Should I hire a digital marketing agency to handle the marketing aspects of my business?

Probably. Some business owners do basic courses and try to do advertising or build a website. I see the first often when business owners say ‘ads dont work’ when its their setup. Have someone that knows what they are doing set up the campaign and assuming they know what they are doing it will be significantly better.

Getting the right person is important. When we take other agency accounts we can typically pull 30% more out of campaigns. too often campaigns are set up in a hurry or via low skilled people. To avoid this I would say the best single step is know who is doing the actual work. Don’t go for sales focused agency organisations. There always hyper-sales driven agencies with well known brand names that pitch for your business beautifully, then outsource it to their office abroad where they have the cheapest overworked graduate who’s learning this trade on your dollar.

So make sure you can talk with the person on the tools, as well as evaluate them directly rather than the company/agency. And on a small budget you have to be cognisant you cant have some person spending hours talking to you about your account, but if you know who is doing the work, odds are it will be done to a higher standard in my experience, so agency or freelancer doesn’t matter, but direct contact to the person on the tools does.

Is advertising expensive?

Marketing is an investment. Its not cheap or expensive, but spending with positive or negative return on this investment. Make sure you look at return on investment (ROI) as the primary metric. If you spend a million dollars and get $1.5m back, its a lot of money, but expensive would be not spending this money.

What can cost money is new campaigns often take time to get optimised. Give new campaigns a reasonable budget over a reasonable time-frame to find what works or doesn’t. Sometimes you smash it outta the park off the bat, but Id say as a rule of thumb from the initial campaign you’ll probably see 30-70% improvements in cost efficiency over 2-4 months, though longer sometimes for activities like programmatic. So if the first month or two inst profitable but close to a positive ROI, keep trying. If its no-where near, cut losses and look at why it isn’t working, the ads, the conversion funnel etc. See if other businesses are advertising, cause if they are, odds are it is profitable or they wouldn’t be doing it. Try to see what they are doing well.

Should I first learn more about marketing, advertising?

Read up so you have a basic understanding of what is going on. And always ask questions if not sure. Often we marketers use a language of our own and need to be told to explain things! But unless you plan to become an expert, focus on your business core and find someone talented, and you trust, to work with.

If you are going to learn one thing, the most important thing you can learn is Analytics and how you measure activity and success. That way you have the knowledge if something is performing or not. How the marketing expert did it (within reasonable boundaries) doesn’t matter if its working.