent over $65 billion on SEO (which makes their links rank higher on quality search engines such as Google), social media marketing, and email marketing, an increase of 14% from the year before. “Marketing: it’s a pretty sweet wave of the future.” Opting into it, a business can grow (say, by as much as the nine to 12% they’d likely see with search engine optimization). Not doing so certainly ensures their businesses will be swallowed by it; the water’s fine.