How A Digital Marketing Agency Can Increase Your Revenues

Marketing is critical to your business. Knowing which strategies will be effective and understanding how to combine different tactics across a variety of channels can result in a level of complexity you don’t feel you have the expertise - or time - in-house to pull off.

If you believe you can’t afford to hire a digital marketing agency, but also know you can’t afford to continue throwing money at digital marketing services without tangible results, it may be time to reconsider your marketing approach and consider working with an inbound marketing agency.

Keep in  mind, spending money on marketing is an investment, not an expense.

After experiencing significant lost time, money and opportunities, more and more small businesses are recognizing that hiring an agency can deliver more leads and increased revenue.

How exactly does a marketing agency help increase revenue?

Through Defined Processes 

Setting specific and measurable objectives is one of the first steps to marketing success. If you don’t understand exactly what you hope to accomplish through your efforts, it will be impossible to determine what your Return on Investment (ROI) is.

And that’s a significant concern for business owners. According to HubSpot, proving the ROI of a company’s marketing activities is one of the top concerns for business owners.

If you’re a numbers person, this ROI Calculator is designed to give you a simple idea of what your ROI would be if you invested your money in an inbound marketing program versus something like the stock market.

By Implementing Best Practices 

When businesses attempt to do too much, like juggling marketing efforts as well as running day-to-day operations, it’s easy to get off track.

There are many ways to spend marketing dollars. But if you’re not basing those investment choices on the strategies and tactics that are proven to be successful, you aren’t going to get any real value out of what you spend.

A qualified digital marketing company knows what works and what doesn’t, and the best for your company should have experience in your industry. That’s because the agency will help you determine which approach and channels you should be investing in.

Inbound marketing is the perfect example. This type of marketing approach has earned a solid reputation for turning awareness into leads, and ultimately more revenue. And that’s a top concern for 63% of business owners when it comes to marketing their company.

Based on a study from Gartner, properly executed inbound marketing tactics are 10 times more effective for lead conversion, compared to outbound methods.

A marketing agency can advise you

• As to whether or not a strategy like inbound marketing is right for your business
• Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you should be tracking
• Which dedicated resources are necessary to implement the strategy

Develop Complete Marketing Strategies

An important step of building toward higher revenue is to build a personalized marketing strategy. A digital marketing agency will do this using the five fundamentals of inbound marketing:

1. Contacts: Investing in CRM technology helps you manage how you gather contacts and how you interact with leads and customers consistently across platforms and departments (marketing, sales, customer support, etc.).
2. Buyer personas: Who are your ideal customers? What drives them? How can you help this audience with your product or service? Leveraging the power of data helps you determine your ideal customers.
3. Buyer’s journey: Take a more comprehensive look into the data that shares how a person goes from a stranger to customer to promoter.
4. Content: Planning and crafting content for real people will turn them into customers. Content includes pieces such as email marketing, ebooks, case studies and blog articles that harness the power of search engine optimization (seo). Social media marketing further promotes this content and expands your online presence.
5. Goals: Setting SMART goals helps you understand better what’s working and what isn’t so that you can enhance marketing cost-effectiveness and maximize ROI over time.

A digital marketing agency will also use a multi-step process that includes four key phases of the buyer’s journey in inbound marketing: 

1. Attract: Attract the right audience with the right content at the right time.
2. Convert: Turn casual content consumption into a more trusting relationships, which generally includes acquiring contact information so you can more efficiently deliver the right content through segmentation.
3. Close: Generate a sales qualified lead who is ready to buy now and does so.
4. Delight: Continue to deliver valuable content to increase loyalty, retention and CLV.

This process is a cycle, not a straight line. Delighting customers leads to customer activities that attract more customers, and the journey begins anew. As a result, this comprehensive, long-term approach makes it easier and more cost-effective to guide customers through the buyer’s journey with each delighted customer you generate. 

In the end, you cut costs while generating more customers … and revenue.

By Allowing You To Spend Less on Internal Staff 

Developing and executing strategic marketing campaigns and plans requires knowledge and experience. Hiring an internal team with a variety of skill sets you need is proven to be costlier and just isn’t practical.

In addition to salary, you’ll want to consider the cost of benefits, such as health insurance, paid time off and other ways to attract top candidates. In fact, in 2018, annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage reached $19,616.

When you hire a marketing agency, on the other hand, you get access to an entire team of experts: pros who know every aspect of marketing, creative content marketing developers, graphic artists, social media managers, web developers, marketing analytics experts and more.

Depending upon the firm you choose to work with and the agreed-upon rates, this can cost less than one internal full-time professional marketer.

Interested in a side-by-side cost comparison of hiring internally vs. hiring a marketing agency? Check out our article about hiring a marketing agency to get a more accurate feel for how much it costs to hire employees versus a marketing agency.

Through Valuable Experience That Saves Time

Developing and executing strategies is time-consuming. Experts who do it for a living are efficient and have solid, repeatable processes in place.

These questions can help you determine just how much time you’re spending on your marketing plan or how much more time you need to spend:

• Do you have a lead generation process and sales funnel that  consistely brings you qualified leads? Are you tracking which marketing efforts that drive leads, traiffic, engagement, etc.?
• Does your team understand how to interpret website or social media analytics and understand how to make chnages based on that data?
• Does your team battle with the constant need for fresh, creative content?

The dollar value of your time saved due to an agency’s efficiencies may very well offset the cost of the agency fees.

By Focusing On Results

If a marketing agency is consistently unsuccessful, it won’t stay in business!

Remember, agencies WANT to deliver results for your business. That’s how they earn more business.

A successful marketing agency is motivated to consistently deliver value to its clients and has processes in place to deliver the highest possible ROI. When assessing agencies, look specifically for a proven track record, review customer success stories and follow-up on references from their own customer database.

You may be holding onto the notion that you don’t have the budget to hire a marketing agency, but working with an agency actually allows you to control costs more and drive business through proven strategies executed by professionals who are trained to consistently analyze and optimize their methods for delivering results.