Does your in-house team have the right digital skills? Are you keeping informed on the latest news from the digital world? Are you using the newest digital tools and technologies?
These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself when assessing your digital marketing and deciding whether you are going to manage your marketing in-house or outsource it to a digital marketing agency.
On one hand, there are a lot of brands that keep their marketing activities in-house and manage it successfully without outsourcing. On the other hand, it is very common for companies to outsource at least part of their digital capability and keep some things in-house.
The following points are not intended to make any generalisation, but aim to offer some useful insights into the benefits of working with a digital marketing agency, especially when digital marketing is not the core of your role. If you find yourself struggling at times with the overwhelming diversity of choice or the advanced technologies the digital environment requires you to master, then you might find the ideas below useful.
Here are six reasons why you should consider outsourcing your digital marketing to an agency.
1. Digital Knowledge and Expertise
Agencies must constantly upgrade their digital knowledge and gain new skills to stay competitive and offer superior service to clients.
No other industry is evolving as rapidly as digital. The constant advancements and changes within digital make it a little more challenging for in-house teams to continuously invest time, money and effort in keeping their knowledge and expertise up-to-date while juggling priorities of their core business.
For example, Google frequently updates their search engine algorithms; Facebook introduces new features every few weeks. The dynamic environment of digital means keeping well informed of evolving possibilities in social media, email, display, paid search, and a myriad of technologies and tools, just to mention a few. For agencies this is an innate behaviour so they can quickly adapt campaigns as per the latest upgrades.
2. Experience and Integrated Approach
Agencies work with various brands and industries and implement learnings from previous campaigns.
Due to their experience of working with several clients and diverse campaigns, agencies can often take a more holistic approach to any marketing challenge. Of course, clients are the ones who know their audience best inside and out, but a digital marketing agency could bring to the table a more varied experience and deeper insights.
By doing so, they can reveal several aspects of a campaign that were not previously considered. They combine years of experience on working with diverse clients, industries and audiences and can draw up a comprehensive approach for your own business challenges.
3. Creativity and Source of Ideas
A digital agency is ‘trained’ to think creatively and bring new ideas to the table.
Agencies live and breathe creativity. Devising creative solutions for several challenges forces them to constantly think from different creative angles. By taking a metaphorical step back, they’ll view your challenge in a different light and will often manage to come up with an unexpected creative proposal thanks to a lesser degree of familiarity with your product.
A digital marketing agency can turn the creative process on its head and add a special twist to any campaign. In-house teams usually tend to focus more on media planning and buying or campaign management and less on the creative approach. A both strategic and creative approach will help you get a complete perspective, custom built to tackle your challenge.
4. Cost and Time
Using a digital marketing agency could be cost effective and time saving.
Working with a digital marketing agency can sometimes be much more cost effective than developing an in-house team of specialists. The resources (both time and finances) necessary to hire and train a complete team of digital marketing specialists can end up much higher than outsourcing your marketing to an agency, who may already possess the digital knowledge and expertise you need.
The biggest benefit of using agencies is the time saved. Working with the right agency can free up a lot of time for clients, allowing them to give more time to their core business.
5. Effective Media Planning and Buying
Digital marketing agencies have a lot more experience with media planning and buying under their belt.
Agencies do media planning and buying day in and out for several hundreds of campaigns. This gives them a level of expertise that spans across a multitude of channels for a variety of different industry sectors and marketing objectives. They know how to locate and have access to the right audience at the right price, through partnerships often unavailable to small to medium sized brand teams.
Their constant efforts for campaign management and optimisation will help you get better results for your campaign objectives.
6. Tools and Technologies
Working with a digital agency gives your marketing campaigns access to the latest digital tools and technologies.
Agencies have access to diverse and sophisticated promotional or reporting tools and technologies, which can sometimes be unaffordable to small and medium sized in-house teams due to minimum spends required.
Engaging an agency could mean that your campaigns will benefit from the superior capabilities of these tools without the financial pressure, as the cost is spread amongst several clients and campaigns.
Looking for a digital marketing agency and don’t know where to start? How about getting in touch with us? Or here are some tips you might find useful.
