It can be tempting to shy away from working with an agency. After all, you already have someone in-house surely you can use them for the job and save money, right? In fact, doing that is often a false economy, and you're frequently going to end up draining more resources than you save. Working with a local digital agency can actually be highly cost-effective. Here are some of the signs it could be right for your business.
When things are going well, all you need to do is to carry on the same way, right? Wrong. As your company's sales and reputation grow, customer expectations will grow with them. If you want to build and maintain a leading role in your niche, an off-the-shelf website full of clichéd lines everyone's seen a hundred times before won't get you very far. When you partner with the right agency, you'll have a new team on board to help you highlight the ways your company stands out from the crowd.
Take a look at company websites in your industry. It's pretty likely that some of them will be a year out of date, or even more. We don't need to tell you how bad that looks to customers – but it also looks bad to another player you can't afford to ignore: Google. An old-fashioned website that only works with desktop PCs is not going to do your search ranking any good in today's responsive, mobile-friendly online world. Working with an agency can be a great way of making your website look and work great on all your customers' devices. Not only that consider the experience a user has when they land on your website, is it modern? Is it quick to load? Is your messaging clear?
With the best will in the world, SMEs are just not going to have the staff to excel in every marketing task. Effective digital marketing now requires deep knowledge of social media, SEO, graphic design, data analysis - to name but four. Trying to do it all yourself means spreading the skills you do have more thinly, as well as risking burnout and lowered morale among your existing team. Bringing in a business development partner like JDR brings the benefit of specialist knowledge, letting your sales team concentrate on what they do best: selling.
If you don't know where your visitors come from, or how their journeys on your website proceed, it's probably time to think about working with an agency. Their experience and expertise will help you to implement sales tracking systems that give you the information you need to increase sales. Once you know which channels work best, your team can prioritise these going forward. The opposite is also true: knowing which approaches are less successful will stop you from wasting time and money on marketing strategies that don't cut the mustard.
Maybe you had a great idea for a campaign six months ago, and it brought the customers and conversions flooding in. That's great – but you can't lean on the same content forever. What sent a buzz around social media last year may produce yawns this year. Living and breathing your business every day; it's not always easy to step back and see things the way customers do. Working with a digital marketing agency is the perfect way to bring a fresh perspective to your content, helping you to keep your target audience coming back for more.
Have a chat with one of our advisors today about the benefits to your business of working with a local, professional marketing agency. We offer a range of bespoke marketing services to help you get discovered online and increase your customer base. Call 01332 982022 today to find out more.
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