Companies today realize that digital marketing can no longer be ignored. But many business owners are unsure how to tackle it. Should they do it themselves? Hire an employee to handle it or get some outside help?
As you begin to plan for 2014, you wonder if now might be the time to finally hire a digital marketing agency.
But, are you ready? Is now the right time?
It’s time to hire a digital marketing agency
Here are five signs that your company might be ready to hire a digital marketing firm:
1. You need direction.
You know how to run your business, but you’re not sure which direction to take when it comes to digital marketing.
Should you overhaul your website? Pursue social media? Invest in digital advertising or hop on the content marketing train?
The options can be flat-out overwhelming.
It’s okay. You don’t have to have all of the answers. That’s where an agency partner can help. A digital marketing agency can help you build a marketing strategy based on your business goals, target market, budget and company culture. From there, you can execute the plan yourself or get some help to make it happen.
2. You don’t have the expertise in-house.
Most small-to-medium businesses don’t have the luxury of a fully staffed marketing department. In fact, many mid-sized companies don’t even have one staff member dedicated to marketing.
Instead, you may have a collection of people who handle marketing activities – and maybe that includes you as the owner or CEO. And if that’s the case, you’ve got much bigger fish to fry than running your company’s marketing efforts.
Certainly, you could consider hiring marketing employees. And sometimes, that makes sense.
But most of the time, working with a digital marketing agency can be a much more cost-effective option than hiring full-time staff. And, a digital marketing partner gives you access to a full team of marketers, which gives you a much broader array of expertise than you would simply by relying on one or two employees.
3. You’re current marketing efforts aren’t achieving results.
Perhaps you’ve already tried diving into social media, attempting to get a blog up and running or building a blogger outreach campaign. But, you can’t motivate your team or you can’t seem to get any traction with your efforts.
There could be a number of reasons why things aren’t working — you might have a weak strategy (or none at all), you could be focusing on the wrong tactics or perhaps you just haven’t been consistent enough.
But, because you’re so close to it, it can be hard to diagnose the problem.
What you really need is some fresh perspective and creative energy to ignite your efforts. That’s what some outside marketing help can get you.
PR and marketing firms can quickly identify the blind spots in your marketing and offer up some ways to better leverage your efforts. Not to mention, the good marketing teams will help you set up tracking so you can better identify what’s working and what’s not.
4. You can’t seem to get things done.
Do you have a long list of marketing initiatives that you want to tackle, but you just can’t seem to get to them? This might be a sign that you don’t have the bandwidth to handle these initiates internally.
Not to mention, if marketing isn’t in your wheelhouse, you could be spending too much time struggling to make your marketing work.
Hiring a digital marketing agency means you can finally cross some items off of your list and spend your time focusing on other priorities.
5.
You simply don’t like marketing.
I hear this from business owners all of the time — they want to focus on running their business and doing the work, NOT spending their time worrying about marketing.
Yes, marketing is important. But, if you don’t like it and don’t have an interest in doing it yourself — whether you’re the CEO or someone else on the team — you’re going to have a tough time making it happen or be successful doing it.
Instead of ignoring marketing, get the help you need to make things happen. That way, you can focus your time and energy on what you do best and leave the marketing to the people who love doing it and know how to get results.
Do any of these sound familiar? If so, what’s holding you back from getting the help you need?
Marketers – what other reasons would you add to the list?
Image credit: Dita Margarita
5 replies on “5 Reasons to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency”
Hi Laura,
#4 is the big one 🙂 I can’t count how many times a company has hired my firm because they took on something and realized it was next to impossible to get done. Almost better this way because they now understand this stuff isn’t easy 😉
You’re so right, Craig. And oftentimes, it’s tied into #5 too. If you struggle with marketing, you probably have trouble finding (or making) the time for it. Better to focus on what you do best and leave the marketing to the professionals! 🙂 Thanks for stopping by!
Digital marketing campaigns are most effective when measurement is planned up front. I would add to number 2 that hiring an agency can give you access not only to deeper marketing expertise but also to analytics tools that may be too expensive to afford, such as Simply Measured or Sprout. An agency will already know how to use those tools, which typically have a learning curve. Also, being able to use an agency to essentially staff up your marketing team temporarily around a specific digital campaign is cost effective for a smaller company. A good agency will come in, learn your business objectives, design the appropriate campaign (including KPIs), execute, measure, and deliver the results back to you. As a small or medium company, you can spend years developing the expertise to do all that in-house.
Excellent point bout the analytics and tools, Solveig! You’re right – many smaller aren’t familiar with all of the tools out there, don’t know how to use them or can’t afford them. An agency can definitely give them access to a lot more information than they may get otherwise.
Thanks for stopping by and weighing in!
My pleasure, Laura. Great article!