What are the benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency? Expertise is one of the top strengths of a digital marketing agency. So is the scope of what they can take on for your business, effectively enabling your in-house marketing team to work more efficiently.
Sound Familiar?
You have a great business, and you deliver terrific products and services. When it comes to marketing your company, though, maybe it’s not going as smoothly as you’d hoped. It may be time to consider adding to the team with a digital marketing agency.
Does that prospect scare you a bit? You’re not alone! But there are several reasons why you may want to take the leap:
1. Focusing on Your Specialty
Chances are good you’re not a digital marketing specialist. Your business relies on you being active every day in the field where you are an expert. So why would you spend your time focusing on marketing efforts, instead of focusing on your business?
Every day you spend trying to manage marketing is a day your business spends without your expertise on the areas where it really needs you. Employing a digital marketing agency allows you to entrust your marketing strategy to experts and its execution to your team. Together they can boil down the complicated details into choices you can make easily and swiftly.
Trying to juggle too many things can sabotage your business. Utilizing experts to simplify your choices and help you understand them isn’t a way of losing control – because you understand more and you can do it more swiftly, you actually gain more control over the fate of your business.
2. Anticipating vs. reacting
You can catch up to current trends quickly. Once everyone else understands them, it’s much easier to make up the ground others have blazed ahead of you. The big problem with this is that it leaves you perpetually behind. New customers who are being reached new ways will go to your competitors instead of you.
Those new customers are the ones who become brand-loyal over time. They’re the ones who advocate for their brand, and who shift influencers into advocating for a brand. Those customers don’t just buy a product or service for your competitors. They serve as anchors into new social media platforms and mediums of advertising.
One of the most important benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency is that you can anticipate new marketing opportunities ahead of time, instead of constantly struggling to play catch up. You can build your strategy around securing new customers, they’ll become brand-loyal for you, and your business will be the one creating new anchor points on the newest platforms.
3. Evergreen Marketing
Traditional marketing is built around what seizes the moment. Online, moments last forever. That traditional approach is still important, and it’s folded into digital marketing agencies’ strategies. It’s not the only element to value, however.
Evergreen marketing includes content that will continue attracting visitors for years into the future.
The higher the quality of the content created, the more likely it is for that content to serve as a draw for years to come.
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Digital marketing agencies specialize in creating this content in a way that interests visitors and encourages them to continue engaging the site.
If everything lasts forever online, the marketing campaign of the minute is only one piece of your strategy. The other piece is the marketing campaign that takes advantage of lasting forever and keeps on building value.
Watch this video for tips on how to create marketing with impact.
4. Growth-focused Strategy
Day-to-day digital marketing is only a successful strategy for so long. It doesn’t guard you. A really good day means you have a big response without a way to fully take advantage of it – because you’re just doing the same things tomorrow. Yet one unexpected event or downturn and your business may not have a way to weather it. This is because day-to-day operations are easy for an event to interrupt. If your marketing is focused on the day-to-day business, it fails to insulate against the unexpected.
Strategy should be focused on growth. Have a good day and your growth balloons. It’s easy to build on that and use that as a new foundation from which to grow even more. Interrupt growth and it simply grows a little more slowly until the environment is healthy again. It’s much easier to insulate against the unexpected because you’re not looking at whether that day was good – you’re looking at what growth milestones you’re hitting over a longer period.
One of the biggest benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency is it allows you to start seeing the shape of your business’s growth much further out into the future.
5. Advanced Tools and Knowledge
Securing the kind of marketing tools a digital marketing agency has is expensive. One of the best bottom-line strengths of a digital marketing agency is that you don’t have to buy or subscribe to those expensive tools. You also don’t have to spend time and money training up your own staff in their use.
Instead, your marketing agency has spent this money. They’ve found the people who are best trained in getting the most out of these tools. They’ve done this for their own business’s health and efficacy.
When you hire an agency, you hire an entire team of specialized professionals. You’re hiring an email marketing expert, a social media expert, a web design expert, an SEO expert, a digital press release expert, and much more with one single contract.
Try finding all of that expertise in the one or two people you might be able to fit into your budget this year. It’s simply not going to happen, but with an external team, you get all of those services – with a single investment.
Therefore, working with a digital marketing agency gives you far more affordable access to the tools necessary to advanced digital marketing today, as well as the experts who can use them efficiently. Those tools and that expertise translate as knowledge that helps you cleanly make top-down marketing decisions.
Check out this video on the 4 digital marketing tools THAT Agency is using in 2020.
6. Cost Cutting
If you wanted to add a few people, what would it really cost? Don’t just think about salary and benefits here. You need to factor in the hiring process, onboarding, workspace, technology, leave, and all of the other hidden expenses associated with employees.
Or you can skip all those costs by outsourcing – while enjoying an entire team at your disposal. They’ll come fully trained and complete with their own ideas, equipment, and office space. You’ll have access to marketing tools and expertise you could only dream of, and it all works with you as an independent contracting business.
Hiring in-house team members can be great, but what happens when they find a better offer? If one of your most qualified marketing employees steps out and you have to replace them, it takes weeks of recruiting and interviewing, and you still may not find the right candidate. (Marketing team members are particularly prone to this, as they tend to change jobs every few years.)
An agency is much less expensive beyond just the tools and training needed to get to the same level. They’re also less expensive in terms of maintaining access and functionality over time.
Let’s say you do eventually hire that new member for your team. You can expect a serious commitment of time and effort on your part. You’re going to have to handle the onboarding process and, even after that, the individual could turn out to be a poor fit.
Firing an in-house employee can mean some serious paperwork through HR, though, and that’s about the last thing you want to do after you’ve invested months adding that person to your team.
When you work with an agency, that won’t happen. You or they can walk away after the terms of the agreement have been fulfilled. It needn’t be a protracted separation.
And, if one of the agency’s employees moves, there is someone else ready and just as qualified to step in and take over. By the time you’d be running interviews, they’d already be up-to-speed on your business and how you like to communicate while seamlessly keeping your marketing strategy in place.
You get better quality tools, expertise, and consistency from a digital marketing agency, at a lesser overall cost. That’s the definition of a smart business decision.
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Plus, every dollar of your investment in an agency represents produced deliverables. Would every dollar of your investment in a few new team members go that way? Probably not. Don’t forget, benefits, equipment, and training are all part of the package with in-house staff. You’re not going to be paying an agency for sick days or vacations.
7. Scaling Up or Down
Sure, you need two employees now, but when things take off after that amazing Super Bowl ad you ran, how many employees are you going to need then? An agency can scale up far faster than an in-house team can, and that means you have the flexibility you to need to grow.
This is one of the major strengths of a digital marketing agency. The services they provide can scale up with ease. As in the cutting costs example, there’s no painful hiring and interviewing process that takes up your time. An agency can simply slide the right experts and tools in to increase your service and growth targets.
On the other side of the equation, some businesses scale back at certain times of the year. They may adjust seasonally, if core staff takes a break, because they’ve just invested heavily into property or a facility, or for any number of other reasons. This is difficult for businesses to realize in their own staff. Decisions on who to cut are bad enough, and it’s almost impossible to maintain the relationships well enough to bring them back when you scale back up again.
This is easy with a digital marketing agency. Those people can move over to another project, and come back again when you need them. Best of all, the work to continue growing your business even in an off-season period is maintained. You can scale down when needed with less of an impact on your marketing operations.
8. measurable Results
Is your marketing strategy working? It’s tough to determine ROI for every marketing campaign, particularly for an in-house marketing staff. Goals are often contradictory. Both good and bad relationships get in the way. Goalposts get moved when it comes to investment plateaus that decide employment and future budgeting.
That’s not necessarily true when you hire a digital marketing agency though. Agencies tend to be results-driven, and that means they have to have a solid reporting strategy in place to help you see that they’re getting results. They’re geared toward clear goals, focused on long-term strategies with consistent milestones along the way. They’re also used to auditing efforts and, as discussed, they have access to tools that can more accurately and precisely measure what’s working and what doesn’t.
Every marketing strategy will need some type of adjustment along the way. You need insight into making it ahead of time. It’s important that you’re able to identify it. The more information you have, and the clearer and more understandable it is, the better equipped you’ll be to measure precise elements and make equally precise adjustments to get the most out of your marketing budget.
9. Testing
Agencies have to utilize the hottest new technologies in the industry to ensure they’re on top of the game. You don’t even have to make an additional investment to get access to those tools. They’re just part of the package. That’s not always the case with in-house marketing team members. They’re not going to have much to show on bring-your-own-software to work day. An agency, though, might have a very impressive digital marketing arsenal ready to deploy – one that includes advanced testing capabilities.
There are countless devices, multiple operating systems, and browsers galore. Most people use Google, but the average user on Bing is wealthier and often a better target for luxury brands. The Ecosia search engine is based partly on Yahoo! algorithms – it’s increasingly popular with niche users and younger customers.
Does your website work on all devices, on all OS’s, on all browsers? Are you optimized for Google SEO, as well as Bing, Ecosia, and other search engines where it’s advantageous for your business? Have you tested that your site and content present cleanly across this extensive range of combinations? Have you tested that it runs well and load quickly for users with slower connections?
A digital marketing agency can test and optimize all of this across an incredible range of combinations. They can do it in a swift and organized fashion, make adjustments immediately. This makes sure you aren’t missing customers who have slower connections or rarer set-ups. It also makes sure you can take advantage of precise targeting to reach the demographics who are most likely to use particular combinations.
10. Building A brand community
Digital marketing creates storytelling around your brand. It creates engagement and passion. It fosters repeat customers who become advocates for your brand. Social media isn’t just for expanding your advertising reach; it’s for building a community that’s passionate about your brand.
When you have such a community ready to share your content and products, you have a jump-start on marketing without spending a penny. Of course, that takes an initial investment and the time and patience to build this kind of foundation. It means a digital marketing agency creating content, regularly updating social media, getting that content shared, responding to comments to engage customers and answer questions, fostering brand relationships, utilizing influencers who can share their audiences, and implementing rapidly increasing opportunities for in-app purchases through social media posts.
This is an entire long-term strategy unto itself, and requires interesting content, a consistent voice, and polite responsiveness to fan interaction. Done right, it develops a voice for your brand that people connect with – and go out of their way to share with others.
In Conclusion
A digital marketing agency can change the picture in terms of your strategy and results. To learn about what THAT Agency can do to market your business, contact us today!
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in June 2018 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.