On the fence about working with a digital marketing agency? Here are some awesome advantages of choosing to move forward with it.

1. You’re always on top of the latest trends

If you’ve ever tried to follow the trends, search algorithm updates, and new tactics & strategies in digital marketing, you know how constantly it changes. Unless your career is in digital marketing, you’re probably just not going to be on top of it all. It takes time that you just don’t have!

Plus, there are so many different aspects of digital marketing. Social media, email marketing, SEO, video, content, paid ads…the list of strategies is long, and you can’t possibly follow what’s trending in all of them.

Enter the digital agency.

It’s an agency’s job and lifeblood to stay on top of trends. If we don’t know about and do the latest and greatest in each channel of digital marketing, we’re not going to be the best at our jobs or retain our clients. So, part of our time is spent learning and growing along with the industry. So, working with a (good) digital agency means you’ve got someone informing you about the latest and greatest, and employing it in your unique strategy.

2. You get reliability & accountability

A great agency is going to be both reliable and accountable.

Reliability means you can call up your strategist and have a chat about what’s going on with your numbers or ask about updating your current strategy. It means you hear back from your agency swiftly, you trust and rely on them to know about and use the best strategies, and you just get the general feeling that they’re there for you.

On the accountability side, you’ve got someone who’s accountable for your digital marketing strategy and the numbers behind it. If you’re losing steam in organic search, for instance, it’s your agency that has the answer as to why it’s happening. If a paid ad fails to bring in the customers you thought it would, your agency is accountable.

3. Your internal marketing team is extended

You’ve got your own internal marketing team, but adding a digital marketing agency is like extending it – big time. Especially if you’re a small or medium-sized business, you’re probably not going to hire your own social media specialist, your own paid ads person, your own SEO specialist…that’s not sustainable. Instead, hiring an agency puts all those people on your team.

4. Your focus stays on growth

Having a digital agency as a partner means you can focus on all the most important aspects of growing your business. Sure, that includes awesome digital marketing, but you can take a lot of that off your shoulders when there’s a team of reliable, accountable experts doing what needs to be done. Focus on growing, not on day-to-day digital marketing.

5. You get advanced insights from advanced tools

There are some pretty amazing tools out there that help digital marketers gain incredibly important insights about your customers, your search visibility, and your overall performance on the web. The bad news for you is, they can get pretty expensive. By the time you pick out a tool to monitor your search engine visibility, you’re already throwing too much into tools and you need another one to schedule your social media posts, and yet another one to monitor your online reputation.

Digital agencies often have their own budget for these important tools, and will be able to give you insights from them without you having to purchase the use of them. These tools can really make or break your ability to market the most effectively.

6. You gain objectivity

Your business is your baby. Whether you’ve built it all up from an idea, bought it from your dad, or came into it by chance, you’re…well…close to it. You make all the big decisions, watch over all the goings on, and generally keep the business running smoothly. That can make it really hard to step back and look at your marketing with fresh eyes. An agency, however, is just learning about your business and taking a look at it from an outsider’s point of view: an objective point of view.

While sometimes it can be hard to let go of the reins and let an agency do what’s best for your business, it’s really in your best interest to let an expert take a look at your marketing from a new, totally objective point of view.

Wrapping it Up

The potential advantages of working with an agency are pretty big ones. To recap, our top 6 advantages are:

• You’re always on top of the latest digital marketing trends.
• You get reliability and accountability in your marketing.
• Your own internal marketing team is extended, without doing the hiring.
• Your focus can stay on growing your business.
• You gain advanced insights from advanced tools (without having to pay for all of them).
• You gain an objective outlook on your business and your marketing strategies.

To make the decision about working with an agency, you’ll want to set up some meetings with them and find one that fits with your business’s culture.

By Brandon George
From Thrive: https://thriveagency.com/news/6-benefits-of-hiring-a-digital-marketing-agency/