Give It To Me Straight:
When asking yourself whether you should hire a digital marketing agency for digital marketing services or hire someone in-house, you should start by considering what digital marketing means. What services, tasks, and responsibilities does this term encompass?
A digital marketing agency offers B2B services that include a wide variety of marketing services. These services most often include social media marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing, SEO, content creation, and website design and development. Therefore, when thinking about whether you will be better off hiring some in-house, you need to consider that you will have to hire a specialist for each of those areas. Sure, when posting the job you may come across a jack of all trades, however, you may be left with a master of none.
Unless you have an entire team available in-house to fulfill your business’ digital marketing needs and goals, and even though we may be a tad biased, we strongly recommend going the agency route. This blog will cover some of the most important reasons for this argument.
1. Lower Cost
When hiring a digital marketing specialist, or several, in-house, you need to consider the cost. Now, you are looking at salaries, vacation and sick pay, pensions, and other benefits. Of course, an in-house employee also needs to have the appropriate office space and equipment. Additionally, since the digital marketing industry is ever-evolving and changing, you also have to budget for regular training expenses. And again, the more specialists you hire, the higher this cost will be. Hiring a digital marketing agency is often a lot more cost-effective and even cheaper than the annual salary of one full-time employee. Less cost for your business means that you now also have a bigger advertising budget when going the agency route.
2. Focus on the Business and Growth
Do you really have the time to spend training a brand new team? Or even worse, do you really have the time to handle all the digital marketing yourself? Let’s face it, you don’t. Trust me, as an Enneagram Type 3, I’d love to do EVERYTHING by myself. BUT, organization, efficiency, and delegation is key, especially if you want to run a successful business. An agency can make this process very smooth and easy for you. While communication is very important, we don’t require a ton of meetings or phone calls and will try to make our partnership as convenient as possible for you! When it comes down to it, all we need are your goals and timelines, and, depending on how much or little you’d like to be involved, some decision-making. This gives you the ability to focus on other aspects of the business and play more of an overseeing role.
3. Experience and Skills
By hiring a digital marketing agency, you now get an entire team with experts in different areas who often have years of experience and industry knowledge. It’s the perfect mix of skills needed for your objectives! On this team, you will have dedicated strategists who will scour the industry, market, competition, and trends for you and provide you with a strategy that is best suited for your business and needs. You can rely on them to share their knowledge with you and educate you on different strategies and trends and you will be able to tap into the knowledge and experience of experts.
4. Latest Trends
As I mentioned before, the digital marketing industry NEVER sleeps and is constantly evolving and changing. It is our job and responsibility to stay on top and always be aware of the latest trends. This could include platform updates and changes, new policies, algorithm updates, social media tactics, email marketing trends, video content, new strategies, … the list is endless. Not only are we aware of these trends, we will also ensure to keep you updated on them as well, and build them in your strategy whenever appropriate.
5. Fresh Perspective
No matter how creative you are, an outsider’s perspective is always helpful and refreshing! An agency has industry insights, or is maybe even working with similar businesses, and also has A LOT of data to bring a new perspective to the table. We can point out your business’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities, and come up with strategies on how to capitalize on them. We can assess your marketing techniques and efforts and create new ideas designed for you. While it can be hard to let go of the reins, it’s very healthy and beneficial to take a step back and take a look at your efforts from an objective point of view.
6. New Tools in the Toolbox
Have you ever looked around and noticed how expensive digital marketing tools and software are? You will need these premium services for tasks such as scheduling and running campaigns, email marketing campaigns, keyword research, competitor analysis, market research, automation, streamlined reporting, and a lot more. The cumulative cost of this can be enormous! Most agencies have access to these tools and will share reports, insights, stats, and sometimes even access with you. Some of these tools can literally make or break the effectiveness and efficiency of your digital marketing campaigns.
7. Accountability, Reliability, and Communication
Reliability means you get quick responses on questions or concerns and that your agency is willing to set up meetings with you to discuss your current campaigns and strategies with you. We want to make sure that you can always sleep peacefully at night knowing there is active and ongoing management of your campaigns. Furthermore, accountability is one of our top priorities as an agency. Everything we do is backed up by data and we offer measurable results based on your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). How much do you care about shiny reports that you don’t understand, and potentially can’t even translate to anyone else in the business? Exactly, not at all. We provide you with regular reports that are tailored to your business goals and we will teach you and show you all the important metrics across different channels. When it comes to communication, we will ensure that you have a designated account manager on your team who you can always reach out to. The account manager will also deliver results, schedule meetings with you, educate you on trends and insights, and provide overall communication between your business and our agency.
8. It’s Scalable
The agency you choose should ALWAYS be able to accommodate your needs and growth. Because, after all, this means you won’t need to hire senior marketing staff yourself and will still get the experts on your team. When your goals and campaigns grow, an agency can adjust to your needs and put the right talent and measures in place to accommodate this. You can also scale your ad budget based on campaign size, holidays, seasonality, etc. Most agencies like ourselves offer different packages or custom approaches to best suit your business size and needs.
So, what do we take from all of this? I understand that hiring an agency may seem overwhelming and even scary at times because you might feel that you’re giving up the reins. Keep one thing in mind though – you’re not losing anything but are gaining an extension to your marketing staff, a dedicated partner and we understand fully that it takes time to build trust.
Here at Frontier Media, we truly do consider our clients partners and we look at their business as our own. We follow one simple principle, to perpetually solve for opportunity and we have a deep passion for succeeding for each and every one of our clients. We value open communication and will work together with you hand-in-hand.
Our mission at Frontier Media is to help our clients reach, influence, and convert the right people at the right time who could and should be your customer. Our team comes ready with years of experience to tackle the marketing process with you, giving you the results you’ve been looking for. Ready to talk? Let’s connect!