Paid promotions beyond "Boost Post"
Paid promotion is an intricate process that calls for a high level of dedication, organization, and supervision. If you’re considering adding a paid digital marketing campaign to your overall business strategy, it’s important to make sure you have someone on your team who can dedicate the time, energy, and attention it takes to make it effective and successful.
If you have a teammate to fill these shoes, that is amazing! But often with small businesses, outsourcing is necessary. Tasks such as email marketing and social media tend to have a faster learning curve, but promotional marketing is a different story. Because you are putting money behind your ads, it is very expensive to learn by trial and error like you can for other channels. This often makes business owners wonder - should I manage my own digital ads or higher an agency?
There are many pros and cons to both sides that we want to lay out for you so you can make the decision that's best for your business.
Diversity of Skills
Paid ads require a variety of skills, including strategy, platform knowledge, graphic design, analytics and reports, and more. This is very challenging to find in one person that you could hire onto your team. Proficiency in each of these skills can take time and practice, meaning you might have to hire a superhuman to get it all done.
Agencies are great to solve this problem because they offer a team that will work with your organization for a lower price than hiring someone in-house. For example, at Meridiem Marketing we have an expert in paid promotion strategy and execution, another in graphic design, and another in social media trends. Combined, we can come up with efficient strategies for your team without the cost of three people joining your company. Ultimately, the diversity of skill you can achieve through the price of hiring an agency is one of the most frugal ways to grow your business.
Brand Knowledge
When it comes to marketing, understanding the company and brand is a must. The definition of marketing is to communicate your brand to consumers and entice them to purchase something. Without deep brand understanding, even the best marketing tactics can become misconstrued.
Full-time employees will naturally have more brand knowledge than an agency that is hired on. Someone working 40 hours a week immersed in a brand will undoubtedly have a huge advantage in this regard.
That being said, agencies are not unteachable. If you find an agency who is looking to be a true partner in this work, they will commit to understanding your brand and asking the right questions to get them to a point where they can represent you digitally.
Flexibility
Digital marketing is one of the fastest changing landscapes in business today. Each day there is a new trend, legislation, or platform that could seriously change the effectiveness of your digital marketing. Pivoting (cue "Friends" meme here) is the name of the game.
When you have a full time person working on your digital marketing, it is often challenging to pivot as often as necessary. They may be pouring hours into each segment of your marketing mix, but then have to adjust it when they hear of a new trend or a better idea. This can be discouraging for your employee but also really inefficient for your business.
Since you are hiring a team through an agency, pivoting is much easier for them because they have the people power to put behind the work. If a trend changes, there are multiple team members to leverage to push out the content or strategy needed to keep your brand relevant in the digital sphere.
The Choice is Yours
At the end of the day, this is such a personal decision. You may have found a superhuman marketer for your team, which means they can do it all to continue your digital growth. Our only question is… how did you get so lucky?
On the flipside, you may be a business owner who is frustrated by digital marketing and just can’t seem to get it right. Which I’m here to tell you is TOTALLY ok. We are digital marketers here at Meridiem but we certainly aren’t accountants. We had to reach the point of frustration before we finally reached out to outsource our accounting so we could free ourselves up for more time to focus on our clients. I share that anecdote to tell you that you aren’t a failure because you can’t do it all. In fact, outsourcing may allow your business to grow in more than one way because you are finally able to focus more on your business (which is your strength to start with!) and let others bring their strengths which will propel the growth of your business even more.
Of course, we now are obliged to say that we are a marketing agency who would love to take some things off your plate so you can grow! Partnership with our clients is something that is very valuable to our team and we put it at the top of our priority list. If you are looking for help with paid ads or navigating the world of promotional marketing, please reach out to us! We would love to learn how we can support you.