Maintaining a robust online presence can be a full-time job unto itself. In fact, digital marketing can sometimes feel like several full-time jobs—PPC, SEO, content creation, website development and maintenance, social media strategies and beyond.
Fledgling businesses often have little choice but to tackle these disciplines on their own, but as your business grows, it may be beneficial to enlist a team of experts—digital specialists who can help save you time and energy, and also ensure that you’re adhering to a prudent strategy.
Here, there are a couple of options. The first is that you can farm out different tasks to different teams, retaining the services of an SEO firm, and a blog ghostwriter, and a social media strategist, and so on down the list. The second is that you can find a single agency that handles all those tasks in-house or through their own proven partners, giving you a one-stop-shop, as it were.
enCOMPASS Agency falls into that second category, which means you already know our take on the issue. But maybe you’re still on the fence. Allow us to elucidate just some of the reasons why it makes sense to bring all your digital efforts under one roof.
Outsourcing vs. Project Management
A common assumption is that, when you outsource all your projects to different teams, they can all be completed at once—meaning you’ll save a lot of time. For example, while your web design team works on a new site, you can also have an SEO expert develop a new campaign infrastructure, you can have an ad team shooting YouTube videos, and so on.
While it may sound efficient to have all these projects under way at the same time, the reality is that it can actually increase your workload. It means having multiple consultation meetings and multiple approval processes to juggle. It means several deadlines to keep track of and projects to manage all at once, rather than a single, streamlined process.
All told: Working with multiple teams may seem like the time-saving solution, but many business owners quickly discover that the opposite is true.
Too Many Cooks?
Here’s another point to consider: You’ve probably heard the old expression that when you have too many cooks in the kitchen, it will spoil the soup. The basic idea is that, the more people you involve in a process, the more opportunity there is for them to step on each other’s toes and work at odds with one another.
That can certainly be true when you engage multiple digital partners. All too often, small tasks slip through the cracks due to a lack of clarity about each partner's role, and who’s ultimately supposed to be doing what. Worse, you may start to get competing advice—your SEO person telling you one thing, your content writer telling you something else. And what happens when your web designer tells you that the SEO expert has it all wrong? Whose judgment are you supposed to trust? And who is ultimately accountable for the results?
Having multiple players can lead to chaos; having a single, unified team keeps everyone on the same page, and ensures clarity about each person’s role in the process. There is also clear accountability for results.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
An obvious point, perhaps, but one that bears consideration: The different digital partners you hire may or may not work well together. They may inspire one another to bold new ideas, but just as likely, they’ll chafe against each other and cause friction.
It makes more sense to have a group of specialists who you already know work well together; and, who share the same space, making it easy for them to collaborate, to brainstorm, and to inspire good ideas in one another.
Point of Contact
Something else to think about is the ease and simplicity of communication.
Say you hire four different digital teams. That’s four different points of contact you need to keep track of; four different people with whom you need to stay in communication—and some of them may communicate better than others!
As you can imagine, working with one team simplifies things considerably. You’ll have a single account manager who can answer any questions you have about any aspect of your digital campaign—the content, the design, timelines, deadlines, you name it.
Keeping it Consistent
Finally, when it comes to any marketing, consistency is key—in your branding, in your visual cues, and in the language you use to describe your company.
Yes, when working with multiple vendors, you can try to keep everyone on the same page and ensure a consistent approach… but that can sometimes be easier said than done.
When you work with one team, you will get to the heart of your message and ensure that it’s presented in just the way you want it to be—always.
These are just some of the benefits to working with a full-service, all-inclusive digital agency—but if you have any additional questions, we’re always happy to chat. Reach out to enCOMPASS any time.
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