As a small, or even medium-sized business, you know the drill. Your day is filled with anything from business finances to (attempting) social media curation. You grow accustomed to doing most everything yourself. After all, who knows your business and customers better than you? If that weren’t enough, you don’t have the funds to bring in hired help. So you spend your day managing all aspects of the business and it works, for now.
IT WORKS UNTIL IT DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE.
At some point, continuing to handle all of your marketing efforts starts to hurt, not help, your company. The reality is that marketing efforts aren’t something that can be half-hearted. A developed, cohesive, effective marketing strategy isn’t your college capstone, and unfortunately, “winging it” won’t suffice.
Marketing your business is crucial to your success. Trying to manage your marketing on your own is rarely an idea that brings big gains in the future, but you have to consider what is right for your business. A lot of this depends on budget, experience, time, and team efforts.
So is hiring a digital marketing agency the right move for you? There are many benefits to outsourcing your digital marketing to a team of experts. Look for an agency that is flexible and that will provide the digital marketing specialists that may cost too much to hire in-house full-time.
Let’s look at the signs that could tell you that your business may need a an external marketing team…
THERE’S JUST NOT ENOUGH TIME IN THE DAY
If you’re juggling social media, website updates, and email marketing plus all your other business priorities, you’re probably spreading yourself too thin. Digital marketing efforts take dedicated time. You’re deciding proper wording, targeting, timeliness, and trying to allocate your budget in order to optimize return on your marketing investment. Likely, you’re getting lost in the (necessary) details and your deliverables are never getting out the door when they should be.
When you add marketing to the mix, it might involve rearranging other priorities in order to get the job done effectively. But, the reality of being a business owner is that you can’t afford to drop the ball on other activities. There’s only so many ways you can split a person’s attention. Especially when you should be creating a quality product or run your business to the best of your ability. This is when your business suffers, because no one person’s time and job is dedicated to digital marketing.
YOU’RE LACKING SKILL SETS
Along with trying to do everything yourself and not having enough time in the day to do it, you most likely don’t have all the skill sets, knowledge, experience, time, and effort that a digital marketing agency has. There are so many areas of marketing between design, development, content creation, analytics, SEO rankings, campaign optimization – it’s hard for one sole person to be 100% knowledgable in every area of digital marketing. On top of that, the “digital” in digital marketing is constantly evolving. Google’s ranking criteria changes with the seasons, and there’s always a new capability or new tool on the horizon.
When you hire out, you reap the benefits of the agency’s seasoned expertise along with their new perspective. As an agency, it’s our JOB to keep up with digital trends and predict what capabilities and marketing actions will be most vital for the coming year. We have the time dedicated to choose the best strategy for your business and we have the expertise to implement it as well.
YOU DON’T KNOW IF YOUR MARKETING IS WORKING
If you haven’t dedicated time to make marketing a priority, then you probably don’t even know if your efforts are working. The foundation of digital marketing is analytics and without data, your business won’t be able to improve its efforts or reach a greater number of people. Without analytics, you’re setting yourself up for a marketing failure. Digital marketing agencies live and breathe data. It’s their bread and butter. As their client, you are the number one priority which means we’re tracking each and every breadcrumb of your data to make sure even the smallest digital marketing effort is effective. That way, you’re optimizing your budget and your time. If that’s not a reason to hire a digital marketing agency, we don’t know what is.
YOU HAVE A SMALL MARKETING BUDGET
A small marketing budget can indicate that either you don’t understand the importance of marketing or that your profits aren’t allowing you to invest in marketing. Both scenarios suggest that you need to work with a digital marketing agency.
Believe it or not, there are many times when working with an agency will be far cheaper than trying to do everything in-house. It saves you the salary of hiring someone and the time you need to train them. It saves the awkward learning curve and gives you access to immediate planning and strategy. You won’t have to adapt to new programs or make strategic decisions because the agency is providing that information for you. The best possible solutions at your fingertips.
Hint: Many agencies have scalable service opportunities that allow you to tailor your digital capabilities to the size of your business. As your business grows, so can your digital marketing services.
YOUR BUSINESS ISN’T GETTING NEW LEADS
Sales and marketing share a symbiotic relationship, meaning each one needs the other in order to survive and prosper. If your sales are going stagnant, you need a dedicated marketing team to help develop an inbound marketing strategy that will reach your key customers — where they are, with content they want to see and when they want to see it. If your sales team has bad or no leads to work with, then there’s not much point to having a sales team.
YOUR COMPETITORS ARE DOMINATING ONLINE
When your competitors are enjoying success online it’s often a wake up call as to how much potential business they’re stealing from you. It’s a sign that they are investing in digital marketing because they see how it boosts their business. The only way to combat this is to be as good as or better than them in your digital marketing. Most people receive their information online, or decide to make a purchase because of a video they’ve viewed, or an Instagram page they’ve visited. If you’re not capitalizing on your digital marketing efforts (whether that be paid ads, search engine optimization, or social media strategy) then you aren’t just prohibiting growth, you’re handing other people your business!
YOU’RE NOT PLANNING AHEAD
Being a consistent content creator can be a daunting task. The full scope of content creation involves knowing what your consumers are looking for and turning that into beautiful graphics or engaging blog posts. A lot of times, businesses start strong when it comes to creating, but once your brand has been established it is easy to underestimate the importance of frequent content generation. This is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make.
Your brand presence is dependent on your ability to consistently generate relevant content. Content is anything that represents your brand in the digital arena. Whether the content be website updates, videos, or engaging comments on social — it is important to make sure people know your brand is alive. If your company is lacking content, not only will your brand presence fade out – but Google won’t like it either.
YOUR WEBSITE IS OUTDATED
Your website is the face of your brand. It is the go-to point of contact for potential clients. Your website should be visually pleasing, responsive, and informative. With an outdated website, you may be lacking one or more of these qualities. Websites help users decide whether or not to trust you. A clean, well optimized, easy to navigate website with a clear conversion path will determine whether or not you generate business.
An updated website will not only look good to users, but will also greatly improve your SEO. This is because Google rankings favor sites that are user-friendly and provide useful information to viewers.
YOU NEED A FRESH PERSPECTIVE
If everything you create seems to be stale or dull in comparison to the competition, then hiring a digital marketing agency is the way to go. Agency teams offer a unique perspective to your marketing efforts. Between graphic designers, creative directors, web developers, and marketing experts – we’ve mastered the art of storytelling on all platforms. Agencies bring you a fresh strategy that you might have missed because you’ve been involved from the start.
Bringing in an external set of eyes can uncover ideas that you may have not thought of before. Most agencies have clients in many different industries. This allows them to take what’s working in a different industry and apply it to your business. Sometimes this can lead to huge improvements that you would never have experienced otherwise.
While hiring a digital marketing agency is a commitment, the alternative could be falling behind your competition. The digital landscape is constantly evolving and small and medium sized businesses don’t have the time to play catch-up. Whether you need web design, development, motion graphics, content creation, email marketing, SEO, or analytics measurement – a digital marketing agency could be your one-stop shop for growing your business.
