With the advancement of technology and affordable Internet, most businesses are now going online to sell and buy goods. The current trend involves shopping online and getting your goods delivered to your home, office, or other location. Upside: The days of your customers visiting stores and you being able to use outdated marketing methods are slowly fading away. Are you ready for the change?
In the 21st Century, there’s no question that gaining visibility for your brand and creating online demand for your product or service are critical. You need both a great website and a savvy marketing agency that can package, market and boost your presence online. Digital marketing agencies create websites that convert, utilize digital marketing tactics to raise visibility and provide a robust online presence for your website. It’s a new digital world and you don’t want to be left behind!
Here are some of the leading reasons why you need to hire a digital-focused marketing agency:
1. An Agency Has the Skills Required
Having a team look at all your digital marketing needs is critical and likely will involve an expenditure of both time and money. To be candid, this process can be overwhelming to many companies and can create a significant budget item, one that’s often unanticipated.
Before you start, however, qualify the agencies in question: There’s no need to have someone audit your current digital marketing if they aren’t qualified. According to the team at GUERILLA Agency, even if you stick with your in-house or old-school marketing team, you’ll still occasionally want to utilize a digital marketing agency. These agencies know exactly what is needed to succeed in the online world, what’s new and the best techniques to ensure that you reach your online customer community.
2. Your Agency Helps You Stay On Top of Trends
Digital marketing involves a lot of work and expertise. There are a lot of changing trends, new tactics that prove successful, social network algorithms to track, and always new ways to convert traffic. It can definitely be challenging for someone who doesn’t understand how it all works to carry out this process efficiently.
With so many skills required and such a variety of different ways to accomplish any given task, you’ll need a digital marketing agency to ensure all procedures are followed and everything is done in a “best practices” manner. A reliable digital agency knows all aspects of online marketing too, including search engine optimization (SEO) for your Web site, content creation, email marketing, paid ads, keyword research, and much more. A digitally savvy agency will also track your analytics and test out various tactics to ensure you reach – and convert – as many customers as possible.
3. An Agency Helps Manage Your Budget
Seem like this is all going to cost a lot? Possibly, but keep in mind that a digital agency will set a working budget before they begin helping out your business and will also advise on an appropriate advertising budget and potentially manage your online advertising campaigns too. Without this agency, you could easily end up spending a lot of money on ineffective or overpriced adverts without meaningful or measureable results. Your agency can instead advise you on where to run ads, what ads to run, when to run them and how to track and assess the resultant traffic (both from advertising and organic search results produced by SEO optimization).
Most digital agencies have a significant presence on social media. Through their own pages and the work they do with client companies, they quickly learn which social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, are suitable for your business and specifically which are your best choices for advertising campaigns. Without their expertise, such processes could prove both time consuming and costly for your business. They use advanced tools and insider techniques to ensure you get the best value for your digital marketing investment, each and every time. By hiring a digital marketing agency your company can then focus on other essential facets of the business, including innovation, customer service and production.
4. Agencies Offer A New Perspective
When you hire someone in-house to manage your digital marketing, their experience is inherently limited and while they can offer insight, the expertise of a team at a smart agency can be far greater and inevitably more up-to-date. Since an in-house marketing person’s work is limited to promoting your products and services, they likely will have a difficult time keeping up with all the changes in this fast-moving industry.
When you hire a top digital marketing agency, you’re assured that you’re bringing on board a team of industry experts who track all the key external trends, something that can significantly benefit your business. An agency will compare tactics used by similar companies in the digital marketplace and apply the best of those to your company, maximizing how effectively you target your customer base with the minimum expenditure.
5. You’ll Work with Digital Professionals
Just as you wouldn’t want someone with no experience as your CEO, you also wouldn’t want someone with no relevant experience to manage your digital marketing. And to state what is hopefully obvious, being good at using social media is in no way the same as being an expert at digital marketing, both through social networks and the hundreds of other channels available online. Too many companies fail in digital marketing because they don’t understand this difference and utilize existing employees to manage their marketing efforts. Getting “likes” for your latest cat video on Instagram and running an effective Facebook ad campaign are not the same skillset.
To ensure you succeed in digital marketing, spend the money to hire an industry expert for your company or, better, hire a savvy and reliable digital marketing agency that will deliver great results with a set budget. Instead of incurring the expense of hiring and training your employees, bring an agency on board and watch the results.
Next Steps
Finally, you’ll then need to assess which of the many agencies are the best fit for your company, your budget and your corporate culture. One starting point: Evaluate which agencies have the right tools for the job. They should have demonstrable expertise with industry standard research tools, competitor analysis, automation tools, fully understand site and network analytics, be able to deliver keyword research, and much more. Check their references, talk to a few existing clients, make sure they have expertise in your particular vertical, set some milestones, and bring them on board.
Now, what’s your next step?
