Why Leverage A Digital Marketing Strategies Expert?

Like any meaningful part of a business, developing digital marketing strategies means long hours, hard work, and a lot of research. It’s as much art as science, even more so than other forms of marketing, requiring a knack for understanding how customers behave, the ability to crunch numbers and turn stacks of data into something meaningful, and an attention to the smallest details.

Despite these hurdles, a savvy business owner, manager, or traditional marketer can likely develop, implement, and maintain a workable set of internet marketing strategies with enough time and effort—and that’s the trap many fall into. You need to ask a second question to get a useful answer. Not whether it’s possible to do it yourself; but whether it’s efficient to spend your time on it, instead of leveraging an expert.

Considering the Value of Your Time

Let’s take a moment to consider what we’re truly talking about when we talk about handling digital marketing internally: time. It’s inevitable that to do the job right, you or the person you assign the task will need to invest quite a lot of time to doing it. You can do it wrong with less time, of course, but that defeats the purpose of doing internet marketing at all, as bad internet marketing, like bad traditional marketing, can harm your business’s image to predictable effect. 

How much is that time worth, if it were spent on more familiar tasks? A business owner might spend several weeks or months learning, planning, and implementing digital marketing strategies, to say nothing of upkeep—how much potential profit do they lose in spending hours on that task, instead of researching suppliers, reaching out to new partners, watching the industry news for potential opportunities? If it’s less than the marketing brings in, that’s a clear loss, but even if your new internet marketing strategies manage a win doing it yourself may be a loss when considering your other option: Expert help.

The Potential of Focused Marketing Expertise

When you leverage an outside expert, someone who specializes in digital marketing strategies, you’re not just paying for them to spend the same time you did; they’ve already learned the ropes, developed experience, acquired the tools (mental and literal) to do the job. Your hours doing your normal job are more valuable at that job—but their hours as an expert, doing their normal job, are accordingly more valuable than the ones you might spend at that same task.

By investing in an expert, you jump straight to getting valuable, effective, efficient man-hours on the task. The cost of learning and experimenting and developing worthwhile experience isn’t solely carried by you or an employee, but split across your digital marketing expert’s various clients. It’s simple efficiency—and that’s completely ignoring the possibility that their expertise produces superior results. Even with equivalent results, your business will see more profit letting an outsider spend their best hours on your internet marketing strategies versus you spending less efficient hours on it. 

Experts Bring Success

This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to savvy business owners—a look at some of the top businesses in the world shows very quickly that success comes to those who learn to leverage the expertise of others for maximum efficiency—micromanaging and Do-It-Yourself attitudes can result in success, but puts a hard roof on the potential of a business by eating up excessive shares of time. 

Similarly, keeping everything in-house doesn’t even work for the largest of mega-corporations; they may do more in-house, but there are still those tasks which deserve occasional specialist attention. Learning when to reach for a phone and call an outsider in to handle a particular task is crucial if you want your business to see its peak efficiency.

The Common Fear

Of course, there’s one aspect of utilizing outsiders which you may dread: that sensation that you’re losing control. When you use an expert in digital marketing strategies, you must to some degree entrust your brand, your company, to their hands. This can be a somewhat nerve-wracking experience, even if you’re vetting what materials are being produced, the internet marketing strategies being utilized, the content being published.

It’s important to remember that you’re dealing with a specialist—if anyone is likely to make a brand-breaking faux pas online, it’s the do-it-myself minded individuals, not an expert with years of experience navigating the waters, who has the time and incentive to keep track of every change in the industry and adapt accordingly. When a business makes a dreadful misstep on Twitter or ranks in Google for a foul word, it doesn’t happen because of marketing experts, it happens because maintenance fell to an intern because the individual who developed the strategy had other tasks to deal with. 

Tools of the Trade

There’s one other thing to strongly consider, putting aside the question of personal efficiency, when measuring the benefits of hiring someone to deal with digital marketing strategies: The tools. When you require a specialized task with expensive specialized tools on a part-time basis, it’s not at all efficient to purchase those tools yourself. 

At the beginning of this post, we mentioned the way digital marketing strategies involve equal part science and art; to leverage the scientific side of that balance requires very specialized tools for measuring, adjusting, and experimenting. Purchasing, learning, and utilizing these tools to their fullest efficiency becomes a major undertaking in and of itself, and anyone attempting to develop successful internet marketing strategies without them is sure to underachieve.

Other Pitfalls of DIY

There are a few other considerations to take into account if you’re still pondering the possible benefits of handling your digital marketing strategies without the benefit of a specialist.

• Dated methods. A few years ago, a backlink profile of exact phrase matches would be ideal. Today, Google frowns upon artificial linking internet marketing strategies. But the countless guides preaching the old internet marketing strategies still exist, leading people astray.
• Faux pas. The internet is a wild beast, and if you’re not sure how to interact with it safely it can turn around and bite you—hard. Getting a positive bit of marketing fluff to go viral can be a herculean task, but a bad piece of marketing will quite eagerly flood the internet. A simple misstep with internet marketing strategies can become a near-permanent embarrassment. 
• Stagnation. Without commitment to the developing nature of digital marketing, it can be very easy for internet marketing strategies to become ‘fire and forget’ without an expert at hand to keep the effort alive and evolving.

Parting Thoughts

In the end, it’s certainly possible to develop your own digital marketing strategies and put them to work—and many businesses do exactly that with mixed results. The question, of course, is not whether you can, but whether you should. And for this particular task, all signs point to ‘no’. Investing in a specialist to handle your digital marketing strategies is simple business sense, even if you already have a general marketing team—the talents required may be the same, but there are so many details to be lost in that the benefit of expertise still pays for itself many times over. Either way you choose to go, you may want to order our Digital Marketing Leverage Analysis to learn where you can increase your leverage in your marketing efforts.

What else?  What other advice do you have regarding Internet Marketing Strategies?