In marketing’s dark ages, all you needed to stitch together a campaign was textbook knowledge of a field that rarely changed. These days, marketing gurus need two new traits: flexibility and a constant learning curve. The internet’s marketing requirements change every single day, and there are enough moving parts to make your head spin.
1) Digital Difficulties
Basic marketing principles have become unrecognizable in today’s world of permission marketing. Yesterday’s problems are today’s easiest to solve. Replacing them is a list of issues complicated enough to exasperate anyone who doesn’t specialize.
Consumers and search engines are always coming up with new and creative ways to evade your hard-won advertising. Ad blockers, algorithms, and a growing distrust of marketing require out-of-the-box thinking and an eye that remains squarely on the internet’s evolution.
2) Dynamite Comes in Large Packages
Everything from your content marketing plan to your social media strategy needs professionals who are uniquely qualified in their own fields. Who better to write your content than writers? Who better to craft your brand than brand specialists? Who better to manage your site than designers and programming language experts?
The cost of hiring every team member you need to keep your online campaign alive would send you into hiding under your desk. There is a solution, though: hire a digital marketing agency, and you receive the tried and tested skill of an entire team, amplifying your return on investment while simultaneously reducing your expenses.
3) Your Competitors are Already Doing It
If your rivals evolve faster than you do, you’re left trekking around a digital dessert wondering where your lost revenue went.
- Marketing automation has opened the door to truly personalized campaigns for each consumer.
- Big data has allowed businesses to track first party information on consumer behavior in their unique industries.
- Social media listening lets businesses respond to every word spoken about their brand online.
- Analytics have given your rivals the power to adjust their campaigns constantly to achieve higher returns.
If you’re behind the pack, your competitors' success has just become your marketing problem. If you’re ahead, though, you’ll be the one winning more market share.
4) Social Media: The Land of the Confused
Pinterest might be sluggish terrain for most B2B businesses, but if you’re a designer, it’s pure gold. Market your B2B business on Facebook, though, and you might just stagnate. Networks are far from universally useful in every niche.
To complicate things even more, each network uses algorithms to decide whether your consumers ever see your content. 90% of adults use social media, so you need a digital marketing agency to leverage this increasingly complex niche.
The flux of everything from algorithms to coding trends makes gaining visibility online an ever-growing skill that demands as much dedication as it does passion. A digital marketing agency is the only rational approach to making it in a marketplace as huge and cutthroat as the internet.
Casey founded Gravity Digital in 2000 after serving as the Internet Services Director for a Nashville-based Ad Agency. He's a rare breed that operates both left and right brain, so along with oversight of the company he's active in the creative process for our clients.
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