When it comes to technology, and specifically marketing technology and with your business spooling back up after the pandemic, there are likely a couple of questions you may ask. How do you maximise, or at least keep up with the ever increasing demand to 'go digital'? And how do you either hire, or retrain staff to make sense of the world we are hurtling towards?
For many businesses 'transformation' is no longer the fashionable thing to be doing, its an economic imperative. We meet so many people who still haven't even installed a CRM into their business yet, and we would argue that's the absolute minimum requirement. Connecting your customer data across the sales, marketing and service functions in your business is a fast way to realise massive competitive advantage over competitors that aren't there yet.
For many, the process of even kicking the tires of a new technology, be it a website or specific piece of software, is a very daunting task. Knowing what you don't know is a skill many business owners have, and not wanting to expose themselves to the 'risks' of technological development is one we hear about over and over.
On the face of it, software is a panacea of solutions to every problem a business should ever face! But it's not as simple as that. Most people worry they are:
It's the last one surprisingly that stop lots of our clients, before they became clients, from making the leap to a more technologically advanced operation. There's no one in the business they can rely on to choose, implement and onboard the software they need, so they sit stuck in a halfway house between wanting to modernise and and the ability to actually do it.
So let's take a look at outsourcing, and what utilising an agency to help out can offer.
There are agencies of all sports of types obviously, and the so called full service - or jack of all trades and master of none - is an increasingly rare and expensive beast. Many business prefer a smaller, more agile, reasonably priced specialists. And like us at Real Inbound, they are usually well connected to related specialists in the industry that they work in.
Well, except you can of course! Most agencies have teams and owners that are steeped in the business that they work in. Buy an hour of an agencies time, and you are getting decades of experience and skills, lessons learned the hard way, and more importantly plenty of successful builds and jobs to be done.
As mentioned, we specialise in websites and HubSpot. There are firms that specialise in all of HubSpot's competitors for a start, and software companies that build bespoke products. Firms that have spent ages and ages finding the best tools to do the jobs they offer to their clients and know them inside and out.
For example cut your HubSpot learning curve in half (or better!) by getting us to set you up, onboard you, and train your team to use your shiny new tools. Or just let us do it for you.
You'll almost always encounter something unexpected when you are building your tech stack. Whether that's software that works 'out of the box' like HubSpot, or something you've build from scratch.
Experienced agencies will have most likely encountered that problem before, and will know exactly how to fix it. And if they don't know themselves you can bet they will be connected to someone who specialises in that particular area to bring in to fix it for you.
Agencies have to get it right more often that not. They not only rely on their reputation to win new business, but they can't afford to get bogged down into long and convoluted work that will tie up there resources interminably. They want to deliver high impact work for their clients quickly and efficiently. So they can either get onto the next thing for you, or win the next client that they need to work for.
Most agencies simply don't pass on the 'true cost' of the work they do for you. Imagine employing an agency owner level marketing strategist for your firm, automations experts, social media writers, developers and so on? The cost soon gets too high to bear thinking about.
Whereas a typical agency with that level of capability offers you a full complement of technical and creative people at an absolute fraction of the cost of employing, training, retaining and developing those people for yourselves.
If you take the above argument about cost effectiveness to its logical conclusion then the average agency retainer is an amazing deal for most business. While we, like many other agencies offer one off projects, or even just hourly consulting, there is nothing like the commitment to a client that the agency retainer generates.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but our retainer clients are our favourites! And we love working with them. And winning for them.
If you have ever considered using an agency, technical or otherwise, we'd love to chat with you to find out how you can benefit the most!
You can book straight into our calendar below.