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How do you engage with your target audience?
Today’s business landscape—especially in the business-to-business (B2B) world—is extremely competitive. Reaching your ideal customers is harder than ever, and yet the long-term survival of your organization depends on drawing in new buyers, retaining existing customers, and building your online presence.
The good news? You don’t have to be a marketing guru to create and implement a successful marketing strategy. Instead, your B2B company can reap the benefits of partnering with an experienced marketing agency.
What Is a Digital Marketing Agency?
A digital marketing agency works on behalf of a business, company, or organization to perform digital marketing functions. They employ marketing experts and use a variety of data-driven strategies and digital tools to help clients reach their marketing, growth, and revenue goals.
In other words, digital marketing agencies specialize in targeting and building relationships with potential buyers online—and encouraging them to purchase your B2B company’s products or services.
Types of Digital Marketing Agencies
Choosing among the types of digital marketing agencies can be challenging and overwhelming if you aren’t familiar with the B2B marketing industry. Some marketing agencies specialize in a specific industry or service; others have a diverse team of experts that offer a broad range of services. The best type of marketing agency for your B2B company depends on your organization’s marketing goals, needs, and objectives.
Start your search by exploring these common types of digital marketing agencies.
Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency
Full-service digital marketing agencies employ experts across marketing specialties so they can help their clients with a wide variety of marketing services. These agencies tend to be larger than other types of digital marketing agencies and are designed to function as the marketing team for an organization or extend the resources of an existing in-house marketing team.
From website development and social media management to lead generation campaigns and email marketing, these agencies can do it all—and usually at a much lower cost than it would take to hire new marketers to perform all these tasks.
Inbound Marketing Agency
Inbound marketing agencies specialize in inbound marketing tactics—attracting the attention of your ideal customers, making it easy for them to find you online, and building relationships with prospects based on trust.
SEO Agency
Search engine optimization (SEO) agencies help use data analytics, SEO tools, and best practices to improve the online visibility of a company’s website and web content. They perform tasks such as keyword research, metadata assessment, backlink audits, link building, and more to increase the client’s website ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Digital Ads/PPC Agency
Marketing agencies specializing in pay-per-click (PPC) ads or other paid search advertisements focus on producing digital ads that grab the attention of your ideal customers and generate traffic to your business’s website. They may use services such as Google Ads, Meta Ads, or LinkedIn Ads to share optimized advertisements on websites, SERPs, social media channels, and more.
Social Media Agency
Social media agencies help clients establish and maintain a presence on social media. These agencies will likely offer services such as producing social content, setting up social media advertisements, and managing your social community, and they may also offer services in affiliate or influencer marketing.
Web Design Agency
Web design agencies are composed of website developers, user experience/user interface (UX/UR) experts, graphic designers, content writers, and other professionals who build and manage custom websites for clients. These agencies can help with web hosting and page functionality and may also offer SEO-related services to help businesses further optimize the resulting website.
Market Research Agency
Who are your ideal customers? What are they looking for?
What do your existing customers think about your products or services? Will they make another purchase?
These questions are critically important and help guide the future of a B2B marketing strategy.
Market research agencies collect data and gather research, both quantitative and qualitative, to determine how your brand and products or services are perceived by customers. Based on their analysis, they can help inform what needs to be changed (and what doesn’t) in order for your organization to acquire new buyers and retain existing customers.
PR Agency
Public relations (PR) agencies manage the media presence and branding of your organization. They not only work to build brand awareness and establish your industry presence but also create an influencer marketing strategy to encourage trustworthy industry voices to promote your products or services.
Core Services Offered by Digital Marketing Agencies
Digital marketing agencies employ experts from many different marketing specialties to build a team that can offer expertise in a variety of specialties. Depending on the type of marketing agency and the specialists they employ, digital marketing agencies may offer a wide range of services:
- Affiliate marketing
- Brand management
- Community management
- Content marketing
- Conversational growth marketing
- Copywriting
- Data analysis
- Demand generation
- Email marketing
- Graphic design
- Growth marketing
- Marketing automation
- Mobile marketing
- PPC advertising
- SEO
- Social media marketing
- Strategy and blueprint development
- Video marketing
- Website development
While larger, more robust marketing agencies will present a long list of services to choose from, smaller or more specialized marketing agencies may offer deeper expertise in a few tailored specialties.
Growth-focused marketing agencies also expand their core services to include the operations side of marketing, sales, and revenue. If your B2B company is interested in revenue growth, be sure to look for a marketing agency that specializes in marketing operations (MarketingOps), sales operations (SalesOps), and/or revenue operations (RevOps).
7 Benefits of Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency
There are several advantages to outsourcing marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency—and this list is just the tip of the iceberg.
1. Stay on Top of Digital Marketing Trends
B2B marketers must keep up with ever-changing marketing trends—and predict future trends—in order to stay competitive. Instead of spending your time analyzing B2B marketing trends and hoping you are moving your organization down the right path, you can rely on a digital marketing agency to keep you informed. They specialize in staying on top of trends and forecasting upcoming trends, so you’ll always be up to date.
2. Expand Your Limited Marketing Resources
A digital marketing agency can operate as an extension of your existing marketing team. If your organization has limited marketing resources, you can tap into an agency’s collective marketing knowledge and access the people, tools, and processes you need to build a competitive marketing strategy and implement your marketing campaigns.
3. Access the Best Digital Marketing Tools
Digital marketing tools are more advanced than ever and offer valuable insights to B2B marketing teams. However, these marketing tools can quickly become too expensive and often require specialist knowledge to operate. And on top of these concerns, it also takes a lot of time and effort to evaluate the available tools, decide which ones are worth investing in, and integrate them with your existing tech stack (if possible).
A digital marketing agency will provide access to the latest and greatest marketing tools. Even better: Their marketing experts will already be trained on how to use them. After your organization partners with the agency and pays a flat fee, you can access the best tools on the market without worrying about the rising cost and complexity of today’s marketing software.
4. Gain an Objective Perspective
Hiring a digital marketing agency gives your organization an opportunity to gain an experienced, objective perspective. The agency’s experts will bring their collective knowledge to the table, offer a fresh perspective, identify unnoticed challenges, and suggest strategies and tactics to overcome those challenges.
5. Employ Scalable Solutions
Digital marketing agencies provide scalable marketing solutions for B2B businesses.
As your organization grows, its marketing needs will change. Instead of hiring additional in-house marketing staff or investing in new marketing technology, you can partner with a digital marketing agency that will adjust its services and scale their digital marketing efforts as needed.
6. Access Industry Expertise
When you hire an in-house marketing team, you are limited to the knowledge and expertise of your individual team members. If you partner with a digital marketing agency, you gain access to an abundance of marketing experts across specialties—a much more cost effective option than employing additional in-house marketers to try to cover the knowledge gaps.
Using a marketing agency also means you are working with marketers that know what has worked before (and what hasn’t. They have worked with other clients in your industry and can help you avoid pitfalls and navigate challenges with the benefit of hindsight.
7. Keep Your Focus on Big-Picture Growth
Spending time on day-to-day marketing tasks distracts you and your team from looking at the big picture. If you partner with an experienced digital marketing agency and handover marketing responsibilities to their experts, you and your employees can focus on growth.
(Hint: An even better option is to hire a marketing agency that specializes in growth and is invested in the long-term success of your B2B company.)
Tips to Find the Best Digital Marketing Agency for Your B2B Company
Follow these tips to find a digital marketing agency partner that has the experience to navigate the complexities of your industry, is familiar with the challenges of the modern B2B landscape, and supports your growth goals.
Determine Your Marketing Goals & Budget
The first step is to assess the needs, goals, and budget of your B2B company.
What type of digital marketing agency do you want to hire? Which services do you need help with? What are your organization’s marketing goals, and how much are you willing to spend to achieve them?
Based on the answers to these questions, you can narrow down your search for a digital marketing agency—and you’ll have a better idea of what questions to ask when determining which option is the right fit.
Do Your Research
Research digital marketing agencies that align with your needs, goals, and budget. Look at their company website and LinkedIn pages, check out case studies, and find customer reviews. Doing your research ahead of time will help you identify potential red flags and avoid making a costly mistake.
Contact Each Agency Directly
After defining your marketing goals, objectives, and budget, researching digital agencies that fit the bill, and coming up with a short list of candidates, contact each agency directly. Learn about their pricing structure and services. See if you can check their references. Ask questions to determine their expertise and communication styles. Now is the time to figure out if the agency is a good fit for your B2B organization.
Many experienced digital marketing agencies will offer a free consultation or strategy call. These calls are the best way to “read the room” and see if your businesses will work together seamlessly, so take advantage of consultations when you can.
Determine Which Agency Is Right for Your Business
With the research, data, and answers to your pressing questions in hand, it’s time to determine which digital marketing agency is right for your B2B company. This decision may require input from several stakeholders and take longer to navigate than expected. But keep your head in the game—at the end, you’ll begin a partnership that will transform your marketing efforts and help you achieve your growth goals.
Hiring a Marketing Agency vs. Hiring In-House Marketers
Effective digital marketing can transform your B2B company and help you reach your revenue goals—but it takes a lot of work, time, resources, and expertise to create and implement a successful marketing strategy, and some businesses can’t handle it alone. That’s why many organizations choose to partner with an outside marketing agency.
However, for some companies, hiring an in-house team of B2B marketers makes the most sense for their budget and goals. Alternatively, businesses can employ a hybrid model that combines the strengths of both approaches.
Determine which of these three options makes the most sense for your B2B organization’s marketing needs, goals, and resources.
Option 1: Partner with a Digital Marketing Agency
Partnering with a digital marketing agency comes hand-in-hand with a variety of benefits. Your company can save time and money while accessing deeper marketing expertise and advanced marketing tools, all while operating at scale. This option is often beneficial for smaller brands that do not have an existing marketing department.
Option 2: Hire an In-House Marketing Team
Hiring an in-house marketing team may work best for larger, more established companies—and it may not be feasible for small companies or startups.
A marketing team staffed by in-house employees gives you more control and accessibility to data and also ensures your marketers have a deeper understanding of our brand voice.
Option 3: Employ a Hybrid Model
Many B2B organizations employ a hybrid model, hiring in-house marketers and partnering with a digital marketing agency to cover more specialized work. This option allows your B2B company to easily scale marketing efforts and benefit from both in-house and outsourced marketing expertise.
Ready to Take Your Marketing to the Next Level? Partner with OneIMS for Unparalleled Growth & Success
If you’re ready to find a digital marketing partner, establish your online presence, and target your ideal audience, look no further. We’re here to help you create a strategic digital marketing plan for your B2B company that puts you on the path to predictable, scalable growth.
At OneIMS, our approach to growth is defined by our growth formula framework. We use our proven formula as a guide that works hand in hand with the bow tie funnel and an overall digital marketing strategy to support your revenue goals.
We have a history of working with companies in a variety of industries to achieve sustainable growth, and we pride ourselves on producing measurable and sustainable results. But you don’t have to take our word for it: View testimonials from our clients and read our blog to get an idea of our training, experience, and track record of success.
Are you ready to reach new customers, build ongoing relationships with existing buyers, find new revenue opportunities, and grow your business? Schedule a consultation with us today to get started.
