Businesses – regardless of size – spend a significant portion of their online marketing budget through agencies. Nowadays, digital marketing consists of increasingly complex tools, so involving experts is a rational decision that pays off. It cannot be expected that a marketer at a manufacturing or trading company understands every online marketing tool properly. And the cost of outsourcing is often much lower than the salary of a senior online marketing specialist. When outsourcing, the question always arises: what can be expected from an external agency? There can be many forms of cooperation, but there are some tasks that should definitely not be entrusted to an external party. Szabolcs Nótin, head of the Marketing21 agency, answers these questions in his blog post.

Tasks that cannot be outsourced to a marketing agency

It may seem strange that I start the list with non-outsourcable functions: the reason for this is that, in my experience, these are fewer and their precise knowledge is the most important. A marketing agency offers tools and solutions, but can only suggest appropriate services if the set goals are predetermined.

Before contacting marketing agencies, it is worth listing the business goals that marketing helps the business achieve. However, defining the goal is much more difficult than it seems at first: without a proper goal, the project is doomed to failure. It is worth using the SMART method in this case. The essence of this is to assign an indicator to our goal that is:

• Specific: specific, precisely defined
• Measurable: measurable
• Achievable: achievable
• Relevant: relevant to the qualitative objective
• Timely: time-bound (e.g., deadline)

This number will later be called a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and marketing activity will be aligned with it.

A well-defined goal and relevant KPI

If, for example, we have a photo studio that customers can rent, our business goal will most likely be to maximize its utilization. Therefore, we can expect marketing to increase the number of our customers. Ultimately, utilization, revenue, and profit will also increase.

A great online marketing KPI for this goal is to increase the number of online bookings received weekly. This is a Specific (S), Measurable (M), Achievable (A), Relevant (R), and Time-bound (T) goal. If we tell our agency that this is our goal, they will surely know what to work with. A special beauty of the SMART goal is that we can even tell if the campaign generates profit. Thanks to analytical software, it is also measurable how much the marketing cost (CPA) of each new customer was.

Strategic approach

It is increasingly common for clients to view agencies not just as simple implementers: they treat the subcontractor as a strategic partner, involving them in business decisions. At Marketing21, we see that during our joint work, we are increasingly involved in strategic issues. Our clients know that we operate in many industries and have access to countless online business data, so they also ask for our opinion during decision preparation. For example, we have a client where keyword research is done for market research purposes even before launching a new business unit.

Technical knowledge

The biggest advantage of marketing agencies today is still the incredible amount of know-how accumulated during parallel projects. Campaigns run on countless networks, with countless advertising methods and messages, thus saving clients from much unnecessary and costly experimentation.

Agencies constantly follow new trends: Waze advertising, Snapchat, sudden appearance and disappearance of chatbot mania, changing Facebook and Google advertising interfaces. Just a few of the trends that affect the return on advertising.

Creativity

Long marketing brainstorming sessions do not fit into the general business operations of companies. These tasks can also be confidently entrusted to the agency. Marketers are surrounded by marketing messages and brands all day long, so marketing systems are put together faster. Graphic designers, copywriters, PPC specialists, and web developers work together to develop creatives, so all necessary competencies are present at agencies.

Hard work hours

It is fashionable to talk about marketing automation nowadays, but in reality, flesh-and-blood people are still needed to devise and operate marketing systems. Outsourcing also saves clients a lot of work hours. Moreover, setting up a single new campaign type requires several days of learning for a corporate marketer. At agencies, this knowledge is readily available.

Information and reporting

Marketing agencies are not only morally responsible to the extent of the fee. Significant sums are spent from the client’s budget during advertising purchases. Therefore, it is rightly expected from responsible agencies to support clients with reliable performance evaluation statistics. Statistics will be the basis for accountability and control, thus ensuring that the set goals are indeed achieved.

Overall, an agency can do its job well if the set goals are appropriate and defined. Subsequently, strategic support, implementation, creativity, expertise, and feedback (reporting) can be expected from the cooperation.

Written by: Szabolcs Nótin

The author is an online marketing expert and the head of the Budapest-based Marketing21 digital marketing agency.