Have you ever thought about outsourcing your company’s marketing or engaging a provider of managed marketing solutions to help you keep on top of your online presence and campaigning?
As your small business grows, it’s only natural to prioritize your core activities. Somehow in the midst of it all though, you need to keep your existing customers hungry for your products or services and to attract new business. However, all too often in small companies, digital marketing takes a back seat, simply because time and resources are lacking.
Some Clear Indications You Could Use Some Marketing Help
If your digital marketing always seems to be an afterthought, you should know that it’s just one of the signs that your company could use the help of a managed marketing solutions provider. It’s not by any means the only indication though. Perhaps one or more of the following three signs also resonate.
1) You Struggle to Quantify Results of Marketing Expenditure
According to the opinion of David C. Edelman, a principle at consulting firm McKinsey & Company, successful digital marketing requires the integration of four key achievements, to create a unified experience as prospects first begin to engage with your products or services, then move on to make purchases and eventually to form a deeper bond with your brand.
In his article on the McKinsey.com website, titled Four ways to get more value from digital marketing, Edelman lists the necessary achievements as follows:
- Continuously increasing the capture of online traffic.
- Engaging effectively with consumers.
- Capturing qualified leads to increase sales conversions.
- Building customer loyalty.
Keeping your hands on the wheel of this end-to-end process is not easy task, especially when juggling it with the cut and thrust of the “day job”. However, if this coordination isn’t being effectively achieved or maintained, you’ll likely find that marketing expenditure seems to increase, with results that are at best inconclusive in terms of a corresponding return.
When you enlist the help of a company that provides managed marketing solutions, not only will that company be equipped with the necessary expertise to unify the digital marketing processes in steps 1 to 4 above, but it will also have the technology, time and resources to measure and quantify the return on marketing spend.
If you sense therefore, that right now your returns aren’t growing in proportion with the amount of marketing money you spend; it’s a clear sign that you could really use the help of a managed marketing solution.
2) You Can’t Scale-up Your Successful Initiatives
You can probably picture the scene. You’ve been doing your homework and perhaps even have a marketing manager who’s doing her level-best to generate great campaign ideas. You’ve tried one or two initiatives on a small scale, which have shown really promising results, so you want to replicate them on a larger scale. However, with the limited resources you have in-house, that’s just not going to happen.
Here too, managed service solutions can resolve your problem. In 2014, SEO writer Jayson DeMers authored an article for Forbes called 7 Signs It’s Time To Outsource Your Marketing. In his concluding comments, Jayson makes the point that you don’t need to decide between doing your marketing in-house and outsourcing it. Instead you can pick and choose by taking a hybrid approach.
Managed marketing solutions are just perfect for this. An external marketing partner can take on the marketing initiatives that brought you small-scale success and upscale them as required, while your own people focus on production, sales, and order fulfillment or whatever else constitutes your core business activity.
3) You Can’t Seem to Get Beyond the Basics
Another sign that you should consider managed marketing solutions is if you have all the basics of an online presence in place, but are otherwise making little progress. Perhaps you’ve spent money on having a top-notch, responsive website built, complete with SEO and mobile optimization. However, as the weeks and months draw on, despite adding fresh content you’re seeing little, if any improvement in search engine page rankings or traffic volume.
The problem here is that you’re not marketing your content effectively, which is understandable because it’s a labor-intensive process and you’ve got a business to run. As content strategist Mike Hanski writes in his article (No time to write copy? Consider outsourcing your content strategy) for Smart Insights, effective content marketing requires attention to a number of elements. Simply adding fresh copy just isn’t enough.
A company that specializes in managed marketing solutions can really boost your business’ presence online and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. The provider will take care of all necessary content marketing activities, which might include:
- Creating and curating content
- Content distribution
- SEO optimization
- Analytics and performance monitoring
- General content management
- Social media growth activities
With these tasks all being taken care of by a team of digital-marketing specialists, the unloading of your internal resources can help you to focus efforts on the continued growth of your business and to develop and execute your non-digital, traditional marketing strategies.
Don’t Ignore the Signs
Make no mistake, the future of your business and its growth depend on your ability to leverage digital marketing capabilities. That doesn’t mean though, that you need to overload your valuable human resources and jeopardize their engagement in the central focus of your enterprise.
Managed marketing solutions exist today because there is a demand for them, from business-owners like you, who care about online visibility and maintaining a healthy flow of traffic to their websites. So if you recognize any of the signs I’ve highlighted in this article, why not talk to a managed marketing solutions provider and make plans to ease your digital-marketing workload?
Changescape Web provides a comprehensive range of packaged and standalone managed marketing solutions for small businesses in the St Charles and St Louis area. If you’d like to know more, please feel free to use our online managed marketing services inquiry form or give us a call at 636.947.6200.