As is the case with many marketing directors and company owners across the land, you may have experienced a Sisyphean battle in recent years. This epic, frustrating boulder-rolling comes from the endless discussions regarding whether to hire an inbound marketing agency or beef up your internal staff.
As recently as three years ago, that conversation might have concerned whether inbound marketing was something your organization should even do. Thankfully, we’ve moved past those times, when you got questions ranging from “Why should we blog when we could be marketing?” and “How many coins do I need to put into the Internet before inbound starts working for me?” Ah, the good old days.
You or your key decision-makers are likely now on board with inbound marketing, even if you’re not entirely sure how it ought to work. If your organization is just starting out or looking to grow your footprint, though, you still have a difficult decision ahead as to how to best get that plan off the ground.
Which approach should you choose?
You’ll note a bit of bias here, but we think it will be easier to hit your goals if you hire a digital agency. You can absolutely build a marketing team out of your internal staff, or even stock your quote-unquote team with freelancers. But eventually, those folks are going to need to have expertise, a budget, and the time to execute your inbound marketing plan.
You do have an inbound marketing plan, right?
Assuming you’re not sprinting back to your office to develop an inbound marketing strategy, here are five reasons why we highly recommend hiring an agency.
Chances are, not everyone on your busy team is going to be up to speed on the latest technology. That might be HubSpot, that might be programmatic advertising platforms, or it might be third-party tools like SEMrush or Screaming Frog. Regardless of what you’re using, you need to master the email, SEO, and CMS technologies that make good marketing possible, or you need to have someone master them and execute your strategy effectively.
With these responsibilities on your plate daily, and the fact that you need to have this tech to keep up with a smartphone-savvy customer base that uses their phone on average 3 hours and 35 minutes per day, you’ve got a recipe for some rough weeks. Keeping up with tech trends is a huge part of what your digital agency does, however, and that ensures you won’t lose sleep at night over how responsive your email campaigns are. If you can’t carve out the time yourself—and believe us, we get how hard it is—then you should get the help of an agency.
Creating valuable and easily-digestible marketing content takes time, and understanding when and where your buyers are looking for that content is no simple feat. Managing different software takes specific expertise, which takes time, and this is all on top of your day job as a marketing professional. As we discussed above, time is at a premium. We aren’t even mentioning the work that goes into the day-to-day, including meetings with your team and the research we’ve outlined above.
So why not let an agency shoulder that weight? They’ll already have the expertise you’re looking for and you’ll be able to clear some time from that busy schedule of yours. You’ll still have the final say over content being produced, without all that pesky labor to actually produce it. You’ll be amazed how much time you can save if you simply have to run through a quick round of edits instead of researching, writing, and editing your own copy.
At this point, you may be thinking, “This all sounds great, but what would hiring a digital agency cost?” It’s an understandable question.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary for a marketing manager in 2017 was around $145,000. For a web developer, the average salary comes in at around $71,000. A marketing content writer can make about $70,000 per year, according to Indeed.com. These numbers can vary by region and company, of course, but these kinds of specialists and talented managers do not come cheap.
See where we’re going with this? Paying a digital agency on a monthly basis to consistently work toward your business goals could actually save your company money in the long run, as well as direct management time for the staff you’d otherwise need to hire.
Hiring a digital agency also helps you obtain all the services necessary to expand your online marketing efforts in one fell swoop, rather than either hiring several new team members or building up the knowledge base of those you already have.
Web design and development, content creation, and social media marketing, are only a few of the different inbound skill sets that require a lot of time and focus. Hiring employees for each position could be a lengthy process and, as we pointed out before, an expensive one.
An agency—the right one, of course—can give you all these things and more. That’s what we’d call value.
Analysis is a huge part of a successful marketing strategy. How do you know which strategies are working and which ones need to be tweaked a little? The good news is that everything is measurable these days. The bad news is that this analysis often requires new software systems, knowledge and, you guessed it, time.=
A digital agency will not only fulfill your marketing needs but will measure the results and can help you adjust course if something isn’t working. The results are the key thing today, and your marketing plan should be built around SMART goals that are actionable, attainable and drive the business forward. Developing those goals—to say nothing of implementing them—is where an agency can really shine, as they’ve likely worked with businesses who need more leads, more traffic, or more sales, just like you do.
So there you have it—five ways that hiring an agency can help you really nail this inbound marketing thing. Interested in learning more about how a digital agency like Raka can help you meet your goals? Get in touch, we’d love to answer your questions!