June 18, 2020
| Article | Advertising,
Analytics,
Content,
Design,
Search Engine Optimization,
Social Media
5 Benefits of Hiring a Marketing Agency
From A/B testing to zero-cost strategies, your marketing efforts determine the success of your business. You need to make sure your target market finds you, chooses you over your competitors, and enjoys the experience enough to repeat the cycle and recommend you to other potential customers. But who should you trust to take on all your marketing activities: an internal team or a marketing agency?
Digital marketing agency services offer more convenience than you might think, even if you already have an in-house marketing team. No matter whether you’re a small business or a well-established industry leader, read on to find out how a top marketing agency can provide you with a valuable partnership.
1. You Get More Experts to Work With
Unless you’re operating on an enterprise level, you probably cannot justify hiring in-house marketing professionals for every aspect of your marketing strategy. You’re more likely to hire one or two marketing professionals and expect them to be Jacks (or Jacquelines) of all trades. Given that online marketing is complex and ever-changing, it will be difficult for your employees to become experts at everything.
Because a marketing agency works with many clients at a time, they are able to hire specialists for each channel. This allows marketing agency employees to focus on their area of expertise, from paid media and web development to content marketing and SEO. As a result, they each develop years of cumulative experience and come together to offer a much broader skill set in their digital marketing agency services.
Not only that, but top marketing agencies have multiple specialists in any given area. That means your marketing efforts won’t come screeching to a halt if someone is out sick, goes on vacation, or leaves the company. If you do have a marketing department, digital marketing agency services can also supplement your work.
2. You Can Learn From Years of Experience
With an agency, you don’t just benefit from each individual’s skill set — you also tap into the team’s collective experience with clients. Agencies typically work with brands from across verticals, of a variety of sizes, and at different stages of their business. It doesn’t matter what your goals are or how you want to collaborate, an agency will have had some kind of similar experience before.
That’s not to say that your brand isn’t special. Past experience just allows an agency to skip the learning curve. While in-house marketing teams need to spend valuable time researching different strategies and finding reports about how they’ve worked for other companies, a top marketing agency has firsthand experience.
A marketing agency has seen what works and what doesn’t work. They can help you avoid pitfalls for new campaigns and provide ongoing insights into the digital landscape based on the results they’re seeing for clients every day. Even if you’re a huge company with a well-established marketing department, digital marketing agency services can still offer an outside perspective to support and inspire your marketing team.
3. You Can Make Your Marketing More Efficient
If all your marketing efforts are falling on one or two team members, it’s going to be difficult for them to learn about every channel, monitor results, keep on top of industry trends, and deliver a wide variety of tasks each day. Even if you have a larger marketing team, you still might not have the time to fine-tune your strategies or start on a large project.
Marketing agencies can take over the tasks that need close attention and expertise. Digital marketing agency services can include managing and optimizing budgets while tracking spend, saving you time to focus on running your business and often delivering better results.
Given their experience, top marketing agencies can also create and optimize personalized digital strategies to generate the highest return on investment (ROI) and cost per lead (CPL). If these are the types of marketing activities you want to keep in-house, agencies also offer à la carte options for more complex tasks, such as branding or website design, that your company doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle.
4. You Have Access to More Tools and Resources
Your marketing efficiency will also be determined by the tools you use, from BrightEdge and SEMRush to Facebook and Google. Subscriptions to these tools can quickly add up, and that’s without the training costs required to get your team up to speed with each platform.
Even though you’re spending money on these tools, you might not be getting the most out of these resources. Because top marketing agencies manage millions of dollars on platforms such as Facebook and Google Ads every month, they get the royal treatment, including their own dedicated representatives. Agencies also get their staff trained on these platforms without billing your company, so hiring an agency is a cost-effective way to get access to the tools and resources you need.
With more experts reviewing your account and round-the-clock support, it’s more likely that your marketing campaign will succeed.
5. You Can Save Thousands of Dollars
You may be asking, “Can I save money by hiring a marketing agency?” All of the benefits of hiring a marketing agency add up to the biggest benefit of all: you save money by using digital marketing agency services instead of bringing on more employees. Working with an agency will give you access to a team of experts and a whole suite of tools at only a fraction of what it would cost to build up your own marketing department to the same extent.
With everything from jobs ads and interviewing to onboarding and training, the average cost per hire in the US is around $4,000. To cover the annual salaries of a marketing team of around seven to nine marketers, you’re looking at anywhere from between $330,000 for smaller businesses to around $1,000,000 for larger organizations. That’s before taking into account benefits, technology expenses, and office space.
If you’re considering bringing on only one marketing specialist to avoid these costs, just remember that a bad hire can still cost you around $15,000 and then you’ll have to start the hiring process again. This will impact your marketing efforts, which are already limited by having only one marketer involved.
On the other hand, digital marketing agency services can start at $24,000 a year, depending on your contract and choice of services, and you’ll have access to all the marketing experts you need. You will also save valuable time, as an agency doesn’t need training or hand-holding. After a new client kickoff meeting, your dedicated agency team will be off to work, although you can always reach out to your account executive for updates and requests outside of your weekly meetings.
To find out how a top marketing agency can help you innovate and scale your business, contact REQ today.