Four Barriers to Online Advertising for Agencies

As an agency, you probably promote the benefits of online advertising to your prospects and clients but you haven’t yet taken the plunge into paid marketing. You are not alone. Surprisingly, a majority of marketing agencies do not use online advertising to promote their firm or services.

Why aren’t agencies taking advantage of online advertising to increase business opportunities? We’ve outlined the top four reasons agencies shy away from pay-per-click (PPC) and discuss the opportunity of paid online marketing. I hope that you can relate to this list and see the potential gains of online ads.

Your budget isn’t big enough.

Agencies often make the assumption that they cannot afford online advertising or they feel the price they are willing to pay is too small to make an impact. The marketing budgets you may be recommending to your clients are not in a realistic price range for you but their businesses and target consumers are entirely different than yours.

However, there are less expensive channels and options available to marketers who are willing to work hard at optimizing their campaign. LinkedIn and Facebook (yes, Facebook for B2B) have highly targeted and affordable options which are great for promoting gated content such as white papers, eBooks, and webinars. Paid search traffic is also much more manageable when you set parameters such as match types, negative keywords, and display times.

You don’t have time.

Another barrier agencies often run into is time. You are probably well aware of this limitation. All your time and resources are spent on your clients. This is an excuse but not a good reason to ignore promoting your agency. Online marketing campaigns cannot be ignored if you expect to drive quality traffic to your site and convert that traffic into leads. You have to be willing to monitor or use a third party to supervise your campaigns.

You can’t keep up with the rapid changes.

As a result of lack of time, many agencies don’t have a thorough understanding of how the advertising platforms can benefit their firm. Additionally, they don’t have solid knowledge of rules and guidelines of each platform. LinkedIn has five marketing solutions: Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, Dynamic Ads, Display Ads, and Text Ads. And what’s going on with Facebook? You can boost your posts, promote your page, get video views, raise attendance at an event, increase conversions on your site and more. Even Google AdWords continues to make changes, the most recent improvement being expanded text ads.

You don’t understand the KPIs.

With so many platforms it’s difficult to fully understand the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of each and how to track it all. Should the click-through rate and cost per clicks be the same across platforms? No, it’s going to be different. It’s important to understand what metrics matter and how to track your results on each platform you choose to advertise on, or you’re likely wasting money. You need a report of the metrics that matter to you like cost per lead and cost per engaged account.

Although these hurdles may have held you back in the past, we recommend considering them for your future. Your services require a high-touch sales process to sell successfully. While Newfangled does not endorse solely relying on PPC to drive traffic to your site, online advertising does help give you an advantage in a multi-stage sales process. When executed properly online advertising can serve as a helping hand for acquiring leads and re-engaging accounts. Consider it for 2017, and if you’d like to learn more about how Newfangled can help, get in touch!