Digital Marketing Strategy
Assembling Your Digital Team
Digital is an increasingly important component of your client’s marketing. So, digital marketing strategy becomes key to your success. Assembling the right team to provide strategy, creative, and delivery is critical. And, having this team integrate effectively with the rest of your staff challenging for most agencies.
It is important to remember, that digital is a platform and must integrate with an overall strategy. It’s not the be all, end all. Offline and online tactics must merge.
Agencies must decide whether to contract, hire, partner, acquire, etc. for their digital marketing strategy. So much of this depends on focus – understanding who is your target audience and what do they need. From here the agency must decide how it can best make money. I suggest starting slow and making an effective transition. Don’t assume a hire or two will necessarily work.
You can’t be good at everything so partnering with specialists is a smart approach. It’s always best to date before you marry – i.e. commit to a specific strategy. After you have had an opportunity to see what’s possible, you should work with your financial model to see what makes sense. There are a variety of approaches.
Building a Team Internally
This is a risky strategy. It requires an effective recruiting approach and a firm commitment to your digital marketing strategy. For some (who can afford it) there are a variety of recruiters who can help identify talent and narrow the pool of candidates. Typically they charge anywhere from 20% – 30% of base salary for their services – some contingency, some retainer based. Should you choose to do this on your own, it will require a significant amount of time – with no guarantees. Remember besides the skill set, you must insure a cultural fit with your agency.
Contracting
Generally speaking this is a less risky approach in that you only pay for hours used, but you have less control. These individuals are specialists, but can be harder to manage and integrate with your team. They may work onsite or offsite – you need to manage the communication and production. Typically this approach is used when you cannot effectively project the amount of work you can secure. I always recommend that an agency develop a pool of contractors that can be hired if/when necessary.
Partnering
There are so many specialist agencies that are good at what they do and would be thrilled to partner with you. In this case you become the general contractor and can have confidence the job will get done. Your clients will be thrilled to let you determine competency and let you manage the relationship. Of course you need to protect the solicitation potential – you own the client. The real challenge is margin – can both you make enough margin to make this worthwhile. Consider this approach as part of your digital marketing strategy.
Acquiring
This is the quickest way to develop a new capability, but can be expensive. This approach should be pursued only if you can confidently project revenue and are confident your target audience requires this service (i.e. mobile, social, SEO/SEM, analytics, web dev, etc.). The positive benefit is your ability to add value to your engagements. Needless to say, this approach has # of integration challenges that must be managed appropriately. Any merger or acquisition must be evaluated appropriately.
I have helped 50+ agencies face these challenges and build a Strategic Plan for Growth. You may be in a position to do this organically, maybe it’s by being a general contractor (i.e. Partnering), or maybe there is an interesting Roll-Up scenario. These are just some of the agency growth strategies covered in the Agency Playbook. Grab your copy of the Playbook with the link in the right hand column of this page.
Contact me at bob@agencyventures.com, at 610-416-5806, or visit my website/blog www.agencyventures.com
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