There are several good marketing companies in Kansas City. Here’s what our great business marketing experts want you to know.
Marketing used to be a lot simpler. Three broadcast television networks, a daily newspaper or two, a handful of top radio stations, some outdoor billboards and a quarterly catalog. You launched your advertising campaign and waited to see the results. The phone and cash register would ring if your campaign worked. And if you didn’t see results, it took a long time to diagnose and adjust your efforts.
Today, marketing is more immediately measurable, with more digital advertising and social media marketing platforms to communicate your brand, and more sophisticated technology to help you evaluate results and adjust your messaging and budget accordingly. But all the choices in marketing, media, measurement and technology create a greater need for people who understand these platforms and how to maximize them for growing your business. Those people who know how everything works work at marketing agencies.
Can your business marketing be better if you work with a marketing company?
Do you own or operate a solid company with a good product or service, but you just aren’t hitting your sales goals? Do you feel like the people who need to know about you have never heard of you? Are you losing sales to a competitor whose products, prices and people aren’t as good as yours? Then your business marketing can be better if you work with a marketing company.
Here are 12 good reasons why a business-to-business company can grow and improve by working with a marketing company.
- Marketing doesn’t sleep anymore. The days of “set it and forget it” campaigns are over. Digital advertising doesn’t work that way. There are several metrics to keep track of. You need daily support to constantly monitor and adjust your paid and organic (unpaid) online communications, including search, display, video and social media.
- Opportunities to tell your story are more widespread than ever before, with no single medium capturing your entire audience’s ears and eyes. Some of your prospects are searching on Google, others are checking their social media and email accounts, others are reading print publications and listening to podcasts. Finding where your prospects are is harder than ever. Choosing the right platforms in which to invest your marketing budget requires the right tools and expertise.
- The new technology and tools of marketing are complicated. There are scores of software platforms to help you with sales force automation, inbound and outbound marketing, website analytics, email marketing, search engine optimization, online advertising and other marketing functions. Which ones should you use, and how do you make your selected stack of applications work together and talk to each other? A marketing agency takes that burden off your or your team’s shoulders and can often save you money since you don’t have to purchase some of the tools or technology yourself.
- You’re bombarded with companies trying to sell you advertising and other marketing solutions. Everybody has the newest solution for your website, lead generation, email, video, social and swag. When you hire a marketing agency, you can stop sifting through all the sales pitches and rely on your trusted marketing experts to bring you the right solutions for your business.
- Every business would love to have that one person who can design, write, build websites, analyze and buy media, create social buzz, shoot photos and videos, and track your marketing budget. If you find that one-person marketing unicorn, we’d love to meet him or her. Reality is that advertising and marketing is too specialized for one person to juggle at once without dropping any balls.
- Some businesses can’t afford an in-house team of creative, technical and strategic communication experts, nor keep them busy 40 hours a week. Working with a marketing agency means you have access to experts and unique skill sets when you need them.
- You get people who are dedicated to marketing all day, every day. Not “sales and marketing” or “customer service and marketing.” Very often, the person assigned to marketing in a business must wear the hats of other operations, too. Working with a marketing company lets your in-house team focus on other responsibilities.
- An agency offers the added benefit of cross-pollination. Much like a doctor who sees dozens of patients every day, your agency is handling marketing for other clients. Your business benefits from the additional experience.
- Agencies offer a 30,000-foot view of your industry and company. Sometimes you are too close to your business to survey the landscape and recognize the opportunities and threats surrounding you. Agencies are full of experts who can offer unbiased, outsider perspectives, and often have team members who have marketed companies similar to yours.
- You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Agencies are good at helping you set marketing goals, measuring your success, and making valuable adjustments to keep you on the right path.
- Good agencies are flexible. They can work with your existing customer relationship and content management platforms and integrate your systems with new tools to deliver new insights and efficiencies. When you hire an agency, you don’t have to tear down and start over.
- A good agency has your back. You’ll have a team of experts to rely on, so when a colleague says, “I don’t know much about marketing, but here’s what I think,” you’ll have marketing specialists to support your decisions.
Ready to improve your business marketing? EAG is an outsourced marketing department for many businesses in Kansas City and around the country. To get the conversation started, contact us.