The truth is, that agencies can help you get a return on your marketing budget at a fraction of the cost you’d have to spend to assemble an in-house team. But before you can run your own marketing campaigns, you have to make sure that you and your team have the following:
Understanding Your Customer Behavior
Marketing is all about communicating with your customers in their language on the platforms where they hang out. Before you can do that, you need to understand the needs of your audience. Not just surface-level stuff like “they need help with SEO,” but a deeper understanding.
Structured processes and documentation for each task.
When you’re starting a business, it’s all about hustling. You’re just trying to generate revenue however you can. But as you grow, you must develop more documentation and processes around your workflows. For example, you might need to have documentation for how to run a PR, social media, or paid advertising campaign.
Quality
It’s easy to write random blog posts, but can you write quality content that your specific target audience will find valuable? That’s what separates decent blogs from truly great ones. At the end of the day, high rankings in Google come from creating and publishing remarkable content that your audience truly wants, not by trying to game the system.
Experience
You should make sure that you have experience designing and running some portion of marketing campaigns. The last thing you want is to spend months and months on content creation or thousands of dollars on paid traffic only to see no results and have no idea where you went wrong.
It takes a lot of time to satisfy all these criteria. It’s difficult to post high-quality content every single day when you have a bunch of other pressing business issues on your plate. It’s not easy to create an airtight process to help new hires hit the ground running from day one.