Are you in the habit of DIY when it comes to your inbound marketing? Is it helping or hurting you? Let’s take a quick look at some of the key signs that it’s time to give yourself a break and finally hire out for agency marketing services.
1) Your Core Services Are Suffering
Are you spending more time learning HTML, Flash or SEO than you are providing what your customers and clients expect of you? Inbound marketing agencies are probably the cure for what ails.
Instead of spending inordinate amounts of time reading how-to’s (like this) and cobbling together what you think is a solid marketing strategy – even if it’s worked for you in the past – your time might be better served serving your clients.
Heck, the time and effort you’ve been devoting to doing inbound marketing yourself could even be put towards expanding your service offerings and benefitting the longevity of your business.
If you’ve been at this for a year or two – what have you really accomplished as a DIY marketer? Hiring an expert could help you make up for that “lost time” – and likely launch you from zero to one hundred in no time. There are so many technologies and tools and tips to become intimate with – do you really have the time to become a true subject matter expert…or would you be better off finding a marketing expert to do the work for you and do it well right out of the gate?
2) You’re Struggling to Produce Real Results
Leads that are sales-ready and transform into real customers are what pay the bills – not how you rank for a keyword. You may know a bit about SEO, and you might have even ranked your page for your efforts – which, don’t get us wrong, is excellent and you should be applauded! But, agency marketing services are about more than SEO – they’re about giving you actionable results and a solid ROI. In fact, solid and professional marketing comes down to leveraging assets and closing the loop.
If your efforts are struggling to produce quantifiable results – or if you don’t know for sure if all of your marketing efforts are what’s helping or harming you – consider agency marketing services. They’ll be able to provide detailed analytics on every element of a campaign in real time – giving you a true idea of how each element is performing – plus, you’ll have a plan in place of real and actionable things that are going to get done and that are going to get tracked.
3) Your Business Isn’t Growing As Much As You Want It To
This is a fairly cut and dried sign that things need to change. Agency Marketing Services should live for the ultimate goal of helping to grow your business via sales-ready leads. As the saying goes, “you have to spend money to make money”, and when it comes to hiring a team of marketing consultants, that couldn’t be more true.
Make it clear that your goal is to grow your business – and discuss the margins you hope to achieve with the marketing agency’s help. As professional marketers, they should feel comfortable having this discussion with you and with managing your expectations in the event they’re a bit too lofty. Don’t allow them to talk you down too far though – hold their feet to the fire and motivate them to wow you with their marketing services.
And, finally, make yourself and your in-house team available as subject matter experts to help foster an environment of creativity and transparency. Knowledge about what makes your business tick and what makes your customers and clients happy is the fuel that drives every successful marketing campaign.
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