Most businesses always get to this point where they realize the need for internet marketing but not sure whether to hire an internet marketing company or employ an in-house digital marketer (or a team of digital marketers). If you are at that crossroad in your business, then you are reading the right content.
It’s 2020 and no one should have to explain to you the importance of internet marketing. You already know this and that’s why you are here.
What Does Internet Marketing Entail?
Often interchanged with online marketing or digital marketing, internet marketing involves everything done via the internet to promote a business or brand along with its products and services. It could be subtle like content marketing or direct like display ads.
Wall Street Journal top influencer, Neil Patel defined internet marketing as “any effort to spread the word about your company that uses the internet to reach people”.
Whether you use an in-house marketer or outsource to an internet marketing company, these are the different aspects of online marketing they are responsible for:
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On and off-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
This refers to everything you put in place to improve your ranking on the search engine. We discussed in detail what search engine optimization is all about here.
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Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
While SEO is organic, SEM is paid. It involves paying a search engine to show your website to potential customers when they search there. It’s an effective way of standing out from the crowd in a highly competitive market.
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Content Marketing
Content Marketing Institute defined Content Marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”.
In layman language, it’s a way of attracting potential customers, prove your worth to them through consistent valuable content to convert them to customers.
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Social Media Marketing
Social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram etc., has helped many businesses reach their audience.
Buffer described social media marketing as “the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales and drive traffic”
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Email Marketing
Email marketing is believed to be the most effective and direct way of building a connection with your leads, nurturing them and converting them into customers.
Reasons you should use an internet marketing company
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Work with Professionals
You have a business and you don’t even know much about internet marketing. So, chances are you don’t know what to look out for when hiring an in-house online marketer. This leaves you with the other option which is – hiring an internet marketing company.
By working with a marketing company, you’d have access to professionals and experts with years of experience.
There is still the issue of getting the right marketing company. Well, all you have to do is a background check of the different internet marketing companies in Canada. Google is there for you. You can search with words like “top 100 marketing companies in Toronto (your location)” or “online marketing companies list in Canada”.
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Focus on Other Aspects of Your Business
From receiving numerous applications, inviting different candidates for interviews to the point when you finally choose one and eventually have to manage them and their responsibilities. Getting just one in-house marketer would be a lot of work. Then imagine having to do that for a team of three to five persons.
This can be tiring and time-consuming. Especially because you have a better option in outsourcing to an internet marketing company. With this, you don’t have to bother about staff training, management and supervision. That leaves you with more time to focus on other aspects of your business.
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Highly Scalable
As your business grows, you would always need to increase the number of your internet marketing team if you have an in-house team. In other words, your business would need more hands in the department to handle the extra demands that would come with growth.
With an internet marketing company, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. Irrespective how fast or big your business grows, it’s on the online marketing company to know how to accommodate your new needs and expectations.
They usually have different plans and may easily switch to a higher or better plan to suit your business needs as you grow.
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Easy to Measure Results
One of the most important aspects of internet marketing is measurement and evaluation. As a business, you would want to know whether your marketing investments are yielding returns.
Determining methods of measuring results on your own as a business may be daunting since there are so many of them in the digital marketing world. With a marketing company, however, they can help in deciding the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on your business goals and objectives.
They would figure key metrics to measure performance across different channels to determine how effective every campaign is. You are also sure of receiving monthly or weekly performance report on your marketing activities.
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Access to Tools
Online Marketing is not one of those services you provide with one or two tools. There are different tools for each aspect of internet marketing. You need tools for keywords research, SEO, social media marketing, analytics, content marketing and so on.
Some of the tools are free, but most are premium. And most of the times, the premium tools give the best results. Imagine you have to be the one to bother about all of these as well. Imagine adding paying for all these premium tools to all the expenses you already have running your business.
This another reason using a marketing company is the best option. They have different clients and paying for the tools is economically reasonable for them. So your marketing would be done with modern online marketing tools.
Conclusion
It’s not completely a bad idea to have an in-house internet marketer (or a team of internet marketers). It has its advantage of easy alignment to business goals.
However, hiring a marketing company takes off a lot of responsibilities from your shoulders while still guaranteeing better results.