As a rule, business owners wear the hat of marketer along with many other hats. A small business model may require this. But as the business grows, the demands on the time of the business owner become more. Pretty soon you find yourself wondering if it isn't worth it to hire someone to do your marketing for you.
In this article, DMM gives you three reasons why it could be worth it for your to hire a Marketing Agency.
Priorities
You can do all your marketing yourself. You have the knowledge, the skills and additional information is available on the internet. Many business owners have undertaken marketing themselves, only to find all marketing activities to somehow be relegated to a secondary role due to more important tasks. DMM sees this all the time. A business owner starts out with the best intentions of marketing regularly. Then months go by with no social media activity. The Google Ads are set to automated bidding and no adjustments or improvements are made. No new campaigns are launched. No new blogs are written. Slowly the website starts to become stagnant and the inquiries stop coming. Meanwhile, the business owner is out on sales calls, organizing the service operations and hiring new personnel. Business is booming. But with no inquiries coming in, no sales calls will be made and over time sales and profit will start to reflect that.
At some point the business manager will realize that marketing needs some attention. However, with everything else going on marketing is not necessarily a priority. This is because marketing does not have a directly verifiable and immediate result. Other priorities might seem more urgent and important.
So while it is possible for you to do your marketing yourself, is this really the best use of your time and energy? Or would it be worth making your company's mission statement and goals your top priority?
Time
Marketing activities may take up more time than you are willing to allocate to it. There are many activities that are needed to make marketing successful. Previously we have written an article on the activities you can undertake in this area. Most of these are doable by anyone with a basic understanding of marketing. Some of them take more expertise. It is true that you would be able to accomplish them through self-study and over time build up the knowledge to do it at the level of an expert.
However, a business owner has many tasks to accomplish in a normal work day. Spending time researching and reading on the latest development in Search Engine Optimization and Google Algorithms might not be top of your list. In contrast, a marketing agency concentrate their efforts on knowing exactly what is new and effective in all areas of marketing. An agency also will have multiple people in different disciplines working on a client's marketing. So the graphic designer hones their skills over years on different clients, and thus is able to produce exceptional work that simple online design programs cannot accomplish. The SEO specialist has studied and continues to read everything that the industry produces to make sure all SEO best practices are followed. The team could include web developers, UX designers, Google Ads specialists, marketing strategists and social media specialists. This combined effort and knowledge can be profound.
For the individual business owner, the team that stands behind you at a marketing agency represents expertise, time and knowledge that you can utilize. The combined time spent on learning and executing marketing activities is time that the business owner can not duplicate by himself. It is also time that should be spent on his own business priorities and his own customers' needs.
Money
Marketing activities can cost you in many ways. Firstly, the man hours spent on activities that an agency could have undertaken is taking away productive time from your business. The learning curve on some activities may be much more than others and would also be taking you or your employees away from essential business activities that could be contributing to your productivity. Keeping up with new technology, platforms and changes to the marketing field can be a costly activity.
An example of this is where you need a video to demonstrate the working of a new product. You need to film the product with good quality video and sound, edit the video professionally, add a music track that comes from a stock music site and market it on the correct platforms with the keywords and links that help make it effective. Consider the right equipment, editing software, subscription to a digital assets website, cost per click and the man hours of the person handling all of this. When you count the cost of this, it might be worth hiring a professional marketing agency to get the job done well.
Another facet of marketing to consider is the mistakes that you avoid through using an agency. DMM has seen multiple companies experiment with marketing on the wrong platforms or with the wrong material. They spend time and money getting collateral ready, but don't see the result they were hoping for. Through trial and error you can certainly figure out the channels and assets that are best for your business. But an agency has already done the trials and errors. They have information you don't have and can help you avoid these money pits without the experiments and the unnecessary expenditure.
In Conclusion
DMM are passionate about marketing and your online presence. We spend our days doing marketing. Our mission is to help our clients create a great customer experience. Our team of experts are able to provide the best in their fields, and work hard to continually improve. Just as much as you are focused on the growth of your business by being the best in your industry, so are we. While you focus on your priorities, we focus on marketing which saves you time and money. Let us do the heavy lifting for you!
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