Short answer: Think higher level. (Keep reading for the longer answer.)
I’ll lay out a couple things here that can get your team through the year—whether by tapping your digital marketing partner for strategic advice, or asking them to take on specific tasks. The main thing to remember: Your agency has access and experience your smaller marketing team may not. Get their insight for a better picture.
Technology
Your digital agency has a lot of clients, and with it, Insights regarding multiple martech stacks. They’ve seen multiple ways to use efficient workflows and know how different tools work together. All in all, they’ve got a better grasp of the best tools and features available. So just ask! No matter how good your prompt is, they can help you with this more than ChatGPT can. For example, get help with the way you’re tracking or analyzing your CRM data. If you have developers on your team, bring them into the meetings, too. Dialogue and asking questions are key.
Paid Marketing
There are so many paid marketing options now, and AI promises to make it easy to DIY your ads. But if you’re not a paid marketing expert, it’s certainly worth getting an expert eye (i.e your digital marketing agency) to provide professional help if you want to move the needle.
Account settings are complex. Sometimes Google will decide the URL for you, and if you don’t change it out manually, your beautiful, pre-built landing page won’t be used (and without anyone digging in, you may never even realize it’s happening). So if you’re hoping to run paid campaigns, it’s best practice to have a digital marketing agency look it over, double check it’s set up and running, with all the necessary boxes checked/unchecked (yes, even if you’re using AI to help you)!
Budgeting
Another piece to this puzzle is how much money you’re spending, and where. Figuring out how and where to spread your budget across channels can be a challenge. Many of our clients use Google or Linkedin ads, but are exploring other new avenues, like Reddit. Agencies can advise clients which channels may work best for specific industries, or for reaching a specific audience—based on their testing with other companies.
For example, we use Linkedin ads for some of our clients, and we explore targeting specific parts of the funnel, and divide the budget based on the goals (the segment our clients most want to reach).
Website
Using a digital marketing agency to help you design your website makes sense. Armed with a UX team and a design team, an agency can help with user journeys within a strategic branding framework. Another point to remember: Landing pages can make or break user engagement and conversion rates. It’s easy enough to build a page, especially with all the tools available now. But an experienced designer will be able to provide feedback that will optimize everything on it, from graphics to layout to hierarchy with search visibility in mind. (For example, how to make the hero image the right size for a better user experience on mobile, or whether to put the social proof higher on the page.) There are so many decisions to make when creating a website, it makes sense to call in for back up: Ask your digital agency for help.
Reporting
With subpar reporting, comes uninformed decision making. From what we’ve seen in data analysis, there are two camps: Those that love it. And those that don’t—but have to use it anyway.
Many marketing teams don’t have someone who lives, breathes and loves analytics, so reporting is not as in-depth as it could be. And then the decisions made are based on “some information” instead of the full picture. You know who can provide that full picture? You guessed it – you’re digital marketing agency.
For data, one number at a time isn’t enough. Some data make sense together, some data are unrelated. An agency can help sort through the metrics, identify the pattern, and tell you the whole story.
If you want better outcomes, choose an agency that’s also concerned with the outcome—the ones that have long-term clients are the ticket. Want to run your own reports? By all means! But have someone walk you through the data if you don’t have an analyst at the ready.
SEO/GEO
Search and generative engine optimization is now sharing a slot on the list. The high-level strategy we mentioned earlier should also include adjustments for SEO and GEO—and what companies should expect. A lot of our B2B clients are finding their AI traffic is coming from ChatGPT. Knowing where your traffic is coming from can be helpful in terms of tailoring your content to be picked up by specific types of AI engines (and possibly in the near future when ChatGPT offers online advertising).
We have seen a bit of a plateau for AI traffic for B2B clients, which helped us provide context for other clients. Because we have our eyes on multiple organizations in a variety of industries, we can see the impacts and patterns before most of our clients do, and we can help advise accordingly.
In Conclusion, Think Bigger
From a larger standpoint, get your digital marketing agency to help you create a high-level strategy. Instead of asking them to do one-off tasks, like creating a new conversion page, ask them to help you problem solve the current one, and find out why it’s not converting. They have a whole TEAM they can put on it, which is a much better use of an agency than “check off our to-do list”.
Ultimately, it’s up to your team to determine how best to use your digital marketing agency. If you want more value, swap out your to-do lists for higher-level strategy; use them as a way to ensure you’re making the right moves in using AI for budgeting, advertising, and content.
