7 Clear Signs It’s Time to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency

In today’s world, it is clear that having a digital marketing strategy is an important part of successfully growing a business. More than half of advertising is now digital, and most small-to-medium-sized businesses spend an average of 5-10% of their revenue on marketing. The question is: should you do it yourself or hire a digital marketing agency?

Of course, you can have success handling your digital marketing in-house with the right knowledge and skills on your team. However, at some point, every business should consider whether a third-party agency would help generate more leads and be more cost-effective. 

Since you’re reading this article, perhaps you’ve already started that consideration. To help with your decision, here are some clear signs that it is time to hire a digital marketing agency.

1. You Lack the Necessary Skill Set In-House

Hiring a full in-house marketing team is expensive. Most small-to-mid-sized businesses can’t justify the overhead and operational costs of maintaining a full-time marketing team, so they are left figuring things out for themselves. Sound familiar?

Digital marketing has become the dominant force in modern-day marketing strategies, and it is effective across most industries. The skills required for an effective digital marketing strategy are unique and require expertise in things like:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media 
• Graphic design
• Web design and development
• Metric analytics
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
• Digital advertising

That is a lot, and this is not an exhaustive list. If you or your team lack some of these skills, that’s okay! That’s why professional digital marketing agencies exist, and it’s the first sign that it’s time to start working with one.

2. You’re Not Planning for the Future

An effective marketing strategy requires long-term planning. Short-term campaign goals need to be considered, but if you are only focused on the current campaign(s), you are missing essential insights.

If you are neglecting to plan your marketing strategy months or even years down the road, your campaigns and content are likely to fall short. You need to keep your brand-building and long-term revenue goals in mind as well. Working with a digital marketing agency will help you to set those long-term goals and create a plan for attaining those goals over the next month and the next year.

3. You’ve Seen a Decline in Sales or Leads

Have you noticed a decline in sales lately? Then it might be time to invest in a new strategy to generate leads, drive traffic to your business, and close on sales. 

Partnering with a digital marketing team will optimize your online presence. This means increasing lead generation but also optimizing your sales process so more of those leads pay off. 

Investing in marketing strategies that don’t pay off is frustrating. A good agency will help you make sure that money is put to good use. Most digital marketing agencies aim for an ROI of 5:1. Some campaigns will be less effective than others (for example, your PPC has an ROI of around 200% while the email marketing has an ROI of around 3600%) but it is important to include a diverse approach, tackling your digital marketing from content creation to website development.

4. Your Website is Outdated

Speaking of website development, ensuring your website is up-to-date is one of the most essential steps to success in the modern era of SEO and smartphones.

Some of the key metrics to landing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) involve the way your website is developed and designed. Is the mobile version of your website up to date and optimized? Are your loading times fast? Is your website user-friendly? Is your website secure?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions–or if you don’t know the answers to these questions–then it is definitely time to engage with a digital marketing agency.

5. You Aren’t Tracking Key Analytics

Metrics like webpage loading times are just one of the many analytics that you should be tracking and that your digital marketing team would track for you. Tracking your website analytics and your social engagement is essential for learning what is working and what isn’t. How can you fix something if you don’t know it’s broken?

Digital marketing agencies record and analyze dozens of metrics like click-through rate, time on page, and bounce rate to help identify where their attention should be focused. If you haven’t been doing this or don’t know what those terms mean, it’s time to hire a digital marketing agency.

6. Your Content is Outdated or Infrequent

Creating low-quality content or not creating enough content can hurt your business’s marketing strategy. Google rankings drop if your content is not high-quality according to their ranking factors, and social media engagement decreases when posting is infrequent. 

For a successful digital marketing strategy, you should be creating new content for your website every week and social media content even more often. That is a lot of work to do on your own when you’re busy running a business.

7. Your Business is Growing

This is one of the main reasons businesses seek out digital marketing agencies. When your business is growing, you’ll need to implement new strategies to continue that growth while maintaining and even enhancing its reputation. 

Plus, as your company grows, your marketing budget will grow with it. It’s worth considering whether it is more effective to continue managing your marketing as you have been or if you can get better results by working with a third-party team.

Hire a Digital Marketing Agency with a Proven Record of Success

Not all digital marketing agencies are built equally. If you are going to trust the growth of your business to a third-party agency, you want to make sure it’s a company that works has happy clients with proven results.

Consultus Digital is Toronto’s premier digital marketing & sales enablement agency that takes a unique approach to the digital marketing model. Not only do we help generate leads, but we help make sure that those leads result in closing sales. By helping you develop a sales enablement strategy, we will optimize your sales process to convert that increased traffic into revenue. 
Don’t wait any longer to engage with a proven digital marketing agency to help take your business to the next level. Contact us, the experts at Consultus Digital today.