Isn’t It Time You Hire An Ad Agency?

All smart business owners know that having a great product is not enough to bring customers to their door. Successfully marketing your business is crucial to create effective branding and to ensure that your product is top of mind when people require what you sell.

If you’ve been considering using a marketing agency in the near future, you’ve come to the right place! If it hasn’t even crossed your mind, stick around because this might help you make an informed decision later down the road.

No matter where you are in your business, we want you to carefully consider the impact of outsourcing your marketing, so keep reading to discover the pros and cons of recruiting a marketing agency.

How Most Entrepreneurs Market

In typical entrepreneur style, most business owners try to do all the marketing themselves, a practice we support and encourage because it helps to keep the initial overheads down.

But today we want to speak to the business owners who have been following our advice and seeing increased ROI on their ad spend and the business owners who have been successfully growing their business. It’s around this time that most entrepreneurs start to feel increasing pressure to keep the marketing ball up in the air, whilst handling all their other responsibilities.

Marketing is a massive beast, the intricacies and strategies of which we could discuss for days. So for the purpose of this blog, we are going to confine ourselves to taking a bird’s eye overview of how a marketing agency might be able to assist your business. We also look at some of the cons you should consider before you sign up with an agency, because great results are not necessarily guaranteed and you need to be well informed to prevent yourself from getting burned.

What Can A Marketing Agency Do For You?

In today’s high-tech world, it is worthwhile to consider exactly what you require when we talk about marketing your business. For the purpose of this blog, and because it’s our field of expertise, we’re going to focus on digital marketing. This is the most common and cost-effective forms of advertising available, so if you were to outsource you marketing, you would most likely start with digital.

Before engaging with an agency, we encourage you to take some time to consider exactly what you need them to do.

Here’s a list of some of the marketing services a typical business would require:

1. Brand awareness (is your business local, national or international?)
2. Running limited-time promotions
3. Acquiring qualified leads
4. Encourage people to visit a physical or online store
5. Sell out an event
6. Have people opt-in to your email list
7. And a million more other options!

Maybe you only need one or two of the above, or maybe you’d prefer a bouquet of services. Either way, you will be throwing your money away unless you are crystal clear what you are trying to achieve before setting up a consultation with an agency.

Consider the process of building a house. You don’t just say to an architect: “Please design me the house of my dreams.” You need to be specific and detailed when you discuss the plans. You need to elaborate on how many bedrooms and bathrooms you desire, whether you want a fireplace in the lounge or a swimming pool in the backyard. Your architect needs to understand your expectations before you both decide to work together and the same goes for marketing.

Cons of Hiring an Ad Agency

Let’s talk about some of the risks involved in using a marketing agency before we move onto the upside. Naturally, your business is your #1 priority, but you need to keep in mind that this is not the case for any external company you delegate work to.

Outsourcing your marketing to an agency means that you are entrusting the promotion of your company to individuals who do not have a direct, vested interest in it. You are just one customer out of many demanding their time and attention, so you need to find an agency who is going to treat you like gold.

Then there is the cost factor. Marketing your business can be pricey. We’ll discuss this one in more detail further on.

But before you freak out, keep reading, because there are ways to lower your risk and even turn the negatives around. Besides, the pro’s are so compelling, you don’t want to miss learning what agencies can do for you.

3 Massive Pro’s of Hiring an Ad Agency

1. Reclaim Your Most Precious Commodity

If you hire the right agency who understand your company and your mission, and also fully comprehends your specific marketing objectives, the #1 benefit an ad agency gives you is extra TIME.

The time and energy required to create, place and manage ad campaigns is valuable time that you could be redirecting into your business.

If you own a hair salon, for example, is your time not better spent running your salon, training your staff and keeping your clients happy than fiddling on facebook trying to “retarget” and “optimise”?

This benefit cannot be overemphasised because time is our most precious commodity and no one on earth would ever decline the opportunity for someone to make their lives easier AND give them more time to do other things. For this reason alone, we feel you should seriously consider handing your marketing over to an agency.

2. Let the Experts Do the Hard Work

Be honest, do you have a burning desire to learn how Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/digital marketing works? Do you love placing ads and monitoring their performance daily? That’s fantastic, and that is exactly what the Big Domino Marketing blog was created for! To educate and inform those who want to improve their digital marketing skills.

However, for many people, learning how something is done in general is very different to actually doing it all day, every day.

Digital Marketers are highly skilled and proficient across multiple platforms. They are dedicated to staying abreast of all the latest marketing trends and are early-adopters to technology changes. These are the people who understand all the terminology, and can set up campaigns in a fraction of the time it would likely take a layman.

Why don’t you let them do the work, while you enjoy the rewards?

3. Quantifiable Results

When you contract with an agency, you can negotiate what services they provide you (remember that list we gave you earlier on?) and you can specify reasonable results you would expect to receive over a given time period. Digital marketing in particular is exceptionally good at acquiring leads for businesses so you can decide what would work for your company’s capacity, bearing in mind what your current numbers reflect. It is always advisable to know your base numbers so that you can quantify the affect of paid marketing.

Marketers often require three months to build the marketing funnels and optimise for maximum results, so keep in mind that hiring an agency is not a quick fix but rather a strategic investment in your company.

Remember the Cons?

Not Their Baby

So let’s touch back again on the cons we listed earlier, to see how we can lower these risks to a manageable level.

We mentioned that any company you outsource work to, doesn’t necessarily love and believe in your company like you do. But even though the ad agency is not directly vested in your company, they are very vested in their company. As long as both parties come to a clear understanding of services required and expectations, it makes sense that the agency you choose will bend over backwards to achieve those goals.

If they are worth their salt, they will try exceed your expectations. This means that if you want 5 new leads per week, they will try their hardest to get you 8 – 10.

Even though marketers are the experts, we receive a surprising percentage of new work from referrals from happy clients. It is also an incredibly competitive industry, so any decent agency would do their utmost to knock your socks off to ensure continuing business with existing clients, but also to attract new clients. If you have an excellent communication plan in place with your agency, then don’t agonise over handing over your marketing to them.

The Price Factor

Naturally, excellent marketing comes at a price. You need to wrap your head around the fact that even though the principle of advertising on social platforms is very simple, the execution is not necessarily that easy.

We want you to consider the impact of a positive ROI on your business. Don’t look at your marketing budget in isolation and seeing it as this massive expense or something that should be kept to a minimum. Rather, shift your thinking to envision all the new business you could bring in.

It bears repeating, but marketing is rarely a short-term exercise and requires you to develop a working relationship with the agency so that they understand how best to serve you.

Embrace the notion that marketing is a necessary expense, but it can provide you with valuable growth and opportunity.

The extra time you will save when you hand over your marketing, is time to invest back into your business. Remember, a company can market your product to death, but if the quality or service isn’t up to standard, you still won’t make sales.

Your company needs you to handle all the other intricacies of business ownership. You need to keep the standards sky high, so that when the advertising brings you a bunch of new leads, your sales people can convert them to paying customers, and hopefully, these people will have such an incredible experience with your company that they walk away as loyal brand advocates.

The Takeaway

While it is tempting to try become an expert at everything that touches your business, the reality is that there simply isn’t enough time to do it all.

You simply cannot do it all yourself, and eventually you might need to rope in some help.

Marketing is crucial to your business success, but the digital landscape can be tricky to navigate if you aren’t especially comfortable with tech. Besides, you have a business to run, remember?

Outsourcing your marketing can be scary and pricey, but the payoff is so huge that we consider it a necessary step to free up a considerable amount of your time.

Think about the pros and cons we’ve presented, and see if you can come up with a few we haven’t mentioned.

Yes, you will have to pay for someone to market your business, but this is what we do all day, every day and we love every second of it.

Consider the huge weight lifted from your shoulders when you allow experts to run and monitor your campaigns for you, and what this gift of extra time can do for your business and wellbeing.