When it comes to digital marketing, brands often question whether they should hire an agency to help them with their online marketing needs. It’s a fair question for sure, as there can be significant rewards and/or consequences, both quantitative and qualitative, based on their decision.
Interestingly, these questions are not exclusive to brands with limited internal or financial resources. Even brands with super savvy, internal marketing teams and sufficiently sized budgets ask this question, recognizing and assessing the additional value that digital marketing agencies can bring to the table.
The Reasons for Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency
1. Save Money—and Time!
Although it may seem counterintuitive to those brands with limited budgets, hiring a digital marketing agency can actually save your brand a lot of money.
No longer would the small business owner, or the do-it-yourselfer wearing multiple hats, need to take time away from the things they love. They could mitigate the instances in which they’re forced to reallocate that time to climbing one learning curve after another for all of the various platforms, tools, and marketing methodologies that exist. There’s no argument that a lack of familiarity with these can create a lot of inefficiencies, which effectively reduces the brand’s financial potential. Entrusting said work to an agency partner can free up more time for other more profitable and/or enjoyable duties.
Perhaps, the time an agency partner can help brands reclaim isn’t even reallocated back to work-related efforts… Instead, and as has been the case for some of our own clients, the newly freed time was put towards increasing both the amount and quality of our clients’ own personal time. It’s hard to put a monetary value on creating opportunities to explore hobbies and/or enjoy more time with family and friends—but the value is definitely there.
Additionally, brands with their own internal marketing teams can save money by hiring a digital marketing agency too. Serving as an extension to the brand’s internal team, agency partners can provide access to a greater volume of experiences, specialized expertise, and agency-side tools that can be acquired for much less than the costs that would otherwise be attributed to new employees (inclusive of payroll taxes, healthcare, salaries, software licenses, training periods, recruitment firms, increases in overhead costs, etc.) and/or some of the more expensive marketing platforms and solutions.
2. Improved Spending & Returns on Investment (ROI)
Another extension of the “saving money” benefit is that of improved spending. Digital marketing agencies are most typically composed of experts specializing in their respective fields, and that knowledge can be leveraged to improve the return on investment received across a brand’s various marketing initiatives.
3. Access to Experts
Previously cited a couple of times in this post, a strong reason for choosing to hire a digital marketing agency is the immediate access to digital marketing experts—and, particularly, specialized experts.
Relative to generalists, digital marketing newbies, or even the very savvy internal team members who wear several hats within their organization, there is a great wealth of knowledge that can be leveraged in working with an agency team member who both specializes in, and is entirely dedicated to, a particular field of digital marketing.
Competitors, trends, algorithms, platforms, and the effectiveness of tactics change regularly in the world of digital marketing—and it’s critical that the teams managing marketing efforts be able to keep up and ahead of these changes.
4. New Perspectives
Partnering with agency experts can also provide opportunities for new perspectives.
Working in silo, it’s not uncommon that we hear prospective clients admit it hadn’t occurred to them to approach a solution in a newly proposed way—with common factors forming the basis of the solution often including experiences unique agency team members, a difference in data interpretation, knowledge of new and upcoming technologies, or perspectives less impacted by internal biases and/or anecdotal evidence.
5. Enhanced Understanding
With new perspectives come enhanced understanding. This is because new ideas often lend themselves to creating more tests, and the accompanied analyses of tests contribute to the generation of data-driven insights that better help brands understand their consumers and make informed decisions.
6. Greater Stability
Armed with enhanced understanding and an extended digital marketing team to help implement optimization efforts, brands can better position themselves both competitively and in terms of reaching their marketing goals—hence, gaining greater stability as an organization.
But what’s better than improving organization stability? Well, you may be surprised at the number of times brand-side contacts have expressed their appreciation for helping them with their own personal stability.
Having heard everything from how our partnership with brands helped maintain mental stability for the internal team constantly “racking brains” for answers to difficult problems, to the small business owner who felt more financially secure because of their business’s online growth, the peace of mind gained in working with a trusted partner could possibly be the best reason of all to hire a digital marketing agency.
Making the Decision to Hire an Agency
When making the decision whether to hire a digital marketing agency, it’s important to consider both the potential benefits and the consequences of the decision. For example, in hiring a digital marketing agency, you may have to allot additional budget for service and management fees, but overall budget efficiency when it comes to your time and existing resources is likely to be gained along with improvements in performance, idea generation, and understanding. This is why it is so important to also consider not only the quantitative value of these decisions, but also the qualitative. In doing so, you might just be surprised as to why it is even a question at all whether to hire an agency.
