Can You Decrease Your Reliance On Digital Marketing Agencies?

Hopefully, at this point, there should be no one running a growing business who doesn’t understand the importance of good digital marketing. However, with the increased importance of good digital marketing comes an increased budget to go towards it, too. If you’ve been working with a digital marketing agency (or more than one) and you’re starting to see that budget balloon, one way to get it back under control is to start internalizing more of your approach. But how do you do that?

Make external knowledge internal

First of all, if you have any marketing materials that are relevant to your brand that you currently do not have full access and ownership to, you should change that. Logos, brand images, photography, anything that you share the rights to, you should own yourself. You can even turn it into a brand bible so that anything you collaborated with digital agencies on before can be reused and evolved so that you don’t have to start from scratch with your online branding.

Get to grips with it yourself

It’s not just the assets that you should start to internalize, you should start to build a good understanding of how digital marketing works, itself. You might not find that the agencies you work with are eager to share all of their secrets, so instead, finding a professional like Jason McDonald, who specializes in teaching things like SEO, social media marketing, and PPC advertising, can be a lot more worthwhile. The more you understand the core of the marketing techniques you rely on, the less that you’re going to need agency expertise in the first place.

Be supported by the right team

Of course, even if you have all of the knowledge required to carry off a quality digital marketing campaign, you might not have the man-hours to do it all yourself. You might still choose to outsource some processes, but you should start looking at the possibility of building your internal digital marketing team, especially if you are running changing campaigns throughout the whole year. At some point, it just becomes a lot more cost-effective to handle everything in-house, so long as you’re able to handle the initial costs of hiring and onboarding the people that you need.

Always keep an eye on the future of digital marketing

The realities of digital marketing change, as search engines and social media platforms grow and evolve, and new marketing landscapes and opportunities rise. The role of new technologies in marketing isn’t always easy to grasp, you want to make sure that you don’t buy in too early to new marketing technology that has yet to prove its worth, but you want to at least keep up with what’s going on. That way, if something does prove to offer real change to the marketing landscape, you’re ready to adopt it ASAP.

If you plan on taking your digital marketing internally, do it, but do it right. Ensure that you have the team and the knowledge to run it as effectively as you should.