A great marketing strategy is the key to ensuring campaigns provide a good ROI, and perform together to increase lead generation. However, it can be challenging to know where to begin. Outbound, inbound, and paid advertising all require keen marketing expertise, and a considerable amount of time, to perform well. It’s important to understand the benefits of a marketing strategy agency, and what exactly they can provide to those building solutions in the B2B tech industry. A marketing strategy agency could be exactly what you need to generate targeted marketing that resonates with buyers, and ensures a positive ROI.
Guide to B2B SaaS Marketing
What is a Marketing Strategy Agency?
A marketing strategy agency will work with your business to develop a content plan and strategy for implementation across a variety of platforms. Unlike an agency specializing in PPC advertising or content marketing, a marketing strategy agency will take a holistic approach, implementing different marketing methods as necessary. For this reason, they should be able to demonstrate knowledge across several areas – most importantly SEO literacy, successful experiences with PPC advertising, and generating polished, informative content. Look for SEO accreditations from SEMrush and Hubspot, and Google’s Ads certification for PPC knowledge.
Agency vs Freelance
Forgoing the agency route, some businesses may be tempted to use freelancers to supplement their efforts. This can work, but it can bring significant risks. Great marketing is borne out of consistent, deliberate efforts. There are excellent freelancers on the market whose work rivals that of any major marketing agency. But with time, your business will hopefully grow, and freelancers are hard to scale. If you need to hire two or more freelancers, you will be responsible for managing and organizing them to ensure a consistent tone and strategy are maintained throughout your branding and content.
Furthermore, if one quits unexpectedly, you will suddenly be responsible for a significant additional workload until you find a suitable replacement, that integrates with your existing freelanced team. A good marketing agency, by contrast, will internally manage its staff to ensure there’s continuity across its efforts and handle any staffing roadblocks in-house.
Process of a Marketing Strategy Agency: Step by Step
They Collaborate to Set Bold and Precise Goals
Your potential marketing strategy agency should make developing a deep understanding of your company and its purpose its very first step. Without a strong understanding of a product’s target audience and how it benefits them, marketing messages will remain superficial and unpersuasive.
If you haven’t already built buyers’ personas for your company, your marketing strategy agency will help you through this process – if you have, they’ll audit these to make sure they still reflect the reality of your customer base. The first step of all effective marketing is correctly identifying your target audience, your target market, and appropriate positioning.
They Do Their Research
A great marketing strategy agency will leave no stone unturned when it comes to understanding your market and competition. In addition to performing keyword research, they’ll do a thorough analysis of your competitors – both competitors in your industry and sites competing for keyword rankings, regardless of their relevance to your product.
An agency is able to brainstorm ideas for relevant topics with a lot of potential traction, thanks to the keywords and their knowledge of your space. They will then take their research, data, and ideas, combined with your company’s buyer personas and USP, and concentrate it all down into a lean, focused content plan and strategy.
They Formulate a Strategy
A great marketing strategy agency will most likely use a range of marketing techniques and content types to build a holistic plan for the growth of your business. Paid advertising, in the form of banners on search engines or video ads, can be extremely effective in driving immediate traffic to your website. They have the ability to guarantee Google keyword rankings, or provide a pitch opportunity on relevant YouTube videos. Both are powerful lead generation tools.
What your marketing strategy agency should understand, however, is that combining paid advertising methods with strong SEO content can supercharge both approaches.
Focus on Evergreen Content
Because, unlike PPC ads, evergreen content offers long-term value with no additional costs. It can also be used to target potential leads much earlier in their considerations and introduce your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
By contrast, an advert will only resonate with those prepared to make purchase decisions at that time. It’s important to note that content marketing does take time to build momentum – which is why the two methods are so complementary.
Your marketing strategy agency will formulate a plan that accounts for this and aligns with your potential customer’s needs throughout the buyer’s journey – offering content to enrich their experience with your business.
Test and Learn
Putting their plan into action, your marketing strategy agency won’t be afraid to experiment and work as they go. Ensure they are using major tools such as Hubspot and SEMrush in their analytics – they won’t be able to give you accurate analysis otherwise.
Ideally, you’ll want an agency you can form a long-term working relationship with, even if your first collaboration is a limited contract. As your business grows, you must have marketing support from a team that understands you and your customer base.
Get Help But Keep Control
That said, it’s equally crucial you don’t rescind control completely. Ultimately, you care more about your business than any agency can. You need to ensure that you’re keeping yourself informed of your marketing strategy agency’s successes – and failures.
A credible agency will keep you informed and not pull its punches. But make sure that you have access to your analytics pages, and understand and align with your agency on the messages behind your marketing, as you’ll need to reflect these in your management of sales and service teams to achieve synergy.
Ultimately, the best marketing strategy agency for your business will be one that has a demonstrable understanding of your industry, is flexible and collaborative, and shows inventiveness and skill when it comes to devising your marketing strategy and content plan.
At Nituno, we’ve learned from experience that effective marketing comes from innovation and resourcefulness. We use a variety of marketing methods including inbound, outbound, paid, and video marketing to drive traffic and supercharge our clients’ growth. Need a bespoke marketing strategy and plan? Book a strategy audit with us today.
