The Pros and Cons of Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

In this blog post, we explore the pros and cons of hiring a digital marketing agency to help you decide whether outsourcing your online marketing is right for your business.

Why do businesses outsource their digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a dynamic and fast-paced industry. New online marketing trends, strategies, and technologies emerge on a regular basis. Continuing to stay on top of the latest digital marketing trends can feel overwhelming for business owners who are often more familiar with traditional marketing methods such as direct mail and newspaper/TV ads.

Digital marketing can take a lot of ongoing effort.  The requirements of publishing to numerous online marketing resources – blogging, social media, video, online review replies, etc. – can overwhelm business owners that are busy running their businesses.

The skills needed for digital marketing are specialized.  Most business owners don’t know how to develop new content, track performance, and measure ROI from their online marketing campaigns. More importantly, most business owners don’t want to do those things.

Therefore, business owners will often outsource digital marketing to achieve their online marketing goals faster and more effectively than if doing it themselves or in-house.

What is a digital marketing agency?

A digital marketing agency provides online marketing services for businesses.  Much like a CPA provides accounting and bookkeeping. A typical digital marketing agency can provide a variety of services, including SEO, search paid promotion, content creation, social media marketing, video production, and branding.

The typical digital marketing agency provides its services on an ongoing basis, usually charging a retainer for a fixed level of hours or services per month.

How do you know you are getting your money’s worth from a digital marketing agency?  You measure the ROI of your digital marketing campaigns by measuring brand awareness, the number of new leads, increases in subscriptions, and tracking marketing to increase customers and sales.

Is hiring an agency the right choice for your business?

When deciding if a digital agency is right for your business, you should consider the following factors:

Value of a web visitor?

Before choosing a digital marketing agency, you should make sure that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. You need to have a good estimate of how much you will benefit from increases in online visibility and traffic to your website and social media.

The projected value of new customers and leads will help you to determine whether the investment is worth it. You want to consider both the short-term and long-term ROI of digital marketing.

Does your customer go online to find your services?

Most people pick up their phones or open their laptops to search for products and services these days.  If your business is in an industry where people want to search for vendors, compare services, check out online reviews and research the company, then you probably need to invest in digital marketing.

Is your competition online?

Assuming your customers go online to search for your services and products, then you probably have competition for visibility on Google and social media.  This means you will need aggressive digital marketing to compete against your competition, which is most likely working with a digital marketing agency to increase their visibility online.

Reasons to Hire an Agency

If you outsource your digital marketing to an agency, you can focus your efforts on the parts of the business that are core to your success. This frees up your internal resources to focus on tasks that will generate greater ROI.

What if your website is not generating leads?  A digital marketing agency will have the knowledge and experience to take care of all of your digital marketing needs. An agency can bring your business up-to-date with the latest digital trends and technologies. This will help you to maximize your marketing efforts and bring more leads and sales to your website.

Today’s digital marketing landscape is incredibly competitive. It’s not enough to have high-quality products and services; your website needs to have a customer focused message, rank well in search engines, you need to have a strong social media presence, and you need to be visible on major marketing platforms such as Google Ads.

Whether you have the internal resources or not, it can be difficult to focus on all of these areas at once. An experienced digital marketing agency will be able to handle all aspects of your digital marketing, from design and content creation to SEO and paid marketing campaigns. This will free up your internal resources and allow you to focus on core aspects of your business.

Reasons not to hire an agency

Digital marketing can be expensive.  Hiring a good digital marketing agency can be an expense smaller businesses can’t afford. As mentioned above, digital marketing is a dynamic and fast-paced industry and requires expertise that can be expensive.

If the value of a new lead from online marketing is low, or your customers don’t search online then you probably should not hire a digital marketing agency.

Another reason not to hire a digital marketing agency is you give up some control on how your business is presented online.  This may be a bad thing or a good thing.  But either way, when you decide to work with an agency, you will give up control of some aspects of how your business is represented online.

How to find a good digital marketing agency

If you decide you need to outsource your digital marketing to an agency, then you have some research to do. Here are the things you should consider when searching for a digital marketing agency:

Experience.  Make sure that the agency you choose has experience working with businesses like yours. Ideally, you want an agency that works with similar types of businesses in your industry. This will help the agency to understand your needs and create more impactful marketing campaigns.

References. A track record of proven success can tell you a lot about a digital marketing agency. Ask for references from other businesses that the agency has worked with. You should also ask if the agency is happy for you to speak with past clients. This will allow you to get an inside look at the quality of the agency’s work and customer service.

Cost. When you’re hiring a digital marketing agency, it’s important that you stay within your budget. Don’t go over your budget just because you think that it’s better to hire an expensive agency.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is an essential part of any modern business, but it can be difficult to manage effectively on your own. A digital marketing agency can help you to create a strong online presence and attract more customers to your website.

Digital marketing agencies can provide a range of services including social media marketing, content creation, brand strategy, and paid advertising. It’s important to choose the right agency for your business and select an agency that is a good fit for your needs.

When you’re looking for a digital marketing agency, it’s important to choose one that is a good fit for your business and has the expertise and track record to deliver effective results.