Investing in digital marketing is a necessary step for any business, whether you own a start-up and are still finding your feet, or your business is more established and you want to maintain your audience (and grow it even further). At this stage it is important to understand whether it’s worth your time to start, or keep doing it yourself, or outsource to a digital marketing agency.
Why is it necessary to worry about digital marketing?
In the current digital climate the vast majority of companies require an online presence. Customers and clients will research their options online and if your competitors have a stronger online presence, you’re in danger of losing business.
Keeping this in mind it is important to ask yourself:
- Do you know what you’re doing with your website and social media?
- Do you have the time to devote to optimising and managing your website, social media accounts and create relevant content regularly?
- Do you have potential customers you don’t think are being effectively targeted currently?
If you don’t have the time to devote to your digital marketing, or don’t have the understanding to deal with it effectively, you will need to come up with a digital strategy to optimise your online presence.
Why choose a boutique agency?
Boutique agencies can help identify a strategy and direction for establishing your company online. Outsourcing to them will give you the flexibility to focus on your own business, while having someone else take care of a side of the business that isn’t in your wheelhouse anyway.
They can help:
- Understand who your competitors are
- Understand what your competitors are doing by identifying what works and what doesn’t work
- Identify the consumer journey and help define digital marketing objectives
- Strategise cost-effective ways to create opportunities to optimise your business. Then create strategies to reach your objectives
Hiring a boutique digital marketing agency can be better value for money than hiring an in-house marketing team. Employing one experienced marketer will typically cost more than hiring an agency, and an agency will have a greater breadth of resources. They will provide content creators, SEO/SEM/PPC specialists, social media specialists and branding advice. They can work on retainer or ad hoc, so have that flexibility.
Don’t forget…
It’s important to be aware that early marketing efforts often don’t have an immediate ROI. Initially, efforts to grow small and medium-sized businesses are based around laying the foundations before you see positive results. If you don’t have the budget to facilitate that as a smaller or fledgeling business it may be a better use of your resources to take social media or digital marketing training to help understand more about what you can do yourself.
Above all research prospective agencies, you want to hire, ask lots of questions and make sure they’re the right fit to work with your company. Agencies end up becoming extensions of your team so it’s important that they understand your company, what you want to achieve and have the capability to help you reach your goals.
Source: Medium / REDotzCreations
