It’s Monday. You’ve made your lists and are confident that you can get through all your tasks today. Then — the phone rings, your inbox fills, advertisers keep calling promising to sell you the silver bullet that will drive more sales, leads and traffic to your website.
The CFO wants to know the returns for last quarter's campaign. Your boss just read an article that claims Snapchat is the only way to reach Millennials and wants you to pull together a campaign to launch on the platform – beginning ASAP.
And all this happened before you had a chance to finish your first cup of coffee.
Sound familiar? The era of “do more with less” is here to stay. Your days are filled with more digital marketing options than you know what to do with.
Think it's time to call for help?
Read on.
If these situations sound all too familiar, it's time to call in the cavalry.
I Have a Marketing Budget but I Don’t Know Where to Spend It
Remember when your marketing choices were simple? TV or radio, newspaper or magazine?
While digital advertising counts as only one more channel, the harsh truth is that both paid and unpaid digital media bombards us with over 6,000 messages a day – and we're lucky if our customers act on two.
In fact, digital ad spending is predicted to surpass TV in the U.S. by 2017. With all these choices, it’s hard to know where to invest your company’s marketing dollars, with hope of a return.
One of the benefits of outsourcing your marketing strategy is that you take advantage of real-time insider knowledge of marketing channel performance. Think of it like your Costco membership – for marketing.
You capitalize on knowledge at scale. Agencies handle multiple marketing budgets across different industries and can share successes across accounts. Sometimes direct mail works when TV won’t. Sometimes Facebook works when LinkedIn won’t. The knowledge you're looking to tap into can be sourced by an expert who deals in tracking paid media return-on-investment (ROI) day in, day out.
I Am the Doer of all Things, Master of None
I’ve been there – strategist, designer, web coder, TV script writer, photographer, one-armed paper hanger… if you're tasked with the success of your company’s marketing campaign there is a good chance you can also rub your tummy and tap your head because the term “multi-tasking” is an understatement.
It’s not enough to engineer a brand strategy and execute it. You also have to manage social media, paid media, Google rankings, inbound marketing and more – with often the same budget (or less), few staff (or none) and even fewer resources.
You often feel stretched too far, you wear so many hats and you beat yourself up because you know you can execute a great marketing campaign but you're so busy trying to keep your head above water that trends, measurement and results analysis are luxurious tasks you can only dream about.
When you outsource your marketing tasks you gain the capacity and skills of an entire marketing department – at a fraction of the cost of hiring your own in-house marketing team.
Each person who works on your account is a specialist in their field, which means they're bringing their A-Game for you when you need it. You benefit from their knowledge and expertise, which is deep as opposed to the shallow pool your marketing has become, diluted as it is across all marketing disciplines.
Your Marketing Advisors are the Same People Selling You Advertising
Looking for unbiased advise on where your marketing dollars should be spent? If that advice is coming from someone who sells advertising, be wary. Their primary job is to sell you their product.
Do you take car advice from the guy who sold you your car?
I am not knocking advertising sales professionals in the least – they know their product better than anyone else. When you engineer your marketing campaign AFTER buying ads, these professionals can really help you align their products and services to achieve a higher return – but only after you've committed to buy.
Where can you turn before the sale to make sure you're getting the most bang for your advertising buck?
This is where an outsourced marketing team can help you put together a strategy that is aligned with your brand and business goals. Their goals are aligned with your goals – because if you are successful chances are the agency you are working with will be, too.
One more tip: Make sure the partners you turn to don’t benefit from the sale (no kick-backs) or you will run the chance of getting a biased opinion.
You Dread the Term “ROI” (and You Dread Your Monthly Management Meeting More)
Does this sound like your nightmare: You walk into your monthly management meeting and the CFO asks you what you have spent from your marketing budget.
Your palms sweat.
Yes, sales are down slightly.
No, you don’t really know why but you have a few theories. No, you don’t know how many customers your social media campaign netted.
Yes, you know your open rates and click through rates on email, but you don’t have a clear picture if your email campaigns are resulting in sales.
Yes, you know sales wants all your nurtured “leads,” but you are afraid that they are not all qualified yet.
And ROI? It’s a moving target.
If this sounds like your monthly marketing meeting, you're not alone.
Unless the right measurement tools are in place, it's almost impossible to turn your monthly management meeting frown upside down. Too often you are cobbling together multiple technologies to achieve your digital marketing goals: email programs, landing page programs, website statistics, Google analytics, digital ad buys, social media schedulers and more.
When these tools don’t talk to each other it's virtually impossible to answer the most important question of all: “What is our marketing ROI?"
Leveraging “all-in-one” solutions that help pull your entire marketing campaign measurement under one roof can help you answer the burning ROI question. Integrating these tools with your sales CRM takes these efforts to a higher level by bridging the gap between lead nurturing and sales.
Sounds great right?
If you have tried to implement these solutions on your own, or worse, tried to cobble together a series of tools to help you calculate your marketing successes (and failures) you know that this task is easier said than done. A lot of time can be lost configuring technologies, learning how to read cryptic analytics and searching for the bottom line.
An outsourced marketing team is used to reading digital statistics and because your measure of success is also their success, outsourced marketing teams are motivated to implement tried and tested measurement tools that help you achieve measurable business growth.
Stop investing time trying to figure out the tools and spend more time watching your bottom line grow.
Your Boss Wants Your Website to be “Number One on Google”
Your inbox fills with claims from all sorts of advertisers saying they can “fix your Google rank” but who can you believe? If getting to the top of the Google search rankings were as easy as they claim, you’d be there by now, right?
Investing time learning Google webmaster tools, robots, crawlers, local search, Adwords, blogging, commenting, indexed pages, “mobilegeddon”… is a full-time specialty.
Organic search ranking is earned continuously but can feel like a full-time job if you are trying to achieve high ranks on your own. This is where an outsourced specialist can help you. As part of your marketing team, this person can help bridge the technical gap between your marketing campaigns and SEO programming so that your marketing content helps contribute to search ranking results.
If your SEO specialist doesn’t have a seat at the marketing strategy table there is almost 100% certainty that many of your best marketing campaigns are on “double secret probation”.
Outsourcing your marketing can help you do your job better (and help you sleep at night). There’s no need to try to handle everything single handedly while risking letting something fall through the cracks. Add some power to your marketing efforts and consider outsourcing.
If you’d like to learn more about outsourcing your marketing, contact Illumine8 Marketing & PR today.
