5 Benefits A Specialist Digital Agency Can Bring Beyond Marketing

We recently wrote about just how hard it is for small businesses and start-ups to make the leap to the next level.

So often, it takes so much in the way of blood, sweat and tears from owners and managers to get on their feet and keep their doors open that their growth ambitions can take a while to implement. For many, it can be a struggle to even get going at all.

When your working life feels like that, it can be akin to climbing Ben Nevis to get to the next stage. One of the best ways to grow, reach out to new customers and carve a clearer path to the top is through marketing.

We especially believe that inbound marketing is the most effective place to spend your time. Thanks to the introduction of GDPR in particular, costly outbound methods such as buying data lists can not only be detrimental if they’re out of date but could also cost you more than you bargained for if they aren’t GDPR-compliant.

An inbound methodology combining search marketing, social media, content marketing, email and budgeting for biddable media placements can be much more effective for a long-term growth strategy.

Outbound methods such as cold-calling are also heavily under threat thanks to the introduction of GDPR. The public will have greater control over the data and how it’s used than ever before, effectively making reaching out to people you’ve never interacted with over the phone much harder.

With an inbound approach, you work toward ranking highly for the search terms your most profitable customers are actively searching for, drawing them into various parts of your sales funnel they’re currently at with incredible content, and keeping in touch with them to draw them back through social, email and other methods can be hugely effective.

A strong inbound marketing strategy can be an excellent way to improve the overall quality and frequency of your leads. Better yet it can be refined and adjusted over time to reflect the search, social and overall shopping habits of your buying public, so you aren’t scrabbling to come up with new campaigns to inject new life into your business at a moment’s notice.

Those two paragraphs alone, though, show just how much planning and maintenance go into preparing, optimising and actioning an effective long-term inbound marketing strategy focused on growing your business. Can you really afford the time and energy to concentrate on so many different channels to grow your business while running it at the same time?

5 other benefits an agency can provide

This is the message we touched on during our last post, where we underlined the benefits of working alongside a specialist digital agency when looking to grow your business and take it to the next level. Not just for managers who need support when growing their business, but those with teams already in place who need additional guidance and support in areas that they may need some help with.

Our last post highlighted how a specialist agency can help in that regard, but we want to expand on it and go a bit further.

A digital agency is more about time management and helping you grow. They’re also there alongside you as you grow your business, committing to the long-term project and watching as your inbound marketing strategy takes hold to beat the competition.

As well as helping to market your business effectively, a great agency will also provide:

Knowledge: Know how Google ranks websites? Understand the intricacies of keyword targeting and link building and how it affects your search position? What about long-tail for targeting those higher-quality leads with specific search habits? What about the recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm that heavily impact on pages’ reach? An agency will be able to consistently fill you in on best practice, making sure all your inbound steps are ethical and position you for growth.

Advice: It’s a jungle out there… If you have your sights set on growth then it’s likely your competitors will, too. Not just on your level, but those below your and above you. Can you keep your eye on what each and every one of them is up to with their marketing campaigns? Competitor analysis will be a key part of the relationship, working with you to provide insight on the movements your competition is making in the marketplace.

Budget responsibility: Inbound marketing is a long-term strategy, but some goals can be reached a lot more quickly if you commit some marketing budget to paid search and paid social ads and placements while your organic campaign takes hold. The right paid strategy can help you to attract the most relevant leads instantly, and over time, as you naturally begin to rank higher for search terms and social presence, you can begin to decrease that budget to save money.

New ideas: Working with a third-party can help you see things about your business and your customers that you may not have noticed before. Working together on building personas to reach out to your most valuable leads, for instance, can see both the agency and business owner contribute nuggets of information to potentially see gaps in the market that nobody else has noticed yet that can be exploited with a well-crafted creative inbound campaign.

New tech and tools: As we’ve (hopefully) hammered home, time can be of the essence when it comes to marketing for growth and maintaining standards. A good agency will be able to introduce numerous tools and techniques though that can help simplify the overall process. Marketing automation, for instance, can go a long way to handling basic administration tasks effectively, giving you time to focus on your customers and the leads that matter to you most. Tools such as data visualisation software, too, are essential to assessing your campaign on a regular basis.

Want to reach the next level but aren’t sure how to do it? Web Presence is a specialist digital marketing agency based in Macclesfield, dedicated to helping small businesses and SMEs grow. Contact us today for more information.

Originally published at webpresence.digital on March 20, 2018.