While outsourcing your digital marketing may seem expensive compared to using an in-house team, it actually ends up paying off significantly higher returns over time. But still, actually making the decision to hire an outside agency for help with your business is always a big decision which shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you’re unsure, here’s some advice to help you work out when hiring an external digital marketing agency would be the right move for you.
When You’re Growing Too Fast For Your Team To Handle
Scaling a business is always challenging. That’s because when a business grows too fast without having the right systems set up, their current capabilities will often lead to an explosion. Operational processes will no longer flow smoothly, requiring improvisation to manage the increased demand for products and services.
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Whether it’s caused by lack of staff or knowledge, the right digital marketing agency will be able to help alleviate challenges with scaling. Hiring a digital marketing agency means you won’t need to hire new senior marketing talent, and you won’t need to expand that department’s management structure either.
Better Industry Knowledge And Practices
It’s impossible to know everything, which is why hiring an external agency for digital marketing often makes good business sense. Agencies are experts with collective knowledge of their field with in-house access to people with the right skills and the finer details of marketing. Digital marketing agencies will look at all aspects of your business from an outsider’s perspective in order to create new and innovative ideas.
You may find that some agencies will have experience working with companies in your specific industry, or at least a similar one. Using an agency with experience in your industry will have expertise with creating marketing campaigns and strategies that have been specifically catered for your target audience.
Need Access To Talent
Another obvious reason to hire an external agency for your digital marketing is because they are specialists and experts in this area. Most people who work for digital marketing agencies are not only extremely passionate about what they do, they’re also highly skilled, expertly trained, and have the best techniques to get the best results for businesses like yours.
Digital marketing agencies can also scale with your business, as they can provide full-time access to teams of niche experts for the same cost equivalent to a single employee. So hiring outside your company means you reap the benefits of highly talented and skilled experts, as well as the latest programs and tools that can take things to the next level.
Limited Funds To Build An Internal Team
While hiring in-house might sometimes save you money, this is actually untrue in most cases. In fact, when you up all of extra HR costs for hiring and training, as well as equipment and conferences, it usually ends up costing much more over time to build your own internal digital marketing team.
The costs internally for your in-house employees to create, test, and implement each marketing plan will add up quickly, as it’s time-consuming to ensure each strategy works efficiently. You’ll also need to consider the recurring costs involved with ensuring they have up-to-date training on how to use the latest technology and other resources for growth development. Not only is using an agency for a one-off specific engagement almost always cheaper, an agency will also usually have much better results.
Need To Focus On Growing Other Areas Of Your Business (Outside Of Marketing)
If you want a good result from your digital marketing, driving your own online campaign is a time-consuming process which requires resources and skills. If you end up having to spend time learning how to do that correctly, it will most likely end up affecting your profits because you won’t have time to focus on your core business.
Instead of dealing with website updates, social media posts, and marketing strategies, you will have more time to concentrate on the big picture of how you can grow your business. Simply by outsourcing your marketing to digital experts, you can focus on improving other areas and departments in order to grow areas that affect your bottom line or even restructure your business as a whole.
You Need More Leads
One of the main reasons to hire a digital marketing agency is to increase sales by optimising your website to attract more online customers. By creating high quality and fully optimised content which helps you appear more often in search engine search results, it will help you generate a higher stream of leads for increased conversions.
Depending on your specific needs, you will most likely find that working together with a digital agency will see an increase in leads and other opportunities for growth. That’s because a digital marketing agency needs to understand all aspects of your industry and competitive environment in order to build a marketing strategy. They will usually end up helping you discover new trends and create fresh leads.
Common Mistakes When Hiring An Agency
While hiring an external digital marketing agency is usually a good idea, there are a number of common mistakes that some businesses make. Here’s a sample of what to look out for.
Not Having A Sufficient Ad Spend Budget
Easily the most common mistake when looking for help with marketing responsibilities is not allocating enough ad spend. That’s because when your budget is too low or a specific online lead isn’t valuable, hiring an agency simply may not be worth the costs involved. So make sure that your ad spend budget for marketing is sufficient enough to actually achieve some optimal results.
Not Maximising Your Internal Team’s Talent First
Just because you’re hiring a professional team of external digital marketing experts, you shouldn’t neglect your internal team. The agency you decide to hire needs to be in sync with your internal team in order to prevent issues like marketing conflicts and strategy disputes. This will also allow you to define a clear and universal set of metrics which makes it easier to understand ad performance and ROI.
Hiring A Churn And Burn Agency
Quality digital marketing needs time and constant effort. But some agencies are only interested in signing as many clients as they possibly can. As long as these churn and burn agencies are able to sign clients faster than they lose them, they’re happy with getting themselves the highest possible ROI for their own business rather than providing their clients with the best quality results. That’s why reputable marketing agencies will always use analytics and tools that prove the ROI of their work.
Final Thoughts
If you’re not sure about whether to outsource to an agency, remember that marketing online is extremely important if you want your company to be successful. Talk to us today about the variety of marketing techniques and technologies we can implement in order to attract more clients to your business.