Four Benefits of Working With an Outside Marketing Firm

As I speak with more and more small businesses about the benefits of digital marketing, I am beginning to hear some usual suspects: Things like, “Our secretary handles that,” or “we should be able to do that ourselves.” For the smaller businesses out there, it’s understandable that the most convenient thing to do is sometimes just to take a current employee and deem them “Digital Marketing Director” of the company.

But the truth is, under this ‘strategy’, you are unlikely to obtain an online presence that’s really valuable (i.e. one that converts; one that will help direct potential customers to your website when they are searching for your services or expertise.) With this in mind, following are four benefits of hiring an outside digital marketing firm for small business owners.

1. A marketing firm is in business to help you grow.

CAUTION to businesses who are considering taking a current employee and re-assigning them as their head of marketing: While this may seem like a convenient solution at the time, there’s simply no way to guarantee that your existing employee will be an effective marketer. In fact, if they only have a rudimentary grasp of digital marketing (which is nearly always the case), you can almost guarantee they won’t be successful to this end.

Not only does effective marketing require expertise and experience in order to help grow businesses and brands, by handing off a big chunk of your business’ marketing duties to a current employee, you risk overloading his/her workload, which could ultimately have a damaging effect on your business down the road.

A marketing firm will take their expertise and experiences and successfully apply them to your brand. Client growth is the raison d’etre of every marketing firm; while an existing employee may be the easiest to take over marketing, you can count on an outside firm to go through leaps and bounds to grow your business for you.

1. With a marketing firm by your side, you will get a bigger bang for your buck!
   Good marketing firms devote the majority of their waking hours to successful marketing partnerships. There is an incredible amount of thought, research and time that goes into successfully developing and executing a marketing plan — not to mention the energy and time that is required to keep up with the ever changing world (i.e. rules) of the Internet.
   
   Giving a current employee that task will not only hurt their routine workload, it will require him/her to stop and learn the many facets of SEO, SEM, graphic design, social media strategy, e-mail campaigns, copywriting, ad placement, video production and so much more. Don’t lower your standards in hopes of saving a few dollars today — you may end up paying for a poorly executed marketing plan that will end up needing to be fixed by professionals in the future.
   
   
2. With a digital marketing firm, you are hiring a team.
   It can be tricky to find the right agency, as some firms may sell you a team-based approach, and then outsource some of your marketing needs to their “partners” on the other side of the world. On the other side of things, there are firms out there that have robust in-house teams made up of experts, who continually work with you to help meet your goals for each project. Simply stated, do not hire a marketing firm just because they sound like they know what they are talking about.
   
   A good marketing firm will always consult with you in order to become, in the truest sense, an extension of your company. The team will work with you based on your ideas and current market evaluations. A solid, well-rounded marketing team will be able to effectively lead your company through the marketing process so that you are involved and informed of the intent and are sure that they are aligned with your goals.
   
   
3. Sometimes you just need the outside perspective.
   All that I am saying here is that it can get hard to market your own business to your target audience when you are so close to managing the internal aspects of everyday business. Who is your key audience? Is it clear to each audience what solutions you bring to the tablet for them? Why should they trust and engage with your company? Working with an outside digital marketing firm is a great way to balance company ideas with a dose of outside perspective.