You’ve worked hard, your business has grown, and you’re ready for the next stage. We get it: we’ve been there. Maybe your competition is nipping at your heels, maybe your growth has plateaued, maybe you’re concerned about how macroeconomic trends might affect your business. In looking at possible next steps, you’ve realized that your digital marketing needs to level up.
So…the next question is, should you hire a digital marketing agency? Of course, we’re biased: we believe the answer to that question is YES. Let us explain why.
- Experience
As a company, we’ve been creating and implementing digital marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes for over 15 years. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients across a variety of verticals (ecommerce, B2B SaaS, and manufacturing, just to name a few) which means we have deep experience solving difficult marketing problems. Our collaborative environment emphasizes excellent results and always learning new things, which means we not only build and implement best practices, but we’re also constantly sharing them with each other and looking for ways to improve that will benefit our clients.
When you decide to partner with Unfair Advantage, your business will be assigned an account strategist – and since our account strategists have an average of 3.5 years of experience as digital marketers, they’re able to hit the ground running. But your account strategist isn’t working alone: they have access to our entire team with expertise across the digital marketing landscape: from PPC to SEO and design to social media. And since digital marketing is all we do, our team is full of subject matter experts with deep knowledge and curiosity about the everchanging digital marketing landscape and how to improve performance for each and every client.
Our deep experience means we bring strategic insights and a fresh perspective not only to digital marketing but also to other related marketing efforts. Our focus is always on how we can best integrate our work into your overall business goals.
- Expertise
How do our account strategists get an average of 3.5 years of experience? It starts with our training program. All our hires, regardless of previous experience, go through our digital marketing training program that’s the equivalent of a 2-year degree. Completing that training program isn’t the end of our learning, though. The digital marketing landscape is always changing and since it’s our sole focus, we work hard to be sure we’re ahead of every curve.
We have ongoing training to keep everyone’s knowledge of the latest digital marketing channels and platforms, technologies and tools, and strategies and tactics current. Our weekly team meeting has a dedicated section for sharing learnings from the previous week. We send our team members to conferences such as PPC Hero and PubCon for training on the latest in the digital marketing world which gets shared with the team.
And speaking of technologies and tools: Unfair Advantage has dozens of tools that we use across our portfolio – but only as appropriate. We’re big on technology, and even bigger on smart people using it in effective and efficient ways.
- Cost
Speaking of effective and efficient, hiring a digital marketing agency is cost-effective for many businesses. You get the deep expertise of an entire team and pay only for the time they spend on your business and goals.
Ask yourself, is digital marketing part of your team’s core competencies? If not, then hiring an agency, similar to having an outside accountant or other resources, may provide the most bang for your buck.
Another advantage of hiring an agency related to cost has to do with budgets and flexibility. The reality is that there are many possibilities when it comes to designing and implementing digital marketing strategies and tactics. Having a team with deep experience allows you to systematically try new things and quickly pivot budget away from those things that don’t work as well and dedicate more dollars to strategies that have the best performance.
Finally, hiring an agency frees in-house resources to do what they do best, which means getting the most out of your internal team as well as your digital marketing partner.
- Strategic considerations
When you’ve decided to hire an agency, the next step is to figure out which one. There are many good agencies out there, and a lot of factors to consider. Here are a few of the things we think are most important:
First, you want an agency that takes a partnership approach. How do we define partnership? An agency which takes a customized, value-driven approach that is focused on driving excellent results aimed at meeting or exceeding your business goals. Also, trust is essential for a good partnership, and trust comes from good communication, so pay attention to how, when, and why an agency communicates with your business.
Second, a quality agency will allow you to keep your data and the associated work product. No black boxes or hidden costs.
Third, you want an agency with strong relationships with Google, Meta, Bing, and the other places you may want to advertise. Those relationships can help troubleshoot issues and get your business into betas faster than otherwise possible.
Have other questions about what it’s like to work with a digital marketing agency? Wondering if working with an agency is the right next step for your business? We’d love to talk with you to see if a free digital marketing audit would be helpful – contact us today!
