Did you know that marketing budgets should essentially be 11.2% of your business’ revenue? Instead of doing your marketing yourself, businesses can use their marketing budget to hire a marketing company.
This budget is based on what the average company spends on its marketing efforts throughout the year. Marketing is a vast industry. It has tactics that cross from digital marketing to traditional advertising and branding.
You cannot simply bang out advertising and social media content and call it marketing. There are strategic decisions that need making. These decisions need to be filtered throughout your organization right to the man on the sales floor.
A marketing agency can help you do this.
But if you’re asking yourself, well how can a marketing company truly help your business? Then you’re in the right place, keep reading!
Marketing 101: The Lowdown
From the get-go, marketing is a broad term that can be described as the process of gaining potential customers through research, promotions, sales, and distribution of information.
Basically, how are you going to get your business into the market and making sales?
This is where a professional marketing company comes in. The right partner will conduct in-depth research on your company, from the ideal target market for you, to how you’re going to reach these people. By the end of your discussions, you should have a broad strategy and tactical steps outlined for you.
Before we get into what types of marketing a professional agency can help you with, let’s have a quick look at how you set yourself up for success:
Know What You Want to Accomplish
If you’re looking into hiring a marketing company to help you on your journey, then don’t set yourself up for failure before you even start.
When you’re preparing to meet with your potential partners in marketing, know exactly what it is that you want to achieve. Know exactly what your goals are for your marketing efforts.
Do you want to increase sales?
Are you simply looking at increasing brand awareness?
Are you expanding your business and you need people to know about it?
Perhaps you’re a startup and you just need to get your business out there.
Wherever it is that you want the marketing journey to take you, this is the most important information that you will share with your marketing company. After this, they should be able to tell you how they’re going to get you there.
So, How Will a Marketing Company Help You?
Whether you’re a large business, medium-sized or a startup, hiring a professional marketing company will benefit you, undoubtedly.
Most established marketing companies will be able to offer a turnkey solution for a client’s needs. This ranges from digital marketing, website design, right through to traditional advertising and branding.
Here’s the list of what a good marketing company should be able to help you with:
1. Design and Branding
The foundation for any business is its brand. If you think of Coca-Cola, Apple, or even Mercedes Benz, you will notice, none of these brands are flexible when it comes to how their brand is represented.
No matter where you find a brand, see it, experience it, or read about it, it should always be represented in the same way with the same look and feel.
This is why branding and design are so important and should be taken seriously.
Your logo should always behave in the same way, no matter what medium it’s being seen on. Your brand’s colors need to be consistent from your website to your print media and more. The way your brand ‘talks’ to your customers and prospects should always be in the same voice with the same tone. It doesn’t matter if you’re communicating with them online or in the real world.
A marketing company will be able to create a corporate identity or brand identity for your brand. This document will be based upon validated research into your target market, competitors and industry.
2. Website Development and Management
Not only is designing and launching an incredible website a daunting task but then comes monthly management and updates.
A marketing company will be able to strategize, design, create and launch exactly the type of website that your business needs. The process of this will include keyword research in order to implement SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Ultimately, it will drive traffic to your website.
SEO, however, is not a ‘once it’s done, it’s done’ element of your website. In order to generate leads and organic traffic, your content marketing strategy will have to go hand in hand with your SEO tactics.
3. Google Ads Management
There can be no doubt that there are advantages to having a marketing company manage your AdWords account and take the results to a whole new level.
The one thing about having a marketing agency manage your Google Adwords account is that they generally will already have experience within the specific client’s industry, so they’ll have an understanding of the market and what works in terms of ads.
They will know what are realistic conversion rates to have as goals and manage your expectations. It will also save you time in testing different ad strategies and designs. They’ll have a portfolio of tried and tested campaigns from other clients.
Not only that, but a marketing company that works within the Google Ads environment on an ongoing basis will have a good idea of what trends are incoming and how to stay ahead of the game.
4. Content Marketing
Content is king.
We’ve all heard the buzz phrase a thousand times.
That’s because there’s truth behind it.
A marketing company knows that no business in the digital world can survive without a content marketing strategy. Your content marketing is what is going to tie your website in with your social media and drive traffic to your website.
It’s all about how you talk to your customers and prospective customers, and where you talk to them. You’re going to need to know where to find them online, what you want to say to them, when you’re going to say to them and how regularly you’ll be making content.
Your website should have a blog, your content marketing is going to tell you what your blog will talk about, what keywords you’ll be focusing on and how you’re going to get people to read it.
Doesn’t sound simple, does it? That’s why a marketing company can put this whole strategy together for you, and implement it as well.
5. Social Media Marketing
Did you know that running a blog can take up to 20 hours of your time each week? On top of that, each social media channel will take approximately another 5 hours each.
This alone should be a reason as to why you should hire a marketing company.
Social media encompasses so much more than simply putting up interesting images and letting people know what’s going on with your business.
You need to incorporate your lead generation strategy, your video marketing, product information, talking to your customers, customer reviews, interesting information, and more. You need someone online who can return messages and interact with your audience, almost in real-time, so that you don’t lose any customers.
At the end of each social media campaign, an assessment of performance will be required.
What type of content performed best?
What didn’t your audience engage with?
What time of day and day of the week was the best performing?
And then, information gathered from your social media report will determine how you adjust your social media strategy moving into the next month.
6. Special Campaigns
Sometimes, businesses will come across marketing opportunities that they hadn’t planned for at the beginning of the year.
Perhaps there’s a community event that you’ll be participating in.
Or an advertorial in a magazine that you simply couldn’t pass up.
How would you deal with this?
Well, simply put, if you have a marketing company at your disposal, you’d be able to pass on the brief, and watch them work their magic.
7. Ongoing Marketing Support and an Integrated Approach
One of the best services that a marketing company will offer is an integrated approach to your marketing. You’ll never have elements that don’t correspond with each other, your branding will be consistent across all mediums and your marketing messages will never be lost in a sea of competitors.
A marketing company will not only offer an integrated approach to all the services they provide, but you’ll have ongoing support for your marketing needs.
Your website has gone down? Call your marketing company.
There’s a spelling error on your product packaging? Call your marketing company.
You’ve lost a considerable amount of social media followers? Call your marketing company.
The ongoing support of having partnered with the right marketing company simply cannot be ignored, with the peace of mind you’ll be getting.
Which leads us to our next section, what exactly are the benefits of hiring a marketing company?
Benefits of Hiring a Marketing Company
When considering whether you should hire a marketing company or not, your motivation around your decision may be based on your budget, but there are other things you should consider too:
- It trumps having to pay a full-time employee’s salary. Not only this, but you don’t have to consider your marketing company going on holiday, or falling ill.A marketing company will be available to you according to the service agreement you have, it won’t matter to you who performs the work, but just that the team gets it done within your budget. No social security payments, no holiday pay, and no added extras.
- You get access to many skills when hiring a marketing company. So you need SEO, design services, Google Ads management, and social media management?Well, a marketing company will be able to give you access to a team with all this expertise, as opposed to you having to hire individuals to perform each task.
- A marketing company will no doubt be using high-end technology to get each task done, which means that your business, in turn, will be using the best software available for the marketing tasks at hand.And all this without you having to pay the hefty subscription fees that come with this software and technology.
- The staff that you do have are able to operate at maximum efficiency. You won’t have to give staff extra jobs, and pay overtime hours if you have a marketing company.Your staff will concentrate on their own job descriptions and outputs, ensuring that you’re getting maximum efficiency.
- You will benefit from an objective perspective. At the end of the day, a marketing company isn’t as ‘personally invested’ in your business as you are, so if you need a rebranding or a change in strategy, they’ll be able to tell you how it is and why you need it, without getting emotionally involved.
There you have it.
The benefits of hiring a marketing company are undeniable. When hiring one though, be sure to ask for a portfolio. Ask them to show you previous work that they’ve done and other companies that they’ve worked for.
Better yet, when you have your list of expectations and goals, ask them if they’ve achieved these for another business before, and how they did it. Ask for references especially.
Hiring Your Marketing Company
We want to leave you with a parting thought on hiring a marketing company, go with your instinct.
Remember, that whichever agency you hire will essentially become an extension of your team. You’re going to want a marketing company that not only has a guaranteed track record but that you feel comfortable with.
If you’re going to be chatting to them on a weekly or monthly basis, a good relationship is going to be the basis of your success. Ensure that you click with the team that you’ll be working with and that you have the ability to operate open lines of communication if you have concerns.
Are you ready to talk to an expert? Schedule a consultation with us, you won’t regret it.
