Do Small Businesses Need Marketing Agencies? Here’s Why You Might.

Regardless of what business you are in, digital marketing is likely important for your growth. But with so many moving parts, it can become a burden and a distraction for your core work.

Digital Marketing may include…

• Pay-per-click advertising (on platforms like Facebook and Google)
• Search engine optimization
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Local listings (e.g. Google, Yelp)
• Online PR
• Blogging, and more

Keeping up with these platforms can  quickly spread your resources too thin. Even if you’ve already got a dedicated Marketing Manager, you risk expending their valuable time and energy on execution instead of where it really makes a difference – planning and strategy. So, as a small business, what do you do? 

Hiring the right digital marketing agency might be the answer.

1. Cut Down on Overall Costs

Let’s face it – money talks. And one of the first benefits you may notice after you hire a digital marketing agency is that your overall costs will drop in comparison to accomplishing the same goals in-house. Here is how they can save you money:

1. Avoid paying an internal person a salary (and payroll taxes, benefits, etc.)
2. The agency will already have all the software (such as design platforms, research tools, etc.) you might be subscribing to currently
3. A team of experts will likely make fewer mistakes and use your budget more efficiently than your internal team that wears many hats

“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” – Red Adair

To find the right agency to help reduce costs, ask the following questions:

• Which of my internal resources can you replace?
• How can you take a load off my team’s plate?
• What measures do you take to optimize for return on spend?
• How do you minimize wasted budget?

2. Easily Scale to Your Needs

Another major benefit to working with an agency partner is the scalability. That means if you’re seeing a huge influx of traffic or are taking on a major new initiative, the workforce is there to do the heavy lifting. On the flip side – if you’re powering down for a few months during the slow season, it’s just as easy to scale your efforts down without losing money over unnecessary costs.

Expenditures, like having to hire or hold on to full-time team members as your marketing needs expand and contract, can hurt your bottom line more than you think. Think about it – if you managed everything in-house, you would have to make significant investments as your marketing initiatives changed over time. Each time, you would have to go through a hiring and training process.

To find an agency that can help you seamlessly scale, ask the following questions:

1. Do you have long term contracts? (the answer here should be NO)
2. If I needed to double my efforts overnight, could you accommodate that? (the answer here should be YES)
3. If we wanted to add additional marketing channels or programs over time, can you help with that? What services do you offer in addition to what we need now?

3. Work With Experts

One of the main setbacks to having an exclusively in-house marketing team is that your employees are essentially working within a bubble. And if you’re a small business with only one or two hires that make up that department, the breadth of knowledge available for you to pull from is quite small. 

Agencies bring with them a competitive advantage when it comes to expertise and experience. They usually have more expert-level employees than a small business can muster, and also have a variety of case studies and previous clients from which they can pool together problem-solving skills, familiarity, and know-how. This means that the issues you face as an organization get solved faster and more effectively.  

No more spinning the wheels trying to understand the root of a new problem. Chances are, your agency partner has already been there and done that with a different client. They can help steer your marketing department in the right direction, so your valued full-time employees can work on higher-level initiatives than figuring out what Facebook audiences are best for each stage of the marketing funnel. 

Questions to ask an agency to make sure they have expertise:

1. What other clients have you worked with in this industry?
2. What other clients are you currently working with similar to me?
3. How many years have you been in business?
4. What is your team’s experience?

4. Focus on What’s Most Important

Good talent is a precious commodity. You’re investing your time and money in hiring employees to run your business to the best of its ability. Do you really want them to be bogged down by granular tasks when they could instead be focusing on strategy and next steps? 

Many digital marketing duties like building content and scheduling out posts for your social media channels can take hours to complete. Time that you won’t ever get back. When you have an agency partner, all of that changes. Your in-house team gets some well-deserved breathing room, allowing them to look at the big picture instead of sweating the small stuff. 

Leave the brainstorming, problem-solving, and execution to the digital marketing experts. They’ll get the job done to your exact specifications, and at a fraction of the time. This way, you can focus on what’s most important. 

5. Stay on Top of Best Practices

Digital marketing, by nature, is extremely fluid. Best practices are changing every day, and what may have worked last month might not be the best approach today. But staying on top of these trends also takes a significant time commitment! The truth is, there aren’t enough hours in the day for most small businesses to keep up to date with what works and what doesn’t. 

Another fantastic benefit to working with a digital marketing agency is that the onus of researching and implementing these best practices is on them instead of on you. All your team needs to do is set goals and expectations for a given campaign, and your partners will do the rest. 

Ask a potential agency partner the following:

1. How do you keep on top of digital marketing trends?
2. What are some recent adaptations you have made to your strategy?
3. How often do you adjust strategy for clients?

Take Your Marketing to the Next Level

Small businesses and digital marketing agencies have worked hand in hand for the better part of the last two decades. It’s a symbiotic relationship that has been proven time and time again to yield results and save money – when you choose the RIGHT partner. At Right Left Agency, we’ve made it our mission to provide organizations just like yours with quality digital marketing services that fit naturally with your in-house team’s initiatives. 

We do our best to become an extension of your current marketing team and lend our extensive resources and expertise to help get your efforts to the next level. If you’re interested in learning how to better manage (or create) digital marketing campaigns, let us know and we would be happy to talk about your digital marketing strategy.