For many companies, outsourcing is now an integral part of their digital marketing strategies. If you hire the right digital marketing agency, it can make a vast improvement in terms of the return on your investment in comparison to taking the in-house route.
By hiring an agency, you can tap into the array of skills, the vast amount of experience and the varying perspectives of a group of digital marketing pros, all are passionate about delivering a result for your company.
Why Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?
You gain access to the type of skills you need
For most small businesses, establishing an in-house team to handle all of your digital marketing is an impractical possibility. To go the in-house route, your company would need the type of skills that are either very difficult to come by or are simply too expensive to acquire.
What’s more, is that in terms of the financials involved it would be unfeasible to hire full time or even on a part-time basis if the skillset you were hiring for was not constantly needed. At varying times of the year, the type of campaigns you will be running will differ. As an example, at the beginning of the year, the focus may be on SEO and brand building, while towards the end of the year you will likely be more immersed in paid advertising and social media. The digital marketing agency will employ staff over a range of disciplines. The digital marketing agency will be fully capable of applying the appropriate blend of skills so that your campaign objectives are always successfully achieved. For you as a business owner, when you hire an agency, this is a seamless process.
Your budget is managed more effectively
When you outsource your digital marketing, the agency responsible takes over your marketing spend on SEO and PPC.
If you were to work in-house, tracking this marketing spend across multiple platforms – Google, Facebook, Twitter, for example – is not only challenging, but it is also very time-consuming. On top of that, you also need to optimise continually, to track conversions – continually – and to direct your budget so that it’s siphoned over to your most effective campaigns. Further, there’s the complexity involved in the reporting procedures and in the management requirements.
Quality digital agencies already have plenty of experience in effectively managing their clients’ digital marketing budget. After all, quality digital agencies will likely have developed the required tools and the necessary processes over hundreds, possibly even thousands of clients so that the methods have become ever-more efficient.
So if you decide to work with an agency, you’re the one to benefit from the agency’s procedures and internal controls. It’s you who sets the budget. It’s you who establishes the expectation. It’s the agency that handles the rest.
You acquire new perspectives
Inherently, the in-house digital marketing team is limited to what they currently have in terms of experience.
The in-house team possibly only ever gain exposure to your business’ product range and industry, as well as the different techniques you’ve used in the past to promote them.
On the contrary, digital agencies work with many different industries, with many kinds of businesses and with many different marketing professionals. The digital marketing agency’s team learns about and develops innovatively successful marketing techniques. These techniques are then applied to contrasting sectors of business.
A quality digital marketing agency’s staff are expected to fulfil continuing professional development requirements. As an example: a Google Partner agency’s staff must complete training on an annual basis on every aspect of Google’s advertising suite.
When you work with a digital marketing agency, it is possible to tap into this expertise and insight in a very effective and very targeted way.
You meet your deadlines on time
When you are set up with a solid marketing strategy, you don’t want to experience the expense of any part of it failing. This may well occur if you rely on an in-house team to do the work.
For the typical agency, they will have a diversity of redundancies already in place. It may be they employ multi-person teams to focus on your campaigns; they might have automation and software solutions; they could be reliant on more versatile employees that offer support to one another. In any event, there’s more certainty that objectives and campaigns are delivered in a timely fashion.
A quality digital marketing agency is also able to manage the planning and development stages. In this way you’re certain to have the media, the copy, and also the campaign briefs available early on so that campaigns are executed smoothly and efficiently.
You have more space for your business to grow
One of the key advantages of outsourcing is its scalability.
With the growth of your business, be that through additional physical locations, increased orders, elevated traffic to your website, or by way of heightened social engagement, there will be a need for changes to be made to your operations to cope. A smaller-sized business cannot be run the same way as a large business and the growing pains that come with a business’ expansion can be troublesome.
A good marketing agency will be in a position to be responsive to the changing landscape of your business. A digital agency will also likely have previous experience in dealing with the various issues that you will want to resolve as your business grows. Again, an agency can apply the insights, the expertise, and the software solutions they have developed through working with other customers. This, in turn, will aid you to successfully deal with the growth stages of your business.
Your sales, operations, and internal marketing resources are therefore free to focus on what they most need to focus on and what they do best – more physical locations, better employee training and engagement, improved operational efficiencies, and more.
Finally
At many levels, for many, if not the majority of businesses, both large and small, the outsourcing of their digital marketing pursuits makes total sense. Not least because of the affordability and the flexibility that outsourcing presents.
You may not be entirely sure which agency is best for your business right now, but because of the minimal financial commitment (in comparison to hiring a marketing employee full time or to invest in the establishment of a full department), it unquestionably makes the investigation worthwhile.
If you would like to learn more about how working with a digital marketing agency could have a positive impact on your business, make the leap and get in touch!