It’s a misnomer to think that the only reason to hire a marketing agency is because you don’t have an in-house marketing team, when really, savvy executives and marketing directors hire marketing agencies all the time.
Does Your In-house Marketing Team Reach All of Its Goals?
There are a million reasons to hire a marketing agency as your marketing partner. Today we’ll touch on 5 key reasons to hire an outside team to support your marketing director and help you meet your marketing goals.
1. You Can’t Be All the Things…AND Neither Can Your Nimble Team!
When you’re in that director position, it’s really easy for your executive team to think that you’re a miracle worker. In fact, it’s kind of your job to make accomplishing huge goals look easy. But if there’s one thing that’s true about marketing, you can’t be all the things all the time.
Meaning, no one person is the:
- strategist
- copywriter
- designer
- developer
- analyst
- and the expert on the latest and greatest digital trends that are absolutely getting the best return on spend.
It’s literally impossible for one person to do all of that, AND do it well.
It’s also pretty impossible for a small and nimble team of a couple of marketers to do it. Chances are, you’ve got a really great content creator and graphic designer on your team and you as a marketing director are likely the strategist. You have so many advantages because you are close to the sales team and close to the customer, but in order to build a really robust, repeatable, high-performing lead-generating funnel you know you need more capacity.
That’s why a marketing agency who partners with you can help you reach your goals.
Not only do agencies have all the experts on staff, you can get access to them and their talents for your specific project. You don’t have to spend time training and getting people up to speed. An agency lives, breathes, and eats all of the marketing execution on the creative, and the strategy, and the analytics side, so that you know you can get the best results and drive more leads.
2. An Outside Marketing Agency Brings Fresh Approaches and New Ideas
Working with an outside team breathes new life into your marketing. Yes, your in-house team is the subject matter expert. You know your clients so well. However, you also have a lot of the institutional knowledge that can sometimes get in the way of making those top-of-funnel connections with customers who are completely unfamiliar with what your company provides. It’s easy to get so deep in the weeds when you’re so close to the service that you forget what the top-of-mind problems are the customers are seeking and searching for.
An outside marketing agency can:
- bring in a fresh perspective and help you clarify your marketing message.
- help make sure that you are actually speaking to the felt needs of your prospects.
- get their attention so that, most importantly, you can get their email address.
As you nurture leads further down the funnel, a marketing agency can bring hands-on knowledge of what’s working in your vertical. Chances are they’re working with multiple companies with your same ideal client profile, and then you know what’s working to get people on webinars, get people into sales calls, and get those deals closed. That cross-pollination of ideas from your outside team can help shorten your sales cycle and bring more qualified deal to the table.
3. You’ve Got a Whole Bunch of “Someday” Projects
There’s two types of someday projects:
Great ideas that get brought up in meetings.
You just know that someday when you have time you can build a nurture sequence to go after a specific new client vertical. Or, build out a funnel on a really great lead generating idea. These are the kinds of projects that you know if you could get off the ground would drive a lot of qualified leads to your sales team, but the day-to-day grind of just keeping general marketing going holds you back from ever getting around to those projects.
These are great products for marketing teams to come in and help you get a strategy in place, and then develop the content and the marketing collateral in place so you can launch those new initiatives.
The ones that keep you up at night.
These are the ones that are actually critical, long-term marketing best practices like auditing your website content, optimizing your site for SEO, building out pillar pages, or refreshing your email nurture sequences. But you are so burdened with other measurements of success, you can’t actually ever get around to the types of projects that would drive inbound leads, lower your cost per acquisition, and shorten your sales cycle.
In other words you’re so caught up in the right resume race of filling webinars or measuring new email acquisitions that you’re not able to get two things that would actually help you reach those goals in a more cost-effective way. And you long for the day when you could just wake up and magically have a fully optimized, up-to-date website, with email nurture sequences that just engage in the light prospects. But you and your small team can never get around to it. This is a great project for a marketing agency.
4. A Marketing Agency Helps Deploy Forward-Thinking Expertise
It’s hard to believe that digital marketing is just a decade or two old! Every year the capabilities within the digital space both expand and contract drastically. This happens so rapidly, that it’s impossible to keep up with everything, especially as we enter this new world of data-sharing limitations, privacy protection, and a cookie-less Google. Having a marketing agency partner is critical to prepare you for what’s coming down the road.
Prepared for the Unexpected
So many B2B companies were completely taken off guard by the loss of in-person lead generation in 2020. Companies that had diversified lead sources were able to pivot and keep business moving forward. Those that relied solely on one source of regeneration, struggled to catch up to their more prepared competitors.
While a pandemic is not around every corner, huge changes to the availability of data that we used to be able to rely on for our low cost of acquisition will continue to change. We’re still very much in the Wild West days of internet marketing. With the new sheriff of data privacy in town, staying ahead of the trends is more important than ever. An expert team can help you ensure that your lead generation never falls off a cliff just because big platform changes happen.
5. It’s Both Time and Cost-effective
Quite simply, marketing agencies, especially the ones that get involved in doing the heavy lifting on specific lead generating projects, are very cost-effective. To run a robust marketing strategy you really need the skills of 10 different types of marketers.
- The creatives — like the copywriters and designers.
- The left-brainers — to do the development and analytics.
- And the niche experts — like the ads specialists and strategists.
Most companies don’t need all that talent in house full time. Most companies can’t afford half-a-million in marketing team salaries and benefits. So instead, hiring an agency to partner with is an incredible way to get fractional access to that talent — all for the cost of one or two full-time salaries instead of 10. Even better, as a marketing director you only have one point of contact inside that agency, so you also save the time of trying to manage all that talent.
If you’re ready to explore what a marketing contract would look like and what goals it would help you reach, contact Moxie today.