As a service-based business, you may be thinking now is a great time to find and connect with a marketing agency to get the results you’re after. You’ve got a rough idea of where you want your marketing to go, and you’re sure that whichever agency you choose will be able to fill in the rest of the blanks.

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While this is a common approach for many businesses nowadays, it’s unfortunately missing two vital components that will help to ensure you get the most out of your marketing function.

Let me break it down for you.

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A roadmap to success

Just about any agency you choose to work with will no doubt have the ability to execute effective marketing tactics that hopefully leads to satisfactory results for your business. However, more often than not the crucial roadmap to success is missing.

Enter the development of a digital marketing strategy.

A digital strategy will help to outline your in-depth marketing game plan, including the people and the tools that you’re going to need to successfully execute it. From there, you can then begin to find the right agency(ies) to help you achieve marketing success.

But maybe your business doesn’t have an internal senior marketing mind? Who is going to make your strategy?

As a strategy-first business, we often hear clients say they have previously used agencies like ours but never have they seen a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Without this blueprint, your senior leadership team won’t have a scope on what people, tools, content, budget and martech components are required to reach your business objectives.

A great marketing strategy will correlate the actions back to those overarching goals, whilst always remaining conscientious about ROI.

Basically, without this plan in place, marketing activity is a waste of time.

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The internal touch point

Hands up if the mere thought of having to hire, manage and assess an internal marketing team stresses you out?

Yep, we see you!

So you want an agency to do it.

But have you considered the following?

For those who want someone to take the reigns on their marketing execution, an agency model has traditionally been the place to start. You select your agency and they take care of the rest. But this model can come with some challenges such as:

• The skills and processes that are required to perform the day-to-day marketing for your business remain solely within your marketing agency. If you want to take things back inhouse you’ll be starting from scratch.
• Your business’ internal team has no opportunity to develop or improve their marketing capabilities.
• Your business risks partnering with an agency with limited innovation, strategy and drive, meaning they will simply rinse and repeat the same marketing strategies every month.
• Your business may be subject to frequent turnover of account managers and agency staff, impacting your chances of seeing consistent progress and results.
• While many business leaders are now looking for ways to mitigate these limitations, as well as current global and local business trends, the obvious option of bringing the entire marketing function in-house still seems far too difficult, especially without a current digital strategy in place.

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So, what’s the solution?

Hire an Ask Marketer.

Considering the success which agencies have brought businesses worldwide, whilst also considering the above challenges and limitations, our team, as well as many other businesses out there are now looking at creating a hybrid approach.

Our Hire An Ask Marketer solution is just one example of this.

Your Ask Marketer would be an extension of your business, sitting between the 100% outsourced and 100% in house marketing models; a new hybrid model.

This enables the business to have senior marketing management through our Ask Marketing team, who will create for you an exceptional and in-depth Digital Marketing Strategy, as well as someone from our team working on the day-to-day execution, right where the action happens. This helps to enhance and develop the skills of the internal team, which is continually and reliably guided by our Ask Marketing team.

The difference between regular outsourcing and working with Ask Marketing is:

• Ask Marketing dives deep into your business objectives, needs, service offering and more, so we understand the business back to front, and any changes which happen along the way.
• There’s no need to hire and train your marketing team, we provide that for you.
• A senior Ask Marketing Strategist will develop and provide ongoing support for our team member who executes the day-to-day tactics.
• Ask Marketing is able to focus on both the overarching bigger picture and the finer details of your business, creating dynamic and successful marketing strategies to suit your needs.
• The teamwork between us and your internal team will be ongoing, with communication a vital component of the partnership.

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So, what’s the process?

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1. First up, the most important step – you need to build a digital marketing strategy that aligns with your unique business goals. This can either be developed by an internal marketing manager or with the help of digital strategists such as Ask Marketing.
2. As your digital strategy will recommend, you will then need to focus on covering your baseline marketing tactics. To do this, you can either hire an internal resource that can take on the role of content gatekeeper for your business, which will require your recruitment, training and management. Or, you can Hire An Ask Marketer.
3. Next, if needed, you can layer in the secondary tactics that are outlined in your digital strategy, and for specialised tactics like website optimisation and videography, we will manage the connection with our recommended partners.
4. Once each of these processes is in place, we will transparently work together and continually assess the performance of your entire marketing function.
5. Finally, make sure that you are always coming back to your digital marketing strategy to ensure that every aspect, person, resource and tool is collectively underpinned by your overarching business goals. It may need adjusting as the business goals change.

For more information, check out our 9-Step Digital Marketing Strategy Guide.

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Do you need help with strategic digital marketing for your business?

All you have to do is Ask!

At Ask Digital Marketing, we combine decisive digital strategy and managed marketing execution to help B2B service-based businesses build demand, establish thought leadership and own their industry through digital business marketing.

Stop waiting. Start building. Experience success.

Just get in touch with us and we can discuss your business to help you navigate the digital marketing landscape towards success.

Let’s harness the power of digital marketing today!

For more great marketing content, connect with our company leaders, Alexandra King and Stephanie King, or follow our Ask Marketing LinkedIn page.