As we are in the middle of 2024, it’s obvious that every business needs to be using Internet marketing as a promotional tool.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, the age of your business, the size of your company, or your location. This statement holds true for both B2C and B2B companies alike.
You won’t be able to survive today and in the future without marketing your company online.
So for those of you who have already implemented online strategies, you’re on the right track.
But with that said, I see so many companies that are approaching Internet marketing the wrong way.
It’s not their fault. Marketing just isn’t in everyone’s wheelhouse. It’s like anything else, if you don’t have experience with something, you’re not going to be good at it.
Think back to the first time you got behind the wheel of a car. Sure, you were able to stop, go, and maybe even make a turn. Sure, technically you were driving, but I’m willing to bet it was a bumpy ride.
This same analogy and concept can be applied to your marketing strategy. Unless you have prior experience with online marketing, you’re probably not doing the best job.
The reality is, you can’t do everything yourself. As a business owner, I know you want to be in control. But it’s better to let professionals handle the jobs that you can’t do.
According to the Infusionsoft Small Business Marketing Trends Report, over 70% of businesses handle their marketing in-house.
However, only 43% of those businesses say that their marketing efforts are effective.
What’s the point of doing something yourself if you can’t do it right? About 47% of business owners don’t even know if their marketing tactics are working.
Let’s go back to another car analogy.
If you open up the hood of a vehicle and look at the engine, can you tell if things are working right? Unless you’re a mechanic and have experience working on cars, you probably have no idea.
The same goes for marketing. Leave it to the professionals.
If you’re on the fence about outsourcing Internet marketing in 2024, this guide will explain why you need to do it. There are tons of benefits, but I’ve narrowed down the top five reasons.
1. More Free Time to Focus on Other Aspects of Business
Think about how much time you’re currently spending on your marketing campaigns.
Depending on your answer, there are two different ways that you can look at this. Here’s what I mean.
If you’re just spending a couple of hours per week on Internet marketing, then your digital strategy is simply being neglected. There is really no other way for me to put it.
For those of you who are spending 20+ hours each week on online marketing, I’m sure you’re expecting a much higher ROI than what you’re currently getting.
As a business owner, nothing is more valuable than your time. Sure, you’re willing to put in the hours, but it’s not worth it if those efforts aren’t paying off.
Imagine what else you could accomplish if you had an additional 20 free hours each week.
Studies show that 72% of business owners feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities.
Even with more than one-third of these business owners working over 50 hours per week, it still feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
Can you relate to this? Do you feel overwhelmed?
If it feels like you have just too much on your plate, you need to have someone else take on some of these responsibilities for you. But you don’t want to give this job to just anyone.
Another mistake that I see business owners make all of the time is when they assign marketing tasks to unqualified employees. It’s not easy to find qualified candidates to manage something that’s so important.
Giving marketing responsibilities to an employee with no or insufficient digital marketing experience isn’t a step forward, it’s a step sideways. Plus, an employee won’t approach this with as much effort and passion as you were, so it may even be a step backward.
They don’t have the experience to handle this job either.
By giving them more work to do, everything else that they were previously working on gets neglected. Then they’ll feel overwhelmed, and their productivity gets destroyed.
You’re much better off having everyone on your team focused on the business.
- product development
- improving your process
- management
You can focus on these areas while a professional Internet marketing company handles your marketing efforts.
Marketing your business is a full-time job. You already have a full-time job. Plus, as an owner, your job comes with more responsibilities than just an average employee. So if you want to do marketing you have to outsource your digital marketing tasks.
Let’s take a look at just one area of Internet marketing to give you an example.
How is your company leveraging social media as a marketing tool? According to Forbes Magazine, 40% of people follow their favorite brand on social media.
Furthermore, 95% of people who follow brands on social media are between the ages of 18 and 35.
These are the types of people that you want to market to. Your brand needs to target younger generations with big spending power.
So hopefully, you’re currently using social media as a marketing tool. But just having an active profile won’t get the job done.
You need to be posting content on a regular basis across all of your social channels.
Even posting once per day isn’t enough. The most successful companies post content on social media multiple times each day.
So if you’re not doing this now, you need to find someone who can do it for you.
For those of you who are, let an Internet marketing company take over so you can free up more of your time. Plus, they’ll do a better job than you are.
Social media is just one example of the dozens of segments of Internet marketing.
2. Improve Communication With Your Customers
Sometimes, business owners have a misconception about exactly what will happen once they outsource work to a digital marketing agency.
They think that this company will just run some ads and charge them a fortune. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Don’t get me wrong; not every Internet marketing company is great.
It’s definitely important for you to understand how to choose an Internet marketing agency without getting ripped off.
But a good Internet marketing company will do so much for you.
You’ve got to focus on your customers. Without your customers, your business can’t survive.
It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest product or service in the world. If nobody knows about it, then it’s useless.
I briefly talked about this before when discussing social media. But I want to go into further detail on this subject.
Shockingly, 80% of inquiries made by consumers on social media go unanswered.
That’s just awful.
You’re not going to acquire new customers that way. In fact, you’ll probably just end up losing your existing ones.
The reason why businesses are ignoring social media inquiries is that they just can’t find the time to respond. An Internet marketing agency can help you implement automation methods that will make it easier for you to manage your comments and messages.
But customer communication goes far beyond social media.
An Internet marketing agency can also help improve your email marketing efforts.
Now you’ll be able to add more subscribers to your email list. For those of you who don’t currently have an email list, a marketing agency can get that started for you.
Once subscribers are added a marketing professional can help make sure that you’re delivering relevant content to the recipients.
Are you currently just sending the same email to all of your subscribers? That’s not effective.
Marketing agencies can segment your subscribers to improve the relevancy of your content.
Just look at the benefits of segmenting email lists.
77% of consumers say that email is their preferred method of communication.
With so many of your customers wanting to be reached by email, you can’t afford to slack on this strategy any longer. Ultimately, improving your email campaigns will help you make more money.
Email marketing is already extremely profitable.
Compared to other forms of communication, email marketing has the highest ROI. You can expect about $40 in return for every $1 spent on email campaigns.
3. Increase Your Reach and Discoverability
How are people currently finding your business online?
If someone bought something from you in the past, maybe they’ll navigate straight to your site the next time they want to buy something. But that’s not a sustainable business model.
You want to make sure that as many people as possible are able to find your brand online.
There are so many consumers out there. Your business is offering what they need. But if they don’t know you exist, it doesn’t accomplish anything.
Outsourcing Internet marketing will eliminate this problem for you.
Marketing experts from a professional agency know how to improve organic reach through SEO, which is short for search engine optimization.
They know the strategies that will get you to the top of search engine rankings. That’s because experts are more familiar with Google’s algorithm, which is important since Google controls more than 90% of the global search engine market share.
Think about it. Whenever someone wants to do something, they automatically start with a Google search.
It seems so second nature that the word Google has become a verb. “Google it.”
The higher your search ranking, the greater chance you have of getting more traffic to your website.
In addition to improving your organic search ranking, if you outsource Internet marketing, you can also benefit from improved paid ads as well.
You don’t want to waste your valuable marketing dollars on PPC campaigns that aren’t generating a return on your investment.
One of the biggest problems that I see when businesses try to do this on their own is they aren’t getting qualified leads. They’re paying for keywords that are too general.
You want to narrow your target with PPC campaigns. There won’t be as many people searching, but those keywords will be less competitive.
Plus, the majority of your hits will be more qualified.
An Internet marketing agency will be able to conduct all of the research and launch these campaigns for you.
4. Enhance Your Content Creation Tactics
When it comes to marketing your business online, content creation is a key factor.
Take a minute to analyze how you’re currently approaching this.
What type of content are you publishing? How often are you publishing it?
I don’t want to make assumptions, but based on what I’ve seen from most businesses, I’m willing to bet that you’re not doing this as effectively as you could be.
You need to publish unique content that’s timely, relevant, and distributed properly based on your target audience.
By outsourcing Internet marketing, an agency can help you with video production, editing and copywriting.
Let’s look at just one aspect of this for now. We’ll talk about something simple, like your blog, assuming you have one.
If you don’t have a blog, you’re missing out on a big opportunity for improving SEO, which we just finished talking about. That’s something a marketing company can help you with too.
But for now, we’ll assume you have a blog. Even if you have one, you need to make sure that you’re effectively using it to your advantage. There needs to be a purpose behind your blogging strategy.
To do this right, it takes lots of time and effort. Let a professional Internet marketer handle this for you.
The more frequent you post a blog, the stronger your results will be.
Furthermore, the average blog post takes 3 hours and 16 minutes to write.
Let’s say that you want to publish one post per day for five days each week. To keep it simple, we’ll round down and give you the benefit of the doubt.
If you finish each blog post 16 minutes faster than the average blogger, it’s going to take you 15 hours each week to produce blog content.
That’s a long time.
This relates back to what we were saying earlier. Imagine what you could be doing with an additional 15 hours of free time each week.
Just between blogging, social media, and the other examples that we covered, you can save more than 35 hours each week by outsourcing your marketing in 2024.
Internet marketing agencies do this every day. They know what it takes to create content that’s high-quality, engaging, and will ultimately drive conversions.
5. Get More Conversions and Increase Revenue
If you outsource Internet marketing, you’ll benefit from an improved website.
That’s because marketing experts have experience when it comes to this. They know what elements of your website need to be changed to drive conversions.
This is crucial for all businesses, especially for those of you who are selling products and services online.
Marketing agencies know how to focus on conversion rate optimization for eCommerce stores.
They’ve been through this before.
Right now, you may not have a problem getting traffic to your website. But if your traffic isn’t converting, it’s just a waste.
Sometimes, all it takes is some subtle changes from a professional to increase conversion rates, which will ultimately improve your profits.
Part of this means getting a better grasp on how consumers navigate through the conversion funnel.
Marketing agencies can do this for you.
They’ll track the right metrics and make necessary adjustments based on their findings. I wouldn’t expect this to be something that you’re doing on your own.
An Internet marketing company will help you with web design and development. They’ll also help you with WordPress development.
They’ll be able to improve your website authority and design.
Experts will enhance your product pages, shopping carts, and CTAs. They can run tests to make sure every single element of your site is optimized for conversions.
You’ll also be able to generate more profits from things like upsells and shopping cart abandonment recovery tactics.
When you outsource your Internet marketing efforts, you can benefit from more repeat customers and improved efforts targeting mobile users.
Basically, a good Internet marketing company will help you implement features and functionality to your website that it doesn’t currently offer. The end results of these efforts will ultimately be higher conversions and an increase in revenue.
Knowing When To Outsource Your Internet Marketing
You can let go of the responsibilities and duties that would take too much time for you to do in-house by outsourcing. You are not effectively leveraging your resources when you have highly capable employees performing low-skill tasks in your company.
For instance, you probably shouldn’t spend 10 hours a month on social media if you can earn $150 an hour for your consulting skills or landscape designs.
It could be preferable to outsource your social media for $200 per month and locate clients to complete that 10 billable hours, which would provide $1,500 in income.
Automating your business systems and procedures is an excellent place to start if you want to do more in less time. Determine which digital marketing functions you can manage internally before figuring out how to outsource the rest.
It’s crucial to avoid using outsourcing as a method to add more non-essential activities to your company procedures, even if it could appear like the final piece in your success puzzle.
Only when there is a direct link between the digital marketing duties you don’t need to monitor and higher revenues does outsourcing make sense in general.
Outsource Internet Marketing to the Right Agency
Now that you understand why you should outsource Internet marketing in 2024, it’s time to find the right agency to hire.
Here at Optimum7, we have the experience, tools, experts, and resources to provide you with everything that was covered on the list above.
If you’re still on the fence, feel free to contact us for a consultation. There is no pressure.
Just let us know a little bit more about yourself, your business, and anything else you think we should know.
Outsourcing your Internet marketing will give you a huge competitive advantage over everyone else who is struggling to market their brands in-house, ineffectively. This is your chance to rise above your biggest competitors.
