The Importance of Expertise in Marketing

Marketing is one of those areas that’s often overlooked. Big companies have so much going on that they tend to let marketing slip through. Marketing can be expensive — Most big companies spend up to 10% of their budget on it — so it’s often the first to go when budgets are tight.

As a result, lots of companies multitask. They assign marketing to people within the company who already have other jobs, who then have to divide their attention. The work suffers, the results don’t materialize, and it looks like marketing doesn’t work.

The truth? Marketing can’t be done in half measures. If it’s going to have a measurable effect on the success of the company, it needs to be done right. To get the best results out of your marketing — and the best bang for your buck — you need experts that can tackle the nuances of modern marketing. Here’s why.

Marketing is Complicated

Marketing has come a long way since the days when you could just put an ad in a magazine. There are dozens of channels, types of media, metrics, and strategies that need to be addressed. Add to that the different people you’re targeting and different buying funnels. A professional marketing team makes it their business to know not just what your options are, but which of them will work the best and how to make them work optimally for you.

First, it’s about properly executing the strategies you do have. Take email, for instance. Email marketing seems easy — you send emails every day — but it’s not as simple as writing a note.

First, you’ll need to know who you’re talking to. What do they want? What are they most worried about? What’s standing between them and a sale? You’ll want to divide them up, too. You don’t want to send an email about your Premium membership to someone who’s already signed up, for example. You don’t want to send an email about an in-store offer to someone too far away to redeem it.

Once you have a list of people to send your emails, you need to create the email itself. But that’s no easy process. You’ll need a good writer to create catchy copy that makes people want to interact further. You’ll need a designer to lay out the email in an appealing way. You’ll need people who can create calls-to-action that drive traffic to your website. When these emails are thrown together without planning and expertise, it shows — and that goes for the rest of your marketing, too.

An Objective Outside View

Another thing to consider is that you know your company well — perhaps too well. You’ve seen it from the ground up, you know what you’ve tried before, and there’s a good chance you’ve formed some habits that might not be helping you.

A marketing agency can come in with a totally unbiased perspective. Experts will take a detailed look at what you’re doing, who your customers are, and what your goals are, and from there they can create a plan that points you in the right direction without any old habits getting in the way.

Better yet, they’ve worked with lots of other clients. Chances are, they’ve seen someone who has similar goals or similar problems to you, so they know how to fix them already. Experience eliminates a lot of the trial and error that comes with a new marketing campaign, because the “trial” part has already been done.

Lastly, a professional marketing agency will be aware of tactics, channels, and strategies that you may not be using because you haven’t even heard of them. There are hundreds of ways to market a business, and you simply don’t have time to keep track of the latest and greatest marketing techniques. Nor should you! You’re busy running a business. But for a professional agency, keeping track of all your options is our business. We’ll break down your marketing needs on a more detailed and granular level than you could ever do yourself.

Analyzing Data Isn’t Easy

Even if you have a solid marketing strategy, that’s only the first step in a marathon. The next step is just as important: figuring out whether it’s working. There’s more data at your fingertips than ever before, and for marketing to truly thrive, it needs to be utilized. Regularly. If you’re going to make sense of the thousands of data points, you’ll probably need some help.

Let’s say you start a search marketing campaign on Google, trying to get new marketing qualified leads coming in. Is it working? Diving in to a robust paid campaign involves looking into no less than a dozen different reports just for one ad set.

First, you need to dive in to Google to evaluate and optimize the ads and campaigns themselves, then look at website metrics to see how they are moving through the digital journey. Once they convert, are they qualified leads? What about the ones that don’t convert — why not?

Breaking down what’s working and what doesn’t requires experience, time, and sometimes specialized software. Bringing in the experts gives you all those resources rolled into one fee.

You Get What You Pay For

Marketing experts will give you better results than trying to do it yourself. Will they be more expensive? Probably — according to one survey, effective content marketers spend twice as much as their less effective peers. But the reason that effective marketing costs so much is that it works. Content marketing gets three times the leads per dollar spent that paid search does. It generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing, while costing almost two thirds less. And conversion rates are almost six times higher than other methods.

More importantly, think about the alternative. If you try to have one person do all your marketing in-house, you’ll have to pay their salary, despite the fact that they can’t possibly handle the workload. If you hire multiple in-house marketers, your costs increase dramatically.If you try to have people multitask, you’re splitting their focus, making them less productive and wasting money on inefficiency.

If you hire a marketing agency, however, you’re paying for the whole agency’s expertise — writers, strategists, designers, account managers, web developers, and so on — for the price of one or two good employees of your own. The agency’s staff only does marketing. They’re up to date on the latest strategies and they have the best software tools to execute your vision.

If your marketing has been stagnating, leads aren’t coming in, or sales are looking a little flat, it might be time to bring in the experts. Give us a call and we’ll go over your current strategy and methods, then give you our take on your best approach. After all, it’s what we’re best at.