Benefits of hiring a marketing agency for your business

A Good Place to Start

You got the green light from your boss to improve the marketing of the company you are working for? Or are you, as a CEO, debating whether to hire a marketing agency or an internal marketer? First, congratulations on making that move! Second, when it comes to marketing, businesses are plagued by a never-ending quandary – whether to hire an in-house marketer or contract a marketing agency. While proponents of an internal marketer might assert that they’re more cost-efficient and personalized, the reality is that working with a marketing agency offers numerous benefits that many businesses need to consider. A good agency fit can propel your brand on a goal-oriented, expert-backed, and ROI-driven journey – saving you time and money while hitting the results you’re looking for. If you want to know more about Kontra as an agency, check out this blog post.

This blog post will explain the many benefits of working with a marketing agency, so hold on tight.

The right time to hire a marketing agency 

Convinced you’re ready to hire an external marketing agency? Let’s move on to identifying some objectives from this partnership. Yes, engaging an agency requires investing your time, money, and trust in the future of your brand. A good agency partner can transform your brand, and the wrong one can mean a waste of all these efforts. So, let’s evaluate when you might need an agency:

• It’s not getting done – We get it. You are doing five jobs. It only makes sense to prioritize those who immediately pay the bills or put out the fires. Because marketing takes time and strategy, it quickly moves to the bottom of the pile. Since marketing is the only thing a marketing agency does, they can simultaneously take it off your plate and make it a top priority.
• You don’t enjoy marketing – Trust us, it shows. Ho-hum blog posts, uninspired emails and landing pages, and a half-hearted approach to social media will not bring the desired results. Agencies love this stuff. Let them get their passion for marketing to your passion for your business. You’ll be amazed at the results.
• You’ve realized you don’t have the skills – Why should you? It’s puzzling when talented and intelligent business owners say they know nothing about marketing. A good marketing agency will get to know you and your business well and apply their skills.
• The Sales Department is Complaining of “No Good Leads” – Assuming your salespeople are skilled and hard-working, it could be that current marketing efforts are producing few leads or poor-quality leads. A good marketing agency will learn about your sales process and integrate their marketing with your sales team. With the support and input of your sales team, they’ll refine and adjust your marketing based on real results.
• Your Marketing Results are Hit or Miss – If your marketing results have been hit or miss, you may have concluded that inbound marketing doesn’t work for your business. Could the blame instead lie with your shot-in-the-dark approach? A marketing agency will look closely at your challenges and goals and devise a strategy to overcome those challenges and meet those goals. Over time, somebody will refine the strategy.
• You Wonder What is Working – If you suddenly experience an increase in website traffic, phone calls, or new leads, do you know where they’re coming from? If not, you’re likely wasting your time on ineffective marketing strategies and squandering potential opportunities for even greater success. How are your marketing efforts contributing to website traffic, leads and customers? If you can’t answer that question, let a marketing agency answer it for you.

What does a Marketing Agency do

A marketing agency offers a broad range of services to help you implement an integrated marketing strategy for all your brand goals, as said by Hubspot. For instance, you might hire a marketing agency to assess your current marketing strategy and help you create a stronger brand voice or connect to a larger audience. You can use a combination of SEO, social media, advertising, and PR to ensure your business goals are met. A marketing agency comprises various experts who can help you in different fields of work. It is important to find an agency that fits how they work, communicate, price etc.

How can you benefit from the marketing agency?

If you are still wondering how can you benefit from the agency, here are some of the most important advantages:

Marketing expertise

One of the biggest pros of hiring a marketing agency is having their expertise available in most areas of marketing. An agency can comprise expert content writers, SEO professionals, web design professionals, social media professionals, and graphic designers, all with real, hands-on experience creating an online marketing strategy while collaborating with multiple companies. These experts have the added benefit of having already learnt how to succeed and prevent failures. To gain an advantage over your competitors, staying on top of new advertising methods with high ROI, user behaviour, SEO changes, and much more is essential. Google, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms constantly update their rules and means of service. To stay on top of the search results pages (SERPs), you must stay up to date with changes to search algorithms. Experts who can analyze and understand the data given by platforms would also need to critique your brand angle. Unless you can hire an expert in these topics, a marketing agency is one of the most viable ways to scale your brand.

Fresh and honest perspective

When all of your internal marketing team members are focused on the same goal, it can be easy for the team to develop tunnel vision and lose sight of the bigger picture. Additionally, employees may be timid in expressing their opinions out of fear of criticism or even getting in trouble.  Marketing agencies, however, focus on the consumer perspective and have the objective experience of what works or not. The main goal of marketing agencies is to boost and retain client traffic using outstanding creative means. To get here, agencies encourage creative, out-of-the-box ideas that give you a step up from competitors. For instance, social media may be complex for companies to maintain, leading to repetitive, structured, easy-to-post content that could bore and lose loyal consumers. Agencies will take the weight off your shoulders, maintaining a consistently creative and engaging social media and overall brand presence.

Cost and Time Efficient

You may ask, “Can I save money by hiring a marketing agency?” All the benefits of hiring a marketing agency add up to the biggest benefit: 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 marketing department to the same extent. You do the math; average cost per hire, annual salaries of a marketing team, benefits, office space, and so on. On the other hand, marketing agency services can start way lower per 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. However, you can contact your account executive for updates and requests outside your weekly meetings.

Access to technology and trends

If you’ve ever tried learning about the latest marketing technology and trends, it may seem incredibly daunting with all the changing aspects (digital, we are talking about you!). You may feel like you’re always behind and spending more time researching than implementing. It’s common to ask seemingly trivial questions, such as how many hashtags I should include and what I should put in the caption. Other tools, such as keyword research, keyword planners, email marketing resources, social media marketing tools, SEO marketing tools and metric tools, may be unnecessarily costly and hard to manage. This is where marketing agencies come in that are already subscribed to most of these tools and already have the research and experience with the technology.

Less Risk and Flexibility

Unlike hiring in-house marketing employees, working with marketing agencies can be flexible and convenient. Utilizing agencies reduces the risk of your marketing strategy experimenting on your company. Agencies have the experience and wisdom of what tools and techniques benefit company growth. Another risk you must avoid is the cost and time spent on new hires. Unlike employees, in most cases, if you discontinue your relationship with your agency, it’s usually a smooth, typically cost-less process that takes no more than a month.

More Time to Focus on Business Needs

Most entrepreneurs are busy with a million and one things at a single time. Thus they need more time and expertise to learn and manage the marketing side of their business. Agencies support entrepreneurs to spend their time working on better, more urgent matters, allowing them to focus more on the products/services they offer. Agencies take the responsibility of your brand message as their sole responsibility and thus amplify your brand quality and growth, opening more streams of consumers to authenticate your company further. Best case, you find a great agency. You get the best of both worlds without the long-term risk and permanence of hiring a new employee.

Immediate start

A marketing agency can start as soon as hired. There’s no training. They know how to do their job from day one. Unlike with a new employee, no training is required. Also, think about all the times you hired someone, spent a lot of time and money on training, and then quit. Or, think about when you hired someone who was a bad fit and had to terminate them months later. Both cases are time-consuming and disappointing and also put your dealership behind. You won’t have to do any of this when you hire a marketing agency. The staff members they assign to handle your marketing efforts are already trained. They’ll need information from your dealership to do their job better, but you won’t need to teach them. That’s a huge plus. If the worst happens and you hire a marketing agency that’s not a great fit, you can easily terminate your arrangement and move on. Not much will be lost. You’ll be free to look for a new agency to serve your needs better.

The ball is in your court

As you can see, the benefits of hiring a marketing agency are endless. Primarily, an agency is your partner, a consultant and somebody who will guide you through whatever process you need. It is not easy to delegate everything right away, and trust takes time. That is why it is important you find an agency that is a good fit for you and with whom you can build a relationship. Once you do that, benefits will come one after another, and you will think – why haven’t I done this sooner? Good luck on your journey!