What Are the Advantages of Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency?

As a LinkedIn lead generation agency we often get the question: what are the advantages of hiring an agency to do your marketing?

Many Small Businesses and Startups don’t have the budget to hire a marketing team. The average annual salary of a digital marketing manager in the USA is currently at $94,400 according to salary.com (April 2017). And that’s just one person, not a whole team.

Online marketing is absolutely essential nowadays

We live in the Internet age, and all businesses need to market their services online if they want to succeed.

The majority of consumers look up a new business online before they make the decision to go there. And often they’ll compare several options and rank them according to online reviews before deciding to purchase.

So even if you have a brick-and-mortar business, you’ll lose a huge chunk of potential customers if you can’t be found online, or if your online presence doesn’t look good. And those customers are going to your competitors, who are investing in their online marketing.

So what’s the solution to this dilemma?

Don’t try to do it all yourself

One option is to learn digital marketing skills yourself. For example, many Founders try to do a little social media marketing in their spare time.

But unless you have a lot of talent and a lot of extra time, you won’t be able to run an effective marketing campaign that rapidly grows your business.

And that’s just social media. Digital marketing includes many different methods and strategies, ranging from SEO to pay-per-click advertising, and from content marketing to online reputation management.

If your core business isn’t digital marketing, you won’t have the necessary expertise to cover all of those areas, and chances are you don’t know about half them, let alone understand which ones are most likely to help your business grow.

Use an agency to get strategic consultation and training

Even before you decide to outsource your digital marketing, an agency can be extremely helpful by analyzing the current state of your website and online marketing efforts, plus give you advice on which strategies and specific marketing channels are going to be most effective to grow a business in your Industry.

In addition, you can use an agency to get training for yourself or your team. For example, check out our LinkedIn marketing course.

Get high value at low cost from a good digital agency

If you hire an agency to do your marketing, you’ll find that the good ones will offer you the services of a whole team at a much lower cost than one full time staff member would cost you.

Their marketing teams usually include content writers, designers, website developers, SEO experts, social media experts, and pay-per-click experts, among others.

That’s possible because each team member is highly specialised in his or her area, and each team works for several clients at the same time.

So you’ll pay a relatively low price to get the help of a highly trained marketing team to promote your business effectively, instead of using half-baked measures on your own, or hiring expensive in-house staff.

Use detailed reporting to measure ROI

You might ask – If I hire an agency, how do I know the efforts of the agency are actually growing my business?

That’s a good question, and needs to address it by defining clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and how they are expected to improve over time.

KPIs are the metrics that define the success of your business – for example: a steadily rising number of new customers per month.

Ask the agency to provide detailed reporting of these KPIs in a regular report. That way you’ll be able to calculate the increase in revenue due to the agency’s marketing campaign, and can measure the ROI.

Use an agency to scale rapidly

If your business is starting to take off, you’ll need a lot more manpower to scale up the marketing.

While hiring and training new staff takes a long time, an agency can scale much faster because they usually have extra staff capacity that can be brought into play immediately.