7 Signs You Should Hire an Inbound Marketing Agency

What Is an Inbound Marketing Agency?

Inbound marketing involves many facets starting with a data-driven strategy that outlines who your customer is, what their pain points are, why they’re seeking a solution and what might keep them from purchasing that solution.

Once you’ve outlined a targeted customer persona, you need to understand how to attract, engage and delight the customer throughout various interactions, which requires expertise in websites, content, technology, email marketing, automation, social media, user experience, analytics and more.

The need for many experts is one of the reasons it can be beneficial to choose an agency with a team of experts skilled in those disciplines. Hiring a full internal team with these skills will get expensive, especially as you factor in onboarding, training time and benefits. And recruiting for these positions is extremely competitive.

What Does an Inbound Marketing Agency Do?

In the beginning of the engagement, your inbound marketing experts might seem like a team of investigators. They’ll ask many questions, meet with various departments within your company, perhaps talk to a few customers and sit in on sales calls.

Most companies expect blog content, email marketing and website changes early on after hiring an agency. But the initial steps of getting to know your business and its customers are essential to laying the groundwork for an effective, results-driven strategy.

Inbound marketing agencies generally engage in the following activities.

• Building a targeted audience outline and customer persona
• Outlining a strategy for how to improve marketing results
• Optimizing or building a company website, including blog content, landing pages, SEO, CTAs, online chat and forms
• Drafting a content strategy that pulls together various channels, such as social media, blogs, ads, email and video
• Designing a customer buying journey map that shows the types of content and interactions a potential customer wants when evaluating your company’s products and services
• Developing a plan for capturing, nurturing and converting leads
• Monitoring campaign effectiveness and reporting on crucial analytics

Want to learn more about what an inbound marketing campaign looks like? Download our guide on How to Run an Inbound Marketing Campaign.

The Benefits of Hiring an Inbound Marketing Agency

Hiring an inbound marketing agency shouldn’t just offer an expansion to your marketing team. You should see these tangible business benefits.

1. Clear Marketing Strategy

Internal marketing teams often find it challenging to dedicate time to building a marketing strategy amidst their day-to-day job requirements. Bringing in outside expertise offers a fresh perspective and the time to dedicate to the task.

2. Consistent Plans for What to Do and When

Many businesses know what they should be doing for their marketing. And yet, they’re also pulled in many directions, which results in starts and stops. Lack of consistency can be detrimental to marketing results. An agency can help you create and act on a realistic strategy of how often to issue new content, what pages of your website to update each month, when to publish on social media and how often to refresh ad content for the best results.

3. ROI

Marketers are responsible for demonstrating the value that they bring to the company. Without a measurable return on investment, the marketing team will likely get assigned a smaller budget the following year (or replaced!). The money you invest in marketing should work hard towards increasing your bottom line.

4. Lead Generation

Long before a customer purchases from your business, they show interest. But some businesses don’t have the pieces in place to collect leads and nurture them to become customers. So, a potential customer shows interest and the business leaves them to find their way to make a purchasing decision. An inbound marketing strategy outlines what happens next, and measures lead generation so you can grow and improve your tactics to earn more customers and greater ROI.

5. Happy Customers

Inbound marketing isn’t just about earning new business. It also focuses on delighting existing customers. With the right plans in place, you’ll have happier customers, which can mean more repeat business and referrals.

6. Reporting and Analytics

Building a marketing strategy is not a one-size-fits-all activity. It requires some testing and constant recalibration. And to do that, you’ll need reporting and analytics. By reviewing the right metrics, you’ll know what is working and what needs updates in your strategy. But some metrics matter far more than others and knowing what to track is often the first hurdle in an analytics plan. That’s where an experienced agency partner can be a real asset.

Top 7 Signs Your Business Needs an Inbound Marketing Agency

Inbound marketing is truly an art. It requires hours of study, trial and error, and experience to understand how different audiences react to various types of content and marketing tactics. And while you could put in the study time and gain the experience, here are seven reasons why it’s better to hire an inbound marketing agency to take your marketing to the next level.

1. Your Marketing Lacks Consistency or Effectiveness

Creating a marketing plan, being consistent with it and measuring its effectiveness is challenging. You need a team completely dedicated to your inbound marketing efforts if you’re going to succeed.

And ideally, that plan starts with measurable goals so you can check in frequently to see how you’re doing to attain those goals. A marketing plan that meets the criteria of providing clear goals and tactics requires copious work, which is why hiring an inbound marketing agency is a good choice.

Marketing agencies follow analytics closely and ensure that marketing plans stay on track based on milestones and daily or weekly activities so that you don’t have to worry about all that oversight.

2. You Aren’t Seeing Results from In-house Efforts

Companies often favor having an in-house team to manage their marketing strategy. But because inbound marketing requires such a diverse skillset, this often doesn’t turn out the way everyone hopes it will.

No one is to blame for the lack of results, it’s just the challenge of managing a large strategy with a limited team all while still answering to leadership, sitting in on meetings and overseeing every tiny website change and social media post.

A common problem companies face when implementing inbound marketing is that they underestimate the resources it will require to be successful.

3. Lack of Content Quality or Quantity

When marketers think of content, they often envision well-formed blog posts. But it’s so much more than that. You need a content strategy that supports other initiatives within your marketing plan. Content needs direction to build consumer trust and fulfill goals within various phases of the customer buying journey.

Building effective content takes time, which often means companies either publish low-quality content to check a box and say they did it this month or they produce high-quality content only sporadically. Inbound marketing agencies have content writers on staff who are passionate about generating high-quality content that meets inbound marketing strategy goals.

4. You’re Lacking a Clear Customer Buying Journey

Marketing plans are a step-by-step process. You can’t just jump ahead to the activation phase to start seeing results. Take the time to go through audience targeting to get to know your buyer clearly. Only then can you build an effective customer buying journey that provides them with what they need every step of the way.

Inbound marketing agencies have experience building these step-by-step journeys by identifying key stages from the moment a prospect asks a question until they are ready to purchase a product or service. The clearer you understand the customer’s processes, the more successful your marketing initiatives will be.

5. ROI is Lacking, or You Aren’t Even Tracking it

The average company invests 7 to 8 percent of gross profits in marketing. That’s a large portion of your company budget. So, what are you getting for that investment? If the results are menial, it’s time to consider bringing on a team of experts.

Or maybe you don’t know the ROI of that massive investment. If so, it’s certainly time to enlist the help of an inbound agency that can set up proper tracking and start offering the reporting you need to understand how you’re doing

6. Your Goals Aren’t Attainable with Your Current Resources

After investing time and money into modern marketing strategy, you still aren’t where you need to be. Perhaps it’s because your internal resources are spread too thin, or you just have so much to focus on. Regretfully, when companies handle strategy in-house, it is often a last-priority item or something that only happens when everything else is done.

But strategy should be your primary focus and it can be when you bring in the necessary resources with the time and expertise to make it happen.

7. Marketing Isn’t Bringing in Enough Leads

Sales teams rely on their marketing partners to bring in leads and help nurture them. So, when marketing isn’t bringing in adequate leads, it can mean conflicts between sales and marketing. There’s no fast and easy fix for lead generation. You’ll need to build a full marketing strategy to see lasting, impactful results, which is why it helps to hire an agency.

Ready to Hire the Right Agency?

Diaz & Cooper Advertising specializes in inbound marketing. We start with a strategic roadmap that includes a customer value journey and outlines what customers are looking for and what pain points or challenges they are facing.

Then we build and optimize the tools you’ll need to start experiencing the goals we outlined in the roadmap. This includes lead generation, customer engagement and sales to reach the ROI you’ve been looking for.

As a HubSpot Gold Certified Agency Partner, we have a team of experts in marketing strategy, websites, SEO, content, video and more to provide everything you need to succeed. Request a free consultation now to grow your business.