Thinking of hiring a digital marketing agency? We don’t blame you.

There are definitely times where engaging with internal resources is not feasible, whether it is due to limited time, limited skillset and expertise, or limited resources to build an internal marketing team.

This is where bringing in external resources may be necessary. The design industry is growing rapidly. Businesses are hiring design firms more than ever before, and design agencies are continuing to grow in numbers as well. The design industry has changed drastically over the last decade with the introduction of new technologies, digital media, and increased demand for innovation. It’s no wonder that design agencies have become a necessary part of many businesses’ success plans.

What is a marketing agency?

A marketing agency is a company that provides marketing services to its clients. It helps businesses promote and sell their products or services by creating and executing marketing campaigns.

Marketing agencies offer a wide range of services, including branding, advertising, public relations, digital marketing, and market research. They typically have a team of experts who specialize in different areas, such as social media, video production, copywriting, graphic design, web development, and media buying.

Agencies can be hired by businesses of all sizes, from small businesses to large corporations. They work with a variety of clients in different industries, including consumer goods, technology, healthcare, automotive, eCommerce brands, and financial services.

What is a digital marketing agency?

What is a digital marketing agency?

A digital marketing agency is a company that provides marketing services for clients who operate in the digital space. These services can include anything from search engine optimization, Google ads, to social media marketing to email marketing.

Digital marketing came about as a response to the increasing trend of online consumerism and of growing brands’ online presence in the digital world. It made it possible to communicate with consumers directly and allowed for brands to be more efficient in their advertising efforts. Digital marketing now consists of those efforts as well as many others such as integrated multi-channel strategies, content marketing, influencer and PR outreach, social media marketing, and pay-per-click campaigns.

Some may ask what the difference is between traditional and digital marketing.

Traditional marketers advertise through mass media platforms like TV, radio, and print — but now we also see digital channels used for reaching targeted audiences. With digital marketing services, you’re able to not only target specific demographics (age range, gender, etc.), but individual customers based on their online behavior (social media habits and search history).

This is something that works great for local businesses. You can then send them highly-targeted and relevant advertising campaigns that will speak directly to their needs — ultimately leading to a better ROI whether through increased website traffic, more leads, or more customers.

In short, these digital marketing agencies meet business goals through implementing their digital marketing expertise.

What is a creative agency?

What is a creative agency?

Creative agencies create and implement creative ideas to assist firms to enhance brand recognition, showcasing goods or services, and maximizing revenue.

Part of what is included in the agency’s creative services is graphic design. There may be a global creative agency that specializes in just graphic design. It’s all they do, so they’ve mastered issues such as audience engagement, memorable visuals, and seamless presentation arrangement. An agency will listen to your unique specifications before developing one-of-a-kind, attractive, and effective finished products.

A creative agency will provide your brand with a professional advantage, from presentations to website content. Design firms not only design logos and websites, but they may also aid in branding your business, producing marketing materials for your brand, and creating marketing plans that can attract clients.

Design agencies are vital for your business because they can help you create and implement different brand awareness strategies and showcase your products. Hiring a creative agency is not only for designing a logo or website for you. Instead, they can also develop your marketing material, brand your business, update your website, and develop a custom strategy to attract ideal prospects.

What is the purpose of a marketing agency?

The purpose of a marketing agency is to help solve their clients’ problems by designing creative solutions that speak to their brand’s identity and messaging along with developing digital marketing strategies to overcome business challenges.

In order to be successful in this industry, a marketing agency needs creativity, problem-solving skills, and an understanding of customers’ needs and business objectives.

What questions to ask a marketing agency in your search?

As you go through the process of vetting a marketing agency, it is always important to ask questions. These questions include but are not limited to:

    1. ‘What are your core values?’
    2. ‘What is your process, and how do you approach a new project?’
    3. ‘How long will it take, and how much will it cost?’
    4. ‘What am I buying?
    5. ‘How do you handle differences of opinion or conflict with a client?’
    6. ‘What does a good client mean to you?’
    7. ‘What is good design work?’

By asking these questions, you can be reassured that you are in the great hands of an agency that cares for your best interests as a strategic partner and not just an outside entity.

How do you know if your company needs a marketing agency?

The benefits of partnering with a professional agency are many, but not every business needs one. So how do you know if your company could benefit from partnering with an agency as opposed to utilizing internal resources? Here are some signs that it might be time to make the leap:

Your past marketing strategies have fallen short.

What do you do now? You may be tempted to try and fix the issue yourself, but this is often where businesses go wrong. Trying to take on too many tasks at once can lead to a lack of focus and a failure to implement any changes successfully.

This is why marketing agencies can help, whether that be a digital agency, a design agency, an online marketing agency, or an internet marketing agency. They have the experience and expertise to take a company’s business challenge, utilize innovative technology to develop a comprehensive marketing plan, and drive business results.

You’re not happy with your website or branding.

There are many situations where clients are stuck with what they have, whether it is with their website, their logo, business cards, flyers, display ads, or more. If this is something currently happening at your business, perhaps, it is time to weigh your options.

Remember, you never get a second chance to leave a first impression! And that happens within moments of your customer or client first encountering your branding and in many cases on your website.

Changes in the marketplace do not happen often, but they do happen often enough to warrant an investment in improving your company’s brand visibility online. Your visual representation is what people will see first, and it must be professional if you want to build trust with potential customers or clients. As they say, “first impressions are everything!”

You don’t have a thorough grasp of how design affects your company’s performance.

Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know, and this would be one of those times. Many business owners don’t have a clear understanding of how design affects their company’s performance. In fact, design is one of the most important aspects of any business, yet it is often overlooked. Good design can help a business attract new customers, retain current customers, and create a positive brand image.

Conversely, bad design can have the opposite effect, leading to decreased sales and revenue, and a negative public image. If you’re not sure how design affects your company’s performance, it might be time to consider partnering with a professional design agency.

Design is not a priority to bring in-house because it is something you know you do not do well.

Design is not something that many companies have or prioritize bringing in-house because it’s not something that they traditionally do well. A creative agency might be a good idea for companies seeking increased functionality and increased efficiency of their marketing channels.

Depending on how many members are on your team and the skillsets of each member, it may not always be feasible to hire an in-house graphic designer, creative director, or specialist in any specific area of design.

The first step in understanding if your company needs a creative agency is to understand what services they offer. A good place to start is their website. Most agencies have a page that outlines the services they offer. If you’re still unsure, reach out to them and ask about their process and what services they would provide for your company.

Your website isn’t converting as well as you expected or hoped for.

Whether you aren’t getting enough sales or leads on your website, are getting bad feedback on website usability, or not receiving enough organic traffic, this may be attributed to the necessity for an improved design and branding initiatives and a look towards solutions that incorporate digital technology.

Your website may not be converting as well as you expected or hoped for because for a few reasons: your web design may not be attractive enough, the copy on your website may not be persuasive enough, or your calls to action on your website may not be clear enough.

If you’re not sure what’s causing your website to underperform, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to track how people are interacting with your website. If you don’t have the resources in-house to work through your analytics, it could be a good idea for you to engage in conversations with a digital marketing agency as well.

What are the benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency or creative agency?

There are several factors that determine whether bringing a digital marketing company is worth the time, money, and trust.

You don’t have to pay a marketer’s full-time salary.

Salaries for mid-level career marketing experts are costly, and they’re rising every year. According to a survey conducted by the American Marketing Association, the typical Director of Marketing salary increased by 17%, while the average Content Strategist salary rose by 40%.

In fact, if you were to hire a full team of marketers rather than hiring a marketing agency, you may end up spending over $600,000 per year. In addition, we have to also mention employee health care premiums, paid vacation days, productivity lost due to sick days, and onboarding and continued training costs!

  • Marketing Coordinator: $46,756
  • Marketing Associate: $49,708
  • Social Media Manager: $55,901
  • Content Strategist: $87,174
  • Marketing Manager: $78,429
  • Director of Marketing: $109,492
  • VP of Marketing: $163,134

Hiring a marketing firm isn’t as pricey as you believe; in fact, it can assist you to reduce overhead and personnel costs being a more cost-effective option. Any decrease in operational costs is clearly beneficial for startups and any other business.

You may receive much more expertise for one price.

An outside agency may provide more than just the marketing services of a single employee. When you hire a marketing agency, you get the assistance of experts in digital strategy, content writing, search engine optimization, graphic design, web development, social media, pay-per-click advertising, and more.

We understand that taking a risk on a new employee may be scary and for some, downright anxiety-provoking. Finding excellent help is difficult, and it might take time to locate people who are really dedicated, competent, and skilled to work for your company.

If you have the ability to recruit, hire, and train strong employees for your in-house marketing team, in-house marketers may be a viable option. And if you take the time to search for the best people, you can employ individuals that cover all of your marketing needs in a small group because today’s marketers often possess a wide range of talents.

By outsourcing your digital marketing needs and creative efforts, you forego having to schedule interviews with a multitude of marketing professionals and can spend time getting to know and hiring one agency. And what’s better is that the agency is the one that does the hard work finding, hiring, and training highly qualified team members.

You stay on top of initiatives with your existing staff.

Some businesses attempt to avoid employing in-house marketers, social media marketers, content writers, and SEO experts by assigning this work to current staff. However, putting the burden on existing workers increases the risk of burnout and lowers long-term efficiency.

It is a lot to expect a single person to drive key performance indicators across all of these mediums like local SEO services, marketing automation, direct mail, brand strategy, email marketing, web development, and more.

With so many people involved, some of your marketing efforts may be disjointed and lack consistency if employees are trying to be jacks of all trades.

Fortunately, digital agencies may assist you in developing a strategy to make the most of your marketing efforts. You can then either implement the plan yourself, depending on your current staff’s availability and skill or outsource it to a qualified digital agency.

You don’t need to train agencies.

You won’t need to send people to a long training program, pay for them to go to a seminar, or pay a senior marketer to educate a new employee in the art of digital marketing when you hire an agency. Any respectable agency will have qualified, experienced, knowledgeable marketers and designers that are ready to start working for you.

Marketing agencies have a track record of success. In addition, they are accustomed to working with new clients. While an employee may only move jobs every few years, an agency is used to taking on fresh clients.

You’ll be less likely to get caught in a time drain than with other services. Furthermore, you may spend more time and money on training an employee. Employees may choose to move on from their careers after a few years of service. Unfortunately, employee turnover can be a big cost to a company’s efforts when you consider the lost productivity for your team and the time spent looking for someone as qualified to fill that seat.

You can work with a marketing agency long-term if you hire them. Even if members of the agency team change, the agency will responsible for bringing new teammates up to speed on your account – not you.

You can ramp up your marketing efforts and focus on the bigger picture.

In an in-house operation, the only way to grow your team’s output is to hire additional workers. However, a marketing agency already has a large number of people on hand that can be used at a moment’s notice if you want to implement a bigger, braver approach.

Also, because a creative and digital marketing agency has the expertise to assist you in scaling up, this is a no-brainer. You don’t need to pay for one of your staff to take an online course or hire someone new if you want to try Facebook Ads for the first time. Or if you are in the need of improving your SEO efforts or creating a new website, it may be a good idea to engage with a specialized SEO agency or web design company, respectively.

Your agency partner should be able to adjust to your demands as you develop and help you with all of your marketing needs as you expand.

You stay on top of the newest marketing trends.

What time does an in-house marketer have to read up on the newest social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, and web development news? They’re generally so buried in day-to-day duties there’s no place to grow, improve, or evolve.

The majority of reputable digital marketing agencies invest a lot of time into learning. They g spend their own time learning how to utilize new resources rather than charging you for their time.

You are having issues with producing results with your current marketing strategies.

It may be time to seek outside assistance from a marketing agency if your past marketing strategies aren’t working and you don’t know how to improve the numbers. A key issue with a lack in production is that it usually is followed by a decline in sales.

Businesses are frequently entrenched in the mindset of “We’ve always done it this way.

When you’re working from the inside, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. What is even more important to recognize is that it’s okay to ask for help. A digital marketing agency can provide you with a unique perspective on your existing marketing strategy. They can give you an objective evaluation of your current digital marketing campaign and suggest ways to improve it and expand your scope.

Our Second Thought

There’s usually one major reason why businesses spend money and effort on having their own creative or digital marketing team:

Keeping employees and marketers in-house means they understand your business inside and out, as no one outside of the company can. They eat, sleep, breathe, and promote your business’ culture full-time. No matter how excellent an external firm maybe, it’s difficult to match that degree of knowledge and devotion.

Fortunately, it does not have to be an either-or situation. The ideal setup is for there to be at least one internal person who can work with the outside marketing agency and benefit from having both perspectives.

Interested in seeing how hiring a creative and digital marketing agency like Second Studios can help your company bring in new business and more revenue today?

Contact us to set up a time to chat and learn how we can help!