Are you considering hiring a marketing agency?
If so, you’re not alone. Marketing agencies can be an excellent resource for businesses of all sizes. Agencies can help with brand development, graphics, and website design to refine your image. They can create lead generation and revenue growth through promotional campaigns in social media, search engine rankings, and paid media placements.
And most importantly, the best agencies can help you learn more about your business and your market.
But when is the right time to hire one? And how do you go about choosing the right agency for your business?
This blog post will answer those questions and help you decide what’s right for your business.
What Is a Digital Marketing Agency?
The main goal for any digital marketing agency is to help your company achieve and surpass your business goals through online marketing techniques.
No newspaper ads, radio spots, or billboards. Digital marketing agencies leverage online technology from Google Ads to social media advertising.
But that’s not all. There are a lot of hats a digital marketing agency can wear: anything from specializing in search engine optimization to executing a full-service digital marketing strategy.
Frequently, a digital marketing agency handles everything related to your company’s online presence, including email marketing, content writing, and social media management.
At The Loop Marketing, we offer a wide range of options depending on your goals and business needs.
Our brand development and design offer an opportunity to create or update your logo, identify your brand’s story, and illustrate your online messaging clearly.
For a more robust option, The Loop Marketing’s Elevated Marketing takes your company goals and utilizes a vast array of online marketing techniques and tools to get your business to the next level.
We like to think of ourselves as an all-in-one solution for your online marketing needs.
When Should I Hire a Marketing Agency?
This is the million-dollar question.
Rather than think about hiring a marketing agency as a set milestone (i.e., when we have X number of sales or customers), a better way to look at it is to first identify your company goals.
When setting your business key performance indicators, are you on track to achieve your goals independently?
If you’re not, then it might be time to start thinking about hiring a digital marketing agency because their main focus should always be one of the tools your company uses to achieve its goals.
Here are a couple other factors that might signify that it’s time to hire a marketing agency.
You don’t have enough time for marketing.
Your business is growing, and you’re knee-deep in making sales and building a day-to-day routine. Somewhere along the way, you realize that you don’t have the time to build a functioning marketing department.
A recent survey of small and medium sized business owners found that the respondents reported spending an average of 20 hours per week personally on their marketing, but 74% would rather spend time on their business than on marketing. (REFERENCE: https://www.callrail.com/learn/state-small-business-marketing-2021)
Digital marketing is more than just putting together a coupleof social media posts and a website. It requires frequent analysis of analytics, an understanding of best practices, and consistent content output.
When you’re a growing business, time is an essential commodity. Rather than learning the intricacies of digital marketing, now might be the time to hire the professionals.
Digital marketing trends have become too complicated.
Google changes its algorithm all of the time. It happens more frequently than you’d think, which means that articles that do well with SEO today might not tomorrow.
But that isn’t all: social media modifies who shows up on your feed daily. Keeping up with these digital marketing trends is time-consuming, complex, and often frustrating.
Digital marketing agencies handle these developments as they are constantly in the loop about the changes that affect businesses. Don’t let rapidly changing trends pull you away from spending time working on the parts of the business you love.
You don’t have the tools necessary to succeed in digital marketing.
To run a successful business using digital marketing, you’re going to need a bevy of tools at your disposal to make sure everything remains up to date, and you stay one step ahead of your competitors.
Some of the tools you’ll want to use include something for social media management (Hootsuite, Buffer), website analytics (Google Analytics, SEMRush, Ahrefs), and the backend of your website (WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace).
That doesn’t even get into keyword research, domain authority, and email list building.
Agencies utilize all of these tools to make sure your digital marketing campaigns stay relevant and functional.
You’re ready to accelerate your company’s growth.
Lastly, the best time to hire a digital marketing agency is when you realize you want to accelerate your company’s growth. A good agency will drive new leads and customers with unique ideas based on your business’s buyer personas.
If you’re waffling on whether or not it’s time to hire a marketing agency, think about your year-end goals and figure out how digital marketing can help your business grow.
Why Not Hire Someone for Marketing Instead of Working with an Agency?
Hiring is expensive, as the average cost of hiring an employee can be around $4,000 according to a Glassdoor study. It also can take an average of 24 days to find the right hire. In a more competitive hiring environment, these numbers can get much higher.
AND, you have to know exactly what you are looking for in an employee, which is not always easy.
Also, it is hard to find an individual that has a really well rounded marketing background and can handle the full spectrum of needs. Some marketing tasks might be very creative, such as brand identity development or content creation, whereas some might be very technical like dealing with website issues or programming a marketing automation sequence.
Hiring an agency team with a full set of skills for the cost of one employee can make a lot of sense.
How to Choose the Right Marketing Agency
There are a ton of digital marketing agencies out there so picking the right one is tricky.
The first thing you’ll want to identify is what you want from your digital marketing team. Is it more leads from Google? Want to build your brand utilizing social media and video?
Every digital marketing agency has its own strengths and weaknesses, so identifying what your individual company needs will help you weed out some of the different options available to you.
The next step is to check for success. At The Loop Marketing, we highlight some of our greatest success stories through case studies. These showcase not only what we’ve done but how we’ve helped these businesses grow with our specific techniques.
If the digital marketing agency can’t point you towards examples of their work or success, you might want to pass.
Lastly, interview a couple different digital marketing agency prospects. Remember, these folks are working for you, so if they don’t seem like a great fit, there is always someone around who is more likely to help your business grow.
Make sure to ask them about how they plan to help you, and your company hit your goals, what digital marketing tools are available, and what examples of success their agency can provide.
If customer service is important, make sure your potential agency is the type that will pick up the phone when you need them to. You should not have to wait a week to get a response from an email. Do they have an Account Manager at your disposal?
If those answers make sense to you and the company seems like a great fit, then that’s when you’ll know you have found the right digital marketing agency.
Who Needs a Marketing Agency?
Two-part answer incoming.
Every business can use a digital marketing agency. Still, not every business needs to use everything a digital marketing agency offers.
For example, some B2B businesses will not find great success using social media. Still, they are desperate for an uptick in Local Google Rankings.
Another company might only need a well-developed, fast website and adding blog content is a waste of focus.
A good digital marketing agency should let you know based on your company’s goals, buyer persona, and industry whether or not specific digital marketing options will work for you.
Different business models and industries require other techniques.
A highly visual company such as home renovation should utilize the proper social media channels (focusing on images) and develop a content strategy targeting folks who are remodeling their home.
On the other hand, a restaurant still needs a fast, efficient website with updated Local Google information, but it shouldn’t have a blog just to have one.
It’s great to have options in the offerings of a digital marketing agency. Still, the right one will utilize their time wisely, focusing on the best-suited methods for your company’s growth.
Ready to Take Your Company to the Next Level? Reach Out to The Loop Marketing Today.
The Loop Marketing believes in building businesses for growth through the world of digital marketing. Our skilled digital marketing professionals have spent years practicing their craft and are constantly learning to stay on the cutting edge of digital marketing trends.
If you are ready to take the next great leap for your business, give The Loop Marketing a call today.
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