Marketing your business and its product or service is key to sustainable growth, success and profitability. The role of digital marketing at its purest is to deliver a strong, cohesive message that resonates with your ideal customer, but in reality, there’s more to it than creating an ad and ‘setting and forgetting’.

A successful digital marketing strategy encompasses a vast number of specialised skills that come together to work in perfect harmony in order to create an online presence for your business. Plenty of agencies out there look at individual factors of your digital marketing but for most businesses, engaging with multiple digital marketing agencies or marketing personnel can be a ticking time bomb both financially and strategically. So, how do you streamline the process and ensure it’s economical and sustainable?

It’s Not a One Person Job

More often than not, we see a lot of small-to-medium businesses go through the process of hiring an internal digital marketing assistant, who is expected to assume the role of a graphic designer, web developer, advertising strategist, social media marketing manager, and also the receptionist.

While we’re yet to come across this unicorn who can confidently perform all those roles at an expert level, chances are that 99% of the time, the results will be mediocre at best and still costing you an annual salary of $50k-$60k. Alternatively, hiring an internal marketing manager with experience in strategic marketing planning and implementation will more than likely still lead to outsourcing much of the work to various teams who design content, create ad copy, or execute web design or updates.

When’s a Digital Marketing Agency Just an Agency?

On the flip side, the other option in many a business owner’s mind is to outsource to a digital marketing agency. Problem is that many aren’t focused on addressing marketing challenges; rather, they are essentially Google Ads resellers.  Google Ads management & PPC agencies often promise a lot but ultimately, their success as a business relies heavily on simply managing your ad spend rather than optimising it and providing informed recommendations to move you closer toward your business goals. These types of teams don’t look at your business as a whole; and while they may be able to bring hundreds of leads in, how many of those leads are actually worth your time and are qualified customers ready to buy

Chances are, the management fee that you are paying is simply for a long list of generic industry keywords with no real insight into your target audience and their online behaviour. The real kicker though is the additional fees that suddenly come rolling in when you want to change your strategy to reflect your industry. This type of method that silos each part of your strategy can prove to be more troublesome than it’s worth if what you’re looking for is a consistent, authoritative brand message.

At the end of the day, you need a few legs on your table for it to stand: A decent overall marketing strategy, engaging social media, effective SEO, not to mention the fundamentals of well thought-out positioning, branding & channel planning. Only then will you get maximum returns from your marketing budget.

The Biggest Cost by Far Isn’t What You Think!

It’s the cost of lost potential of not executing in the right digital marketing channels, in the right way. When you spend a dollar in the wrong way, you don’t just lose a dollar – you lose the ten dollars you could have gained had you made the right choices and executed them perfectly.

Yet we see this all the time. It’s very rare to witness a business just nailing all aspects of their marketing, and thus wringing every ounce of potential out of all the options in front of them. It’s largely because even for the business owners out there who have a foundational level of knowledge when it comes to digital marketing, it can be overwhelming to take all the various platforms, strategies and content into consideration. Even more overwhelming to then execute all of those tasks.

Look at the Bigger Picture

From a management perspective, partnering with a digital marketing agency that looks at your digital marketing in terms of a holistic framework is by far the most cost-effective and sustainable approach. The benefit of engaging an agency means having access to a team of experts who have worked in a multitude of different industries and have extensive experience when it comes to what works and what doesn’t. Keeping tabs on the bigger picture is crucial in a disruptive marketplace that requires communications to be appropriate, timely, and the most effective for your business.

The right digital marketing approach for your own business doesn’t need to be costly and inefficient. Utilising the broad and holistic skills that the right digital marketing agency offers is key to growing your business and staying in business. Ronin Marketing has over 15 years of experience working executing the marketing Brisbane business owners are needing. That is, optimising their budget and providing real results