The large majority of companies are learning the painful reality that marketing is moving too fast. Most organizations are starting to realize very quickly that marketing isn’t a one person’s job anymore.
They might have a CMO that might have a director of marketing and the challenge is that person is probably either overworked, or they’re at a crossroads to try to figure out which platform or approach that they’re going to use.
Let’s dive in
There is a term that was made famous by HubSpot, that they call this individual “Marketing Mary.” The reality is that Mary is awesome at her job. But unless she’s working 180 hours a week, there’s no way that she’s going to have enough time to be able to do all the critical facets of marketing.
Your clients may expect you to be on the first page of Google, be a thought leader, to have a great website, while also expecting you to communicate effectively through newsletters and social media. They have greater and greater expectations.
Breaking through the clutter
When you are in this position you must figure out what to do strategically and when to act, becomes a challenge. But then, it actually gets worse.
This statistic is two years old, but as of 2020, there are over 2 billion blogs. Billion with a B! That is one blog for every seven people.
If you figure that all these organizations are starting to commit to producing and pushing out content, that means that there are huge mountains of content out every day.
What we are seeing in 2022 is that content, including what is developed by AI, is rising. The amount of content that’s introduced into the market is staggering and the competition to gain the attention of prospective customers is harder than ever. The landscape is growing at a rapid pace.
The graphic was created by Go Glade, which illustrates how much content is being pushed out on every social media platform.
For example, if we look at YouTube, more than 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. So when you think, “I’m going to be the next viral video”, you might be, but probably not.
The snowball of hiring external talent
You’re going to need to know what marketing challenges that your CMO face every day. Usually the alternative is hiring internally. Having a house marketing team can be a resolution to outsourcing talent.
You have Mary, who has a starting salary of around $72,000, then she realized that she needs to have someone write content for us, at least part time. And so Connie Content is going to come in, and she will cost about 34,000 a year.
Another marketing challenge can be social media management. If Mary and Connie can’t handle it, you will have to outsource that either internal or through another vendor. Social media marketing is a huge asset to a company’s marketing strategy that they can capitalize on.
SEO is an art and a science, which is a very specialized skill to have. You will need to hire people that know what they’re doing. They will either be internal or through another vendor, which can become very expensive.
You want everything to be cohesive with your brand, so you must add a website developer and designer to your team. The graphic design or your business is a crucial part to making your brand image professional and appealing.
You could wake up one day and see a lot of money going out the door. When using multiple vendors, brand changes can be very timely and costly. If your company decides to change their messaging or approach, Mary must call five different independent vendors to keep their content consistent. It is crucial that everyone be on the same page, but Mary cannot guarantee that from her team.
The team based approach
The alternative is using a team based approach. The team based approach is commonly using a marketing agency.
If an agency is good, the number one question you need to ask them is, how many of their people or resources are internal hires? What often happens is that agencies will outsource their work overseas to save cost, but sometimes, the quality goes down with saved cost.
If I select a team based agency, you will want to know the stakeholders in the process. One of the things that we highly recommend is that you have a project manager, who is also a strategist.
In the ideal sense, your team will be comprised of the following talent:
- Account Manager
- Project Manager
- Content Writer
- Social Media Specialist
- SEO Expert
- Graphic Designer
- Paid Ad Strategist
There are a variety of other things that you might have to get into depending on if your content is video or native advertising. Long story short, hiring internally is extremely cost effective.
If you can use a digital marketing agency to change the game and change how you do things, I would highly recommend it, but they must have a team based approach.
Internal marketing vs team based-approach
When you compare using multiple vendors versus an agency that has a team based approach, you will find that the agency comes in at a deep discount.
For example, if your account manager is speaking with you a minimum of an hour and a half per week, they will feel like your partner. If they feel like your partner, they will be able to keep up the same rhythms as your internal team.
If you’re finding that your account manager only speaks to you once a month, they are not coming back to you with data driven decisions and they’re not doing the things that make you feel like you’re a partner, get rid of that agency.
It is imperative that you find a partner as early as possible so that you can build your editorial calendar to reach your three to five year roadmap.
Wait, there’s more!
What you should also be saying is there is more that goes into hiring the right digital marketing agency. If you look at our organization, we spend a minimum of around $7,000 a month on software for our clients.
If you figure that you are going to drop $7,000 a month on an agency, that agency also has to have the software they need to succeed. If you were going to try to use these tools internally, before you hired a single person, that is $7,000 worth of tools that you need, just to be competitive.
Our Unique Process
The other thing that you want to be able to do with a marketing agency is to make sure that the agency is comprehensive enough to be able to handle the ups and downs of marketing, the algorithm changes, or just even the crazy stuff like privacy updates and things that pop up periodically.
Whenever you select a marketing agency, you should ask them what their process is like. The pillars of objectives that you should be looking for, take a significant amount of time to do discovery.
At Farotech, we conduct a gap assessment, which is an important piece of our unique process. The gap assessment takes us about 10 weeks, and in those 10 weeks, we figure out your three to five year roadmap, look at the challenges for your industry and evaluate your competition.
We analyze your goals and work in reverse to try to figure out how to achieve your goals successfully. For example, let’s say we need to drive $20 million of new revenue, we will need to figure out the following statistics:
- How many sales?
- Does it take in new sales?
- How long will it take to get to that $20 million mark?
- How many leads does it take to get those sales?
- How much of the marketing did it take to get those leads?
Ultimately, I need to know how much I have to spend in content marketing to get the sales that are going to drive me to $20 million.
After the gap assessment, we will conduct a usability conversion analysis. The analysis is essentially heat mapping that you’re going to put all over your website to trigger actions to try to figure out how your usability is leading to conversion.
The next part of our unique process is SEO, search engine optimization. SEO is the art and science of getting on the first page of Google for critical keywords. You will have to find out what content you will have to write as well as what backlinks you can get.
Your content strategy should work hand in hand with SEO. When selecting your agency, we want to recommend that you use marketing automation. The tools that we recommend you use would be HubSpot, but also Salesforce or Pardot.
After you’ve looked at that, we will look at lead nurturing. With lead nurturing, it allows us to connect marketing automation so that any lead that comes in will be able to get an overview, email features, benefits cost of procrastination, answer frequently asked questions, show some client testimonials or case studies, and then maybe a new offer.
From there, I want to also make sure that my social media channels are all set up and ensure that I figured out what audiences I am targeting.
But social media is only going to work effectively if you’re connecting it with a paid approach. I’ve talked significantly about your organic reach and the fact that SEO is not worth your effort unless you’re willing to pay for the eyeballs of the consumers to see it.
If you are going to implement a paid social or a paid advertising strategy, you’re going to have to figure out your analytics and data to calculate your ROI. I would make sure that your digital marketing agency understands your entire paid advertising approach.
Video development is the number one way to engage your audience and humanize your brand or your products and services. Content creation such as video can elevate your landing page to help connect with your audience as soon as they come onto your homepage.
If you don’t have video on your homepage, you absolutely should. You have to be able to make data driven decisions on your marketing. If not, you’re just going to be chasing trends and hunches. Typically, that will lead you nowhere.
In conclusion
If you’re hiring a marketing agency, those are some of the deliverables that you want to look for. At Farotech, we offer all those services. We don’t hide anything, and we’re 100% transparent with all our clients and audiences. Our marketing efforts are always data driven and logical to best fit your business’ three to five year roadmap to success.
When selecting a digital marketing agency, it should be clear what their goals are, what marketing efforts they can offer and how their team based approach will benefit your company or business.
If you have any questions about our agency or approach, please contact us and we will get back to you shortly. We look forward to working with you!
