Deciding on a strategy to promote your brand is no walk in the park, especially with so many routes right at your fingertips.

Do you narrow down your options and opt for a single agency to manage your digital marketing plans or choose a laundry list of vendors for different services?

Having a ton of options, while seemingly wonderful, can cause you to spend way too much time in the “planning” stage instead of the “doing” stage. With patience running thin, no solution in sight, and no course of action decided upon, you find yourself in analysis paralysis, or what we like to call the thief of productivity.

We have a solution for you. Hire a single full-service digital marketing agency.

Time Management

Which of the following scenarios sounds like a better use of your time?

• Scenario A – You make one call to one digital marketing agency where you have one point of contact. Your digital marketing account manager, Jane Doe, has a detailed, prompt communication style that saves both parties valuable time. She even remembers that your daughter’s birthday is coming up this week. You have her undivided attention to help you thoroughly understand your project from top to bottom. Jane fills you in on updates from the graphic design, social media, and SEO teams.
• Scenario B – You have to make several calls to a handful of vendors. Because you’ve split the work between vendors, your calls lack depth and visibility into the full scope of your project. You spend the afternoon calling your SEO guy, the marketing lady, and the graphic designer, trying to understand when the SEO guy will have a list of updated keywords that you can share with your copywriter. You are exhausted by the inefficiency.

Benefits of working with one company

• Consistent marketing strategies: Consistent marketing strategies: Your digital marketing account manager will know your portfolio from A to Z. As a result, your company will have a cohesive strategy across all of your marketing platforms. No delays, no inconsistencies. Utilizing one account manager ensures that any keyword shifts, for example, can be implemented in both your paid search campaigns AND the SEO of your website. With multiple vendors, you run the risk of miscommunicated strategy shifts, resulting in your projects being, literally, on different pages.
• Cohesive branding and voice instead of inconsistencies between several outside teams: Can you imagine listening to an audiobook that switched narrators randomly, with no warning? (As an avid reader and audiobook listener, the thought of this haunts me.) Similarly, you don’t want to throw your consumers, customers, clients, and followers for a loop with brand and voice changes. A firm voice and brand message create trust. You trust your brand and what you promise to offer and deliver, and in turn, your clients trust you to continue being that rock. There is a major benefit of maintaining that consistency. Keep it simple by empowering one agency to create ads with your voice, logo, and color scheme. Also, cohesive messaging between social channels is everything, as consumers expect it while switching platforms.

According to Statista, “Improved traffic, lead generation, and growing fan loyalty are among the top reasons why marketers see value in employing social networks in their campaigns.”

Don’t miss the mark on how you present your brand in such an integral part of your campaign.

• Easy payment and cost efficiency: When working with one full-service digital marketing agency, you can skip the additional minimum fees that occur when doing singular projects with vendors. Not to mention payment to one agency is far more convenient. With one invoice, your accounts payable team will only have one payment to track. (They may even do a happy dance.)
• In-depth lead tracking and understanding of bottom-line goals: When it’s all said and done, goals look different amongst industries. If you are in retail, you may want to work with an agency that’s very familiar with Shopify or BigCommerce. If you are in video production, you’ll want to work with visual-based web designers who can showcase your work with seamless video integration. Putting your trust in a single agency means you’ll be able to better streamline the data that drives your company’s goals. It’s far easier to find data-driven, seasoned expertise within your industry through one agency than multiple.
• Extensive analytics and reporting: Further, unless you’re an analytics superhero (and, hey, maybe you are!) then you’ll really end up appreciating having ALL of the reporting in one place. A custom reporting dashboard will break down every channel’s performance and save you from manual consolidation before presenting to your team.

Maintain your bandwidth to focus on internal tasks and responsibilities, free of that extra work, by having one dedicated account manager who knows the numbers on your report. In fact, 89% of marketers ranked improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact as a top priority.

What to look for in a digital marketing agency

• Variegated skills: When hiring an agency, you are working with a whole team and network. That means your high-power results should come from a diversified team. You could go into things expecting help with graphic design yet find they have game-changing insight on SEO. Or you could approach the team in need of copywriting and then find there’s knowledge to gain regarding user experience. A multi-faceted team means quicker problem-solving, more perspective, increased innovation to find creative solutions, and higher flexibility to adapt strategies. Look for a combination of skills in the agency so that you get more flexibility in an ever-changing environment.
• Expertise and experience: Digital marketing agencies specialize in specific roles or industries. Ensure that they’ve worked in your field or with clients in your space before. Their track record of providing the services you need to multiple clients means they are experts in their domain.
• Ready To Make Your Business Scalable:How do businesses scale? With new customers and the right talent in place. The right digital marketing agency can provide you with the necessary resources to successfully scale your business. From a talent standpoint, you won’t have to build out a management structure for hiring out senior marketers. When it comes to growth, the agency you work with should have the data analytics capability to diversify and test new channel strategies and secure greater brand awareness.
• Partnership: Hiring out versus working with an agency is extremely fundamentally different. An employee may be a silent task-taker, meaning that the strategic side of things may just not be there. A digital marketing agency should work alongside you as a partner. That means they should be results-driven with strategic insight. An outside perspective that addresses problems you didn’t even know existed with high-level data that truly grows your business.

Maybe your director of marketing is currently hiring out 75% of the team to outside vendors. Or, perhaps your business development director is burning the candle from both ends to get sales and customer service materials produced. You could be experiencing long turnaround times from third-party graphic designers, or your company is trying to prepare itself to scale or be acquired, and there’s no cohesive branding style or message across all platforms (digital/print).

Whatever your situation is, think critically about what will work best for your company, but don’t let that analysis paralysis stop you from the solution: Simplicity.

At Gravity Junction, we help businesses navigate the ever-changing tide of algorithms and best practices when it comes to creating a marketing strategy that makes your business boom. We are a full-scale digital marketing agency based in Atlanta. Get in touch with us to enhance your business’s lead generation without losing the human touch.