If you want to scale your business, investing in marketing is a crucial component of overall growth. However, if you’re looking at all the options — email, social media, content, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and more — you might feel a little lost on where to spend your time digital marketing for your manufacturing company.
In this post, you’ll discover why hiring a digital marketing agency can help you leverage years of expertise to your manufacturing company with digital marketing expertise. With the marketing agency market expected to increase to $53.5 billion by 2024, their proven ability to help you reach your ROI goals and earn new customers will give you a competitive advantage against others in your industry.
Ready to learn more? Let’s discover a few key reasons why it’s time for your manufacturing company to invest in digital marketing expertise.
Key Takeaways:
- Digital marketing agencies help you focus on business initiatives instead of day-to-day tasks
- You can hire a full-service or specialized agency to achieve your key objectives
- Agencies will often provide quantifiable performance results to help you scale and inform future campaign decisions
What are Digital Marketing Agencies?
If you want to capture your audience’s attention, you need a strategy that has multiple touchpoints across their user journey. For example, the average person spends 8 hours a day consuming digital media, increasing online sales 20% in 2020 and giving you a massive opportunity to reach potential customers on their preferred platforms.
Digital marketing agencies use digital marketing strategies to target, reach, and build relationships with prospects online to convert them into customers. Think of digital agencies as a team of experts specifically working for your business by using a variety of tactics and tools to execute campaigns.
With digital marketing continuing to grow year after year, it’s an excellent time for companies to jump on board or risk falling behind in the competition. Here are a few ways digital marketing agencies can help your manufacturing business get started:
- Build a market research strategy for your industry
- Provide PPC services on platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and more
- Optimize your website to improve your website’s domain authority and ranking
- Manage social media profiles and online communities
- Execute a public relations strategy for your brand and products
- Measure results through tracking and analytics tools
Types of Digital Marketing Agencies for Manufacturers
With over 13,000 agencies across the United States, finding the right agency for your marketing and sales goals is essential. Certain agencies specialize in specific channels, while others may be all-inclusive to your needs. However, choosing your agency will widely depend on budget, objectives, and how hands-on your internal team will be.
To help you get started, here are the most common types of agencies available to manufacturers:
- Full-service agency: Offers a wide variety of services through an omnichannel approach and focuses on more dedicated campaign work.
- Inbound agency: Seeks to build trust with audiences long-term on multiple channels like website, blog, email, social media, and more.
- SEO agency: Specializes in optimizing your online presence to rank higher in search results through tactics like keyword research, link building, and content development.
- PPC/digital ad agency: Helps generate traffic through paid advertising with eye-catching campaigns and strategic keyword bidding.
- Social media agency: Designs, posts, and monitors your social media platforms to increase engagement.
- Website design agency: Builds and maintains your website to ensure you make the best impression on new users.
Digital Marketing Agency vs. In-house Manager: What’s Right for You?
If you’re debating between hiring an in-house marketing manager or an agency, you may be surprised to learn that an agency will help you save money long-term. Agencies are similar to independent contractors, so you won’t need to worry about payroll taxes, onboarding expenses, benefits, and salaries.
While you may need to pay for specific tools or subscriptions, the majority of agencies will bake the costs into your overall contract, so you won’t need to worry about ongoing fees. However, most marketing agencies will charge anywhere between $75-$200 an hour.
Overall, choosing a digital agency over hiring someone in-house is ideal for businesses that want to deploy impactful marketing strategies on autopilot without overseeing employees. Hiring an agency offers subject matter experience and brings a fresh perspective to your company to drive new business.
5 Ways an Agency Enables Digital Marketing for Your Manufacturing Company
Do acronyms like CPC and CPM make you nervous? Are you not sure where your target audience spends the most time? Do you get pressure from executives to increase your lead funnel? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these, it might be time to hire an agency to handle digital marketing for your manufacturing company.
Let’s take a look at a few additional reasons to leverage the expertise of a digital marketing agency for your manufacturing company.
1. Access Expert Knowledge on More Channels
It doesn’t always make sense for lean manufacturing businesses to hire in-house marketing staff to handle a few yearly campaigns or monitor your platforms. It can also be time-consuming to learn digital marketing strategies, like SEO and social media, on your own.
Instead, you’re able to leverage an agency’s years of experience on multiple platforms to help you grow. Additionally, many agencies work hard to maintain snd recruit top talent, allowing you to access the best marketing minds. You also won’t have to worry about trial and error on campaigns when working with experienced professionals who have run similar projects. In this case, you can’t put a price on good experience.
2. Focus on Scaling Your Business, Not Daily Marketing Tasks
While an in-house team has several advantages, it takes away business resources with training, learning processes, and running the digital campaigns. With an agency, all you need to provide are your goals, guidelines, and timeframe to get started.
In turn, this limits the amount of managing or onboarding since all marketing elements are handled externally. By hiring a digital agency, you’re able to free up valuable time to focus on running your business.
3. Build a Competitive Industry Strategy that Keeps You Relevant
Before your marketing agency develops a campaign, they will complete a deep dive into your company, industry, and competitive landscape. Once completed, they’ll present trends and strategies based on external and internal factors to help you get an edge on the competition.
Since you won’t have to research any of this on your own, you’ll be able to take these insights and implement them in your sales or operational functionalities as well. You’ll be more equipped to target your audience and deliver quantifiable results to stay relevant in your industry.
4. Get Measurable Results Through Scalable Services
Of course, no manufacturing business wants to invest in services that don’t drive ROI. However, it’s sometimes difficult to identify your key performance indicators and overall campaign performance with so many different tactics and channels. Your agency will not only highlight the right metrics but will often build monthly reports so you can constantly measure progress to inform future decisions.
You would need to hire new employees to expand your marketing efforts in a typical setting, taking up additional resources to fuel growth. However, your marketing agency will continue to scale with your business and help you choose the suitable packages that fit your company size. Not only do you experience quantifiable performance, but you also don’t have to limit growth when needed.
5. Leverage the Right Technology with Little Investment
Companies often invest in multiple platforms to streamline and improve campaigns since there isn’t a one-size-fits-all platform for all marketing channels. But, let’s face it — you don’t have time to research, test, and invest in every new technology the promises to be the next best marketing tool on the market. Many of these tools provide enterprise packages, including everything from analytics, paid search management, and automation, which can quickly run up your budget.
Instead, your digital marketing agency will already have many of these tools in place to help you get the most out of every marketing touchpoint. Often included in your service package, you won’t have to worry about investing in any other technology.
Interviewing a Digital Marketing Agency for Manufacturing Businesses
If you’re ready to hire an agency for your manufacturing company, you’ll want to do plenty of research ahead of time to ensure they are aligned with your goals and budget. You’ll also need to consider how involved you want to be in each campaign to help build a strong working relationship.
To help you get started, here are a few questions to consider in the interviewing process:
- Does the agency have experience in your industry and type of business?
- Will you have a designated account executive or project manager?
- How does your contract compare to others under the agency?
- What online software and tools do they use?
- Are administrative costs included in your budget?
- How will you communicate with the agency?
- What can you expect in the first 90 days?
- Can the agency provide case studies and reviews?
- How often will the agency report on the status of your campaigns?
Grow Your Manufacturing Business with Digital Marketing Expertise
If you’re ready to grow your manufacturing business through a dedicated marketing strategy, but don’t have the resources or budget to focus on it internally, hiring a digital marketing agency is your best option. With the right agency, you can target your key audiences on multiple digital platforms to grow your pipeline and convert leads into long-lasting customers.
Ready to boost your marketing efforts? Get started with Shanahan Strategy today.
