Marketing companies can help small businesses improve their marketing efforts by managing a broad range of channels and crafting strategies. Provide the company with the advantage of removing the burden of everyday management and freeing internal resources. When you hire a marketing agency to outsource your internet marketing, you hire a team of marketing experts and all their resources to help you implement your marketing strategy. In a way, the agency becomes responsible for the marketing responsibilities of your company.
Everyone knows that digital marketing is a powerful tool for lead generation. Still, with all the tech and complexity involved, it may be tempting to hit the slack and hire an agency to outsource your internet marketing. If you can’t afford an agency, you might feel tempted not to use these powerful tools. Or even worse, you’ll hire an agency but don’t understand the results they’re producing for you.
Here is a list of the four best things you should do before you outsource internet marketing. By doing so, you will benefit from knowing what you need when the time comes to hire outside resources.
1. Understand Your Data
Digital marketing systems generate a large amount of data, and it can be hard to read numerous complex reports from various systems. If you want to understand your data, sign in to Google Analytics. Your website developer probably installed this on your site (your outsource internet marketing team can do this for you) to gather key statistics about your website traffic. Find out how much traffic your website receives from sources such as organic search, referrals, direct traffic, and advertising. Google Analytics also allows to set up goal conversion tracking to see how many leads are received or sales are generated from each source.
2. Focus On Your Goal (Traffic, Leads, Or Sales)
Once you understand what you are currently doing, you will be able to set goals to improve. There are several digital marketing techniques available to you, like search engine optimization and website optimization. Your outsourced online marketing team will do this but if you do it yourself, make sure to focus on driving more traffic, leads and sales. On your home page or landing page, you can add a “call to action” or “offer” that makes requesting contact information uncomplicated for visitors.
3. Test Simple Marketing Strategies
If your budget is limited, use simple campaigns that can generate traffic and leads. Sending out emails or creating simple ad campaigns using Google, LinkedIn and Facebook are the easiest ways to start campaigns. All these tools are powerful, but starting with the simplest form can help you get the program started correctly. Remember, these campaigns do not run themselves, your outsourced online marketing team can do this, or you’ll need to review them every few days to ensure they are running smoothly and are driving desired results.
4. Get A Little Help
It is okay to seek help when you need it. You are probably better off outsourcing website, video, or graphic design to an outsourced online marketing company.
Following these practices can help you grow until you can afford to hire a company leader and digital marketing agency. And With the help of the marketing company, you will likely build a larger SEO-optimized website, produce more content and video, increase more ad campaigns, and implement a fully automated marketing program.
See also: 5 dangers of software development outsourcing