When the decision to “Go Inbound” (as in inbound marketing) has been made, the hard work of implementation has just begun.
If you’re currently vacillating between hiring employees to help with inbound efforts, or hiring an inbound marketing agency, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn about the benefits of hiring an inbound-trained team to help you achieve your goals.
Compelling Reason No. 1: Time
Agencies are Paid to Keep Up With Ever-Changing Technology
As a marketing professional in this day and age, chances are, you have a lot of responsibilities. You support sales efforts, plan offline events and campaigns and communicate your company’s offerings to the right people at the right time. Staying up-to-date with fast-changing technology — like marketing automation, e-mail campaign choices, the latest SEO tactics, and the like — is an integral part of any successful inbound marketing campaign.
Did you know that digital marketing has one of the steepest learning curves in the entire history of business?
For each of the marketing tactics that comprise inbound marketing, there are a lot of moving parts. To give you a very simple example, for an e-mail campaign, one must know:
- How well a CMS performs on multiple mobile platforms
- Whether an e-mail will look the same on a tablet or smartphone
- How the e-mail will look when a new version of the smartphone comes out
As an agency, our role is to stay abreast of the finer details as our team works to make a robust and powerful online presence for our clients — all with the intention of giving providing them with more time to focus on internal implementations and offline marketing goals. Doing this requires skills in content creation, market research, web design and development, SEO, lead generation, e-mail marketing, social media marketing and sometimes paid advertising.
Compelling Reason No. 2: Money
Agencies Are Less Expensive Than You May Think
You may be wondering, “What would hiring an inbound agency COST?” Paying a team at a digital agency on a monthly basis costs, on average, anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 per month. Paying an agency to perform all of the above-mentioned skills and to consistently work toward your business goals will likely save your company a good amount of money in the long run, and in fact, make you money! How many sales would it take to cover the cost of those services?
To put into perspective, let’s compare these costs with what a company would pay hired in-house employees to carry out a digital marketing campaign. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average median annual salary for a marketing manager in 2016 was around $131,180. For a web developer, the average median salary comes in at around $63,130. And a marketing content writer makes about $65,000 per year, according to Indeed.com.
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.
Digital marketing requires a variety of very different skill sets that are difficult to find in one employee with an annual salary that falls within your company’s budget. Not to mention, hiring individual employees for each of these positions could be a long process.
Hiring a digital agency enables you, the marketing professional or CEO, to do more with the budget that you have by taking advantage of all of the services available and necessary to expand your online marketing efforts — AT ONCE.
Compelling Reason No. 3: Team
When You Hire an Agency, You Hire a Team That Can Hit the Ground Running
Learning and managing marketing software, deciding on a content strategy and SEO strategy, and implementing inbound tactics takestraining, hours upon hours of internal meetings, review processes and decision making. Not to mention managing new employees’ proper execution.
An agency has the built-in expertise that you’ve been looking for, so why not let an agency shoulder some of that weight? It pays to hire people that can hit the ground running.
Compelling Reason No. 4: ROI
Agencies Eat, Sleep and Breathe Measurement and Reporting
With Inbound, everything that you do can be measured. And the even better news: when you’re working with an agency, you don’t have to be the one that’s gathering then numbers in order to show ROI to your executive team. An agency will provide those numbers to you.
For a marketing strategy to be successful, it’s imperative to know which strategies are working and which need to be abandoned or tweaked.
Agencies have the tools to measure the results that your executive team is most concerned about, and can produce reports and advise your company to adjust course if something isn’t working. These numbers tell us where the big wins are, help us uncover additional opportunities and tell us where to tighten our focus so that your business can see greater success.
Compelling Reason No. 5: Glory
Agencies Make You SHINE
That’s right, we’re not in it for the glory! We’re in it to help you reach your revenue goals by executing on the solid, tried-and-true inbound methodology. We want you — and your company — to look really good, and really smart…for hiring us! 😉 Your success is our success. When done right, it’s a WIN-WIN.
“Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” -Mattie Stepanek
Our goal is to complement your in-house sales and marketing team as much as possible. We’re here to serve you so that you can serve the greater good of your company. Hand us what you can’t handle, so you can focus on your core responsibilities.
In Conclusion
We’re on your side. Our sole purpose is to help your business grow, in whatever way we can. And to execute on a strategy that encapsulates your company’s goals, challenges, plans and timeline.
