Why You Should Hire a Social Media Marketing or Digital Marketing Agency

Whether you are a transnational corporation, a shopping and entertainment center or a cafe around the corner, in the modern world you can not do without online presence and digital marketing. Since, according to research, 80% of buyers are looking for points of sale and recommendations for them on the network (50% for B2B), while eCommerce accounts for 19% of all retail (1% in 2000).

The only question is whether to independently promote the business on the network or to entrust this company with outsourcing. In this article, we will explain why you should choose the last option - what benefits will you get if you hire a digital marketing agency, and what problems you can avoid.

# 1. Economic benefit

The main reason you should hire a digital marketing agency is cost savings. This option is always much more cost-effective, even if your internal marketing team will consist of several specialists.

Here is the average salary for key marketing roles:

1. Marketing Manager - $ 130,000 per year.
2. Social Media Manager (SMM) - $ 50,000 per year.
3. SEO manager - $ 60,000 per year.

Thus, you will spend $ 240,000 a year on salaries alone. But this is not all expenses. In addition to them, you also need to take into account taxes and social benefits, vacation pay, premiums, health insurance costs, as well as the cost of rent (purchase) of premises, equipment and software.

As a result, you will spend more than $ 300,000 a year on an internal team of a minimum number of employees. On the other hand, the cost of agency services ranges from 1,000 to 10,000 dollars a month, or from 12,000 to 120,000 dollars a year. And this option is more profitable, even if you are a small business that needs only a presence on social networks: from $ 60,000 per year per employee in the state versus $ 6,000 per year for providing SMM services.

# 2. Focusing on your business

Another advantage of hiring a company for outsourcing is the ability not to dive into the intricacies of digital marketing. Agency employees live and breathe their craft. They spent years mastering their professions, mastering tools, social media marketing strategies, plan and at the same time continuing to study profile blogs, online magazines, research, news and laws for several hours a day in order to keep their skills and knowledge up to date.

Now think about whether you have the time and desire to delve into all this. After all, even in order to understand common things, it will take months. Yes, theoretically this can be beneficial in the future, but only if a significant part of your business is in digital marketing. If not, then this is a waste of time.

If you hire a marketing agency to promote on the Internet, then you can concentrate on business processes. You already do this: power networks, Internet communications, transportation services, repair of equipment and vehicles - for the most part, you give away all this to outsourcing to third-party companies. So why should it be different with digital marketing?

Again, with this approach, there is no need to manage, adapt and train the internal team, since all elements of online marketing are processed by the team on the side.

# 3. Work with experts in their field

Marketing as a field of activity includes many professions. For example, to promote a brand on the Internet, you need SEO specialists, traffic managers, marketers, SMM specialists, copywriters, email marketing, web analytics, project managers, web developers, brand designers and other specialists. At the same time, someone needs to be hired on an ongoing basis, and someone just for a couple of hours of work per day or even a month.

Marketing agencies can afford to keep all these people on staff and pay them good money (this is the only way to keep professionals), because their work is streamlined and they usually do not have any downtime. Whereas for an online store, a restaurant or a sugar factory, it simply does not make sense to spend time and resources searching for and hiring expensive specialists who will work on an hourly basis per week.

Yes, you can try to hire people on a part-time basis, but only beginners and unclaimed specialists will agree to this (which probably indicates a poor quality of their work). In addition, with this approach, you will not work with a well-coordinated team, but, in fact, with individual freelancers who need to be paid as an agency. That is, this approach does not make sense.

# 4. Access to technology and tools

Perhaps you have some kind of tool for automating work with e-mail (Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Customer.io or even Pardot), but do you have applications for monitoring the ranking of your web resources in search engines for key queries? Do you use specialized tools to create and promote landing pages. Can you calculate the payback of advertising campaigns? Have you budgeted for the purchase of licenses for photo and video editing apps like Adobe?

Digital marketing agencies use all these tools and much more, because without this you cannot create a competitive product. Not only that, they do not just use them, they own them at a professional level, which can be achieved only after several years of constant use of these tools.

# 5. Creative marketing thinking

Even if you have never played video games, you hardly noticed the hype surrounding Pokemon Go in the summer of 2016. This is a game where you can use your smartphone to collect virtual fantasy animals. But everyone knows this. But not everyone knows that in Pokemon Go there is a purchased object for luring virtual animals.

It would seem ordinary game mechanics. But marketers noticed something more in it: if you want to draw attention to a certain place, drop the bait and wait for the players. According to a study by Bloomberg LP, in such a simple way, shops, cafes and bars increased their sales by 30%. Given that the bait cost $ 99 and lasted 72 hours - the result is more than successful.

This is a vivid example of how marketers turn seemingly ordinary things into real sales, subscribers, the growth of the brand’s popularity and other things useful for business. Here are some more examples:

1. The Milka brand sold some chocolate bars without one square. Inside the packaging of such a chocolate bar there was a transition to a site where the lucky one made a choice between receiving the missing bar and sending it to someone else.
2. EA, advertising the launch of the Dead Space horror movie with a rating of 18+, used videos with the reaction of women of pre-retirement age to what is happening in the game (the game itself was not shown in commercials). This move created a separate genre of YouTube videos.
3. Gillette marketers learned about the scandal in Japan around the video of actress Gao Yan-Yan in which she shaves her boyfriend and made her the face of the brand (men's razor). After which a contest was launched, the winner of which was Yanyan. 237 million guys took part in the competition, and Gillette sales reached the highest level in Gillette history.

# 6. Industry Innovation Monitoring

To remain successful in their field, digital marketing professionals must constantly monitor multiple information flows:

1. Search engine algorithms. The position of your site or its individual page in the search results of Google, Yandex, Yahoo, Baidu and Bing depends on them. At the same time, search engine developers usually don’t tell how their algorithms work (only in general terms), so in order to understand how they work, you need to test and analyze statistics. Many teams are engaged in such studies, and they need to be monitored.
2. Scientific research. In the past few years, marketing has grown from a field of personal experience and familiar practices to real science. And this science is at the intersection of neurology, psychology, evolutionary psychology, data science, game theory and other areas of scientific activity.
3. Trends in the media and culture. Information about current books, movies, TV shows, events, and even memes helps keep the audience going by creating content that is interesting to the target audience.
4. Web development. In order to create a digital product, you need to understand what you can create and how to do it, that is, you need to at least superficially monitor the development of programming technologies that are used in web development and digital content creation.

# 7. Scalability of all services

If your company is engaged in marketing independently, then the scale of the advertising campaign is limited by the physical capabilities of the full-time team. A copywriter cannot write more than 50 texts a month, a video maker can do more than 20 videos, an SMM specialist can conduct more than 10 projects, and so on for all positions. The marketing agency, in turn, employs 2-5 one-profile specialists and has several more trusted freelancers on hand.

Thanks to this, the agency can provide high quality both when working with several small campaigns, and when working with large projects. In addition, as we wrote above, agencies use various tools to automate marketing processes, which also contributes to the ability to scale the campaign without losing its quality.

# 8. Increased chances of success

According to Google research, usually a business with every dollar spent on digital marketing makes $ 2 profit from sales. However, if professionals (agencies or marketing teams) are engaged in advertising, then from $ 1 you will receive $ 11 in profit. Such a big difference is due to the following factors:

1. Marketing agencies use tools to automate and optimize many processes, which increases efficiency and reduces advertising costs. In addition, such tools allow you to create a better product, which also increases the effectiveness of advertising.
2. Agencies usually create advertising campaigns tailored to narrow target audiences. This approach increases the involvement, loyalty and interest of people and at the same time makes it possible to reduce costs.
3. Digital marketing professionals usually either work in agencies or create them, because this is the only way to earn money without downtime and constantly improve your skills. There are many loners in the industry, but their level of professionalism is usually much lower on average.
4. Agencies know better how to promote goods and services on the Internet.
5. Agencies offer comprehensive promotion services.

# 9. Variability of Results

No business will want to make investments without the ability to check whether it is useful or not. Investing in digital marketing is no exception. The problem is that in this industry it is sometimes very difficult to find out the real return on a particular action, because in order to get reliable indicators, you need an integrated approach and special tools to track the statistics of relationships across different channels of promoting a product or service.

The application of this approach and the purchase of a license for specialized software pay off only for large volumes of work. In addition, agencies in the state have specialists to analyze individual tools, channels, projects or advertising campaigns in general. Thanks to this, advertising campaigns become measurable and controlled, and agency clients have the opportunity to measure the benefits of marketing investments.

# 10. Simplicity and accessibility

It is always easier to work with companies on outsourcing, since you do not need to spend time and effort searching and checking people, interviewing, introducing newcomers to the staff and establishing team work. Also, you do not need to think about their financial, social and material security. When working with an agency, you just spend time looking for the best candidate once and then working with him for years.

How to do this is described in the article: “How to choose marketing agency”.

Why You Should Hire a Social Media Marketing or Digital Marketing Agency key takeaways:

#1. # 1. Economic benefit
#2. # 2. Focusing on your business
#3. # 3. Work with experts in their field
#4. # 4. Access to technology and tools
#5. # 5. Creative marketing thinking
#6. # 6. Industry Innovation Monitoring
#7. # 7. Scalability of all services
#8. # 8. Increased chances of success
#9. # 9. Variability of Results
#10. # 10. Simplicity and accessibility