Introduction
Hello and welcome to an Impression video on adding value beyond revenue as a digital marketer.
My name is Ben Garry and I’m a content specialist, which means I work in our SEO team with a particular focus on content strategy, writing and optimisation.
What we will cover
In this video, I’m going to be looking at the ways in which digital marketers can provide more value to their business than simply increasing revenue.
First, I’ll take a look at why this matters. I’ll then move on to three thoughts on how any digital marketer can add value to the business they’re in, before finishing by touching briefly on how digital agencies can add value to their clients.
Why it matters
So why bother talking about techniques that don’t explicitly increase online revenue or leads? Isn’t that the main thing we’re judged on?
In most cases, yes. However, in my time in SEO some of the best relationships I’ve had with clients have been those where my skills can be of practical use to the business beyond the core results I’m judged on.
Looking for ways to make yourself useful to other teams and to the business as a whole improves others’ perception of your contributions.
By adding value and building good relationships with the wider business, you’ll be able to have more constructive conversations about your results, regardless of whether they’re positive or negative.
What we’re really talking about here is a way to get your colleagues and stakeholders invested in everything that you can bring to the table.
How digital marketing channels add value
Now I’m going to share three thoughts on how all digital marketers can add value. If you think about your business and your situation, I’m sure you’ll be able think of specific actions you can take beyond these general ideas.
The underlying question behind all of these is this: How can my skills make life easier for my business?
With that in mind, the first idea is that we can provide valuable data on product and service demand. Keyword data from SEO and PPC is an incredibly useful insight into how real people are looking for key parts of your offering.
For example, I’ve used these insights to help an art marketplace client determine how to prioritise their efforts to promote different artists that sell on their platform.
Alternatively, you might be able to provide insights into the market maturity for a new product or service, or use data over time to advise on seasonal trends in demand.
My second point is similar, in that digital marketers often have an incredible amount of insight into how their audience behaves and what they respond to.
Social media can provide invaluable insights into the attitudes of your audience towards your services or to a wider cultural event, while user behavior data from your website is a brilliant insight into the parts of your offering that people find most engaging.
This information can help to inform the approach that businesses take to anything from cultural trends to a rebranding project, and ensure that decisions are made with real customers in mind, rather than an ideal vision of what your customers should be.
And for my final idea, consider how your expertise can act as a bridge between different teams. Digital marketers often have unique insights into teams as varied as web development, communications, sales and customer service.
You can use these connections to increase the integration between different teams – ensuring that everyone sings from the same hymn sheet, as it were.
Being able to have insightful conversations with people from around the business is a critical skill, and it means that you can bring a perspective to the table that others might not have when it comes to weighing into a decision that’s like to impact the channels you have direct control over.
Connecting different teams together can undoubtedly have a positive impact on revenue, but its value to the integration of the business’s strategy and activity goes beyond that.
How agencies add value
Before I finish I want to indulge a little in the question of how agencies can add value.
Again, we return to a very similar practical question to the one I asked earlier:
How can our skills in agencies make life easier for your business?
Ultimately, in-house marketers will rightly judge their agencies on achieving a return on their investment. Beyond that, however, there are numerous ways we can add additional value.
Agencies contain people with specialist skills in different areas who have the time to study niche areas of marketing that teams in-house may not have the time to.
We also tend to have access to a larger, broader tool set that can give us multiple ways of approaching a given task, helping us to provide high quality data on all manner of topics, both those relating to revenue and insights that can impact the wider business.
And finally, we can lighten your load by spending our time on specific projects. If a marketing manager can task an agency to run a certain campaign or fix certain technical issues, they then have more headspace for their other responsibilities, which is never a bad thing.
The specific benefits of working with an agency will depend on the channel and the project at hand, but I want to stress that we can add value beyond our ROI in the same way that in house marketers can add value to their wider teams.
