These days, nearly everyone in the workforce is used to wearing many hats – and being able to do so is often a selling point on resumes and in interviews. If this describes you in your career, chances are you’ve been asked to do something outside of your typical job responsibility, and for many people that includes taking on some marketing efforts. Sometimes companies choose to run marketing efforts in-house as a conscious decision; oftentimes in a race to remain competitive with other companies, it’s not. Many companies soon wonder, “How did we get here?”, “How did we spend so much budget on these initiatives?” and more importantly, “Are they working?” For the person thrown into overseeing or navigating the digital advertising landscape, they often think, “Is this my job now?”, “Am I qualified for this?”, “Do I really know what I am doing?”
As a digital agency that’s worked on all types of businesses, we’ve seen it all. Budgets are tight and leadership doesn’t want to bring on an agency partner just yet. Or, they’ll offer to bring on an agency only when some initial internal efforts show success. Other times, they want to bring on an agency but aren’t sure how to find one that’s qualified or where to start. Based on many of our conversations with prospects throughout the years, we put together the top six reasons you need a (savvy) digital marketing agency, and why you should hire one sooner rather than later.
Save Time
Time is money – we all know this. If you are in a leadership or supervisory role and are asking internal team members to test out some marketing initiatives, run some Facebook ads, try out Google ads, you are actually asking A WHOLE LOT. While you may feel that you’re giving your team new learning opportunities to be cross-functional and building their skill set, understand that this is a significant time investment and will very likely diminish their work on other projects or their work/life balance as they try to stay ahead of the curve. With an agency, you don’t have to teach yourself or your team a comprehensive understanding of ad strategy, how to find and use complicated ad tools and tech, or how to budget, report on and track activities. Running digital marketing campaigns is a full-time job for so many because it’s a race to keep up with an ever-changing landscape. Each day, our team members spend a good portion of their morning getting up to speed on all of the latest changes across the platforms we work on and we’re here to provide and pass on that knowledge, saving your team time and effort.
Not All Relationships Are Golden
This is a good one. Many times, we have prospects with fairly significant marketing budgets tell us that they don’t need an agency because they have a rep or partner from Facebook, Google, Amazon, or similar reaching out and guiding them. To a business, a relationship with someone at one of these big companies may seem awfully special but oftentimes the goals of those relationships are misaligned. While we can’t speak on behalf of all reps from these companies (because we’ve come across some real winners), we can tell you that the majority we’ve worked with just aren’t on the same page nor have the depth of knowledge that we expect from them. Think about it: many of these representatives are salespeople who haven’t run digital marketing campaigns for actual businesses before and their companies are incentivizing them based on how much money their clients spend on their given platform. No wonder they’ll try to sell you on impressions and CTR, telling you your efforts are paying off just based on your cost-per-click or how many people have seen your ads. If you hire an agency, you can expect much more than that. We dig down deep to understand the inner workings of your business beyond the click. For example, if you’re lead-based, maybe we can only track leads in our advertising platforms, but we’ll ask about quality, not just quantity. We’ll figure out how a lead turns into a sale and what other platforms you are using to track that so we can close the gap through creative reporting solutions. Reps may be “experts” on their ad platforms, but so much of digital advertising success takes place when the full customer decision journey and sales cycle is realized and accounted for.
Save Money
You save money in a couple of ways by bringing on an agency. First is by conserving your media budget. Media budget is sacred and oftentimes you’ve probably fought tooth and nail to get it. When you go with an agency from the start, you don’t have to make big mistakes and test a bazillion things. We know the strategies and methods to find the testing that works. We know what variables are high impact vs. low impact and we can get your media budget working harder for you much quicker than you’d think — without you having to make costly mistakes. Second, in many cases, we can save you money on the management of your digital campaigns as well. Of course, this varies by each company and their specific needs, but most of the time you pay an agency the same or less as a single salaried individual at your company, but you get a whole team for that cost! And if you’ve done your homework, you can find a whole team with knowledge very specific to your vertical, industry and goals. Really, it’s a huge value when you consider all that brainpower working in sync with your existing team versus paying just one individual to manage and lead everything in-house.
Focus Your Attention
We talked about how many people wear many hats in their careers today. So, if you could focus and wear fewer hats, where should your attention be? How would you want to spend your time? Working with a digital ad agency, you can find time to focus your attention on other matters to help grow your business and brand. With an agency taking the lead on digital ads, you have more time for other marketing efforts, and managing your overall marketing strategy, not just one specific piece of it.
Proper Setup & Reporting Insights
If we had a dime for every prospect who came to us because they lost access to one of their marketing platforms after an employee who had the only access left company…or how many times someone set up the wrong Google Ads account type…or placed a pixel in the wrong spot…we would be pretty well off. When you work with an agency, they help ensure you have the proper setup. From creating ad accounts to pixels, they ensure proper access levels and are wary of things that cause disapprovals, account suspensions and more. If you’re new to digital, let us set up your accounts properly and seamlessly from the beginning. The same goes for reporting. You don’t need messy dashboards and, if you’re new to digital, you’ll likely include too many data sets, not enough pertinent data points, or nothing actionable. We’ve been generating reports for years and know how to distill down the most important actionable insights for you each week.
Cross-Channel Ideas
The great thing about digital advertising is how much you learn from your campaigns. With cross-channel knowledge, our team is poised to shuffle through loads of data to find the little insights that matter – the insight that can translate to your next big campaign, TV spot, email newsletter, website update and more. Let an agency with cross-channel knowledge use their findings to influence other marketing efforts and parts of your business.
If you’re searching for an agency or warming up to the idea, reach out to us today. We’re happy to let you chat with our team, walk through our pricing and some initial ideas. If we can’t help you directly with your efforts, we’ve spent years building relationships with other companies who may be better suited to help you based on your specific needs. You can also do your own research by looking through through the top Digital Agencies according to DesignRush.