Starting a business is like running a marathon — you have to have the endurance for it, and make sure you’re constantly taking things one step further. That’s why hiring the right digital marketing agency can be the best decision you’ll ever make for your business.
At this point, you probably already know that marketing is one of the most important factors in determining your success. But before we get into the exact benefits, let’s take a step back and learn what a digital marketing agency is.
Definition of a Digital Marketing Agency
A digital marketing agency is a B2B service that offers a range of marketing services. Some agencies specialize in one or two areas of marketing, and other agencies are large enough to handle any marketing task you could throw at them. Some digital marketing services could include:
- Website design and development
- Social media marketing
- Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO)
- Email marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Content creation
Businesses contract digital marketing agencies because they might not have the in-house expertise to perform all of these tasks to meet their customer acquisition targets. Or they might have limited in-house expertise and need help covering the rest or scaling up their efforts. Whatever the reason may be, a digital marketing agency can help a business achieve goals such as:
- Building brand awareness
- Increasing sales
- Driving traffic to a website
- Engaging customers
- Building customer loyalty
5 Benefits of Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency
If you are wondering what the benefits of using a digital marketing agency are, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions first. Do things like SEO, pay-per-click or conversion rate optimization make sense to you?
Have you ever tried to create a social media marketing strategy? Can you be certain that your online strategy is working? If the answer is no, then hiring an online marketing agency might be exactly what you need. Here are six benefits of having an experienced team handle your digital strategy.
1. A digital marketing agency will help you expand your business online
If the pandemic has taught entrepreneurs one thing, it’s that businesses that don’t go digital can struggle or be left behind. It’s that plain and simple. But if your business has been mostly offline up to this point, building your online presence is going to require a big upfront time investment. You might have to build and launch a website, start running ads on social media, send out newsletters to your subscribers and the list goes on. A digital marketing agency can take all of this busy work off your plate so you can focus on what you do best.
2. A digital marketing agency will bring you more customers
When you do pay-per-click advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google or Instagram all by yourself, you only have to pay for the ad space. But with a digital marketing agency, you’re also paying them to make your ads look better and reach more potential customers.
You might think this is a cost, but it’s actually an investment. If you hire a great digital marketing agency (we’ll show you how to do that below), then they’ll make sure your ads break even or even generate a positive return on ad spend.
3. Hiring a digital marketing agency lets you can focus on what you do best
Your strengths are the things you bring to the table that other businesses can’t offer. Unless you are a digital marketing agency, you might want to prioritize improving your operations and giving customers the best possible service.
You’re an expert in your industry, but not digital marketing. And if you think you can simply learn digital marketing on the side, consider this. To become good at something, we need to try new things and apply what we’ve learned repeatedly. Do you really have the drive and speed to learn all the theories, run experiments, and try out all the advanced tools available? When will you make the time outside of running your business? This is why you need to hire a digital marketing agency that already knows how to get you the best results.
4. Digital marketing agencies have access to resources that you may not have
When you’re still in the early stages and trying to grow your business, you may not have the budget to hire a full-time digital marketer, but you may well be able to afford a digital marketing agency. Sure it’ll cost you, but many people don’t realize how much they can save by not having to pay for all the resources that agencies have access to.
Here are just a few of the resources I’m talking about:
- Content research tools
- Competitor intelligence trackers
- SEO optimizers
- Grammar/plagiarism checkers
- Automation tools
- Educational courses
- Website development tools, technology, and plug-ins
All of these resources have monthly subscription prices or big one-time fees. Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t run marketing campaigns on your own. But it does mean it will take much longer, and cost you more money, to do it at the same level.
Have trouble justifying the cost of a digital marketing agency? Consider the ROI. Often, the ROI of a digital marketing agency can cover the cost of the service by reaching an untapped market that you may not have been able to reach otherwise.
5. You can rest easy knowing that everything is handled by professionals
So we’ve established that doing everything yourself might get you overworked, and hiring a full-time employee will cost more than it does to retain an agency. Even if you hire an inexperienced employee, you’ll still have to train them, which will also add up.
But when you hire a digital marketing agency, you do not have to worry about recruiting the right talent because agencies already employ a set of highly skilled players. This saves you both time and money that you can reinvest into scaling up your marketing efforts.
What to Look for in a Digital Marketing Agency
The first thing you need to do before you hire a digital marketing agency is think about what you want for your business. Do you want your brand’s presence to be more widely known? Do you want to increase your social media following? Do you want to boost sales? Whatever it is you want to achieve with your marketing, the first thing you need to do is outline your goals. Here’s how that helps you find the right digital marketing agency for your business.
Years of Experience
There is no shortage of digital marketing agencies online. Having your business goals in mind will help you evaluate all the agencies you come across and quickly filter out the subpar ones. For every agency you’re considering, try to see if they’ve achieved similar results for their other clients. You can usually see this in the portfolio section of their sites, like this one. The larger their portfolio, the more trustworthy the digital marketing agency is. And if they don’t have one, that’s already a big red flag. And don’t just consider their experience with digital marketing as a whole. Look at their selection of clients and see if they’ve already generated results for your particular business model or industry. At IMP Digital, for example, we focus on the following lines of business:
- Spas and pools
- Home builders
- Pharma
- Professional services
If a digital marketing agency has experience in your niche then they’ll already know what works for your business, which means they can hit the ground running.
Active Management
Communication is key. When you hire a digital marketing agency, you’re offloading key responsibilities to them, so they have to actively keep you up to date on all the latest developments related to your campaigns. A digital marketing agency should give each client a dedicated account manager. This is the person to whom you’ll get updates and questions, give answers and relay feedback too.
It is crucial that you are able to get along with this person because they will basically become an extended member of your team. But it is also important that you don’t treat them like an employee that you just boss around. Remember, they’re the experts. If they’re just handing out orders to them, then you’re probably not taking advantage of their wealth of knowledge and will generate mediocre results due to this.
Data-Driven
Back in the day, marketing was all about coming up with the next big idea. A flashy billboard or Hollywood production quality TV commercial. What these marketing campaigns lacked was that their effectiveness couldn’t directly be measured. In today’s day and age, and especially online, there are zero excuses for an agency not to use analytics to improve their marketing campaigns.
If an agency doesn’t provide its clients with a weekly or monthly report, that should be an immediate deal-breaker. Don’t forget that your marketing budget is an investment rather than an outright cost, and as such you have the right to know how your investment is performing.
Budget-Friendly
A ton of people are concerned about the cost aspect of hiring an agency. Let’s break down the different ways that agencies price their services. Keep in mind that every pricing model has its pros and cons. The one you choose ultimately depends on what your business can afford.
Revenue Sharing
This is a “kill what you eat” model. Here the agency only gets paid based on the amount of revenue they generate for your business. This sounds ideal on the surface, but if they do get you great results, you’ll be paying a hefty sum out of your winnings.
Percentage of Ad Spend
This is when the agency gets paid off of the amount of money you allocate to running ads. The immediate risk of this pricing model is that it incentivizes an agency to request a bigger ad budget so that it earns more money.
Retainer
This is the simplest of the three and simply involves paying the agency an agreed-upon monthly fee. This is the pricing model we use here at IMP Digital. You can get in touch with one of our experts for a quote.
Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency
Hiring a top-of-the-line digital marketing agency can help your business convert more potential customers. Some of the other reasons we mentioned are:
- A digital marketing agency can expand your business online.
- A digital marketing agency can give you access to all the right tools minus the cost.
- A digital marketing agency already knows what works, so they can save you from making common mistakes.
Marketing can be complicated. There are lots of different channels to pay attention to, and it’s easy to get lost or overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information. But if you have a marketing agency, you don’t need to worry about all that.
Our team at AdMagneto Media will handle all your digital marketing efforts so that you can focus on what matters most: your business! Feel free to book a discovery call with us here so we can discuss how to create memorable digital experiences for you.
