Do You Need an In-House Marketer, or Why Are Clients Disappointed with Digital Marketing?

When working with leads who reach out to our marketing agency, we often hear things like, “We spent a ton of money on marketing and got no results. Maybe you’ll be different.”

Today, we will share our observations on why these situations happen and whether the previous agencies are always to blame for the lack of results.

Let’s imagine a typical business owner who has tried numerous vendors but hasn’t achieved the desired outcome. What should they focus on to finally make marketing work for their company?

Who’s responsible?

Here’s the deal: if you don’t have someone on your team who is responsible for certain tasks, you are setting yourself up for failure.

This is especially true for small businesses (usually up to 10-15 employees), where the owner often juggles multiple roles and becomes the linchpin for all communication. But, believe it or not, we have seen this in larger companies too (up to 100 employees).

It is crucial to assess whether you can handle marketing on top of your current operations. Here’s what you will need to manage:

• understand how different marketing channels work;
• find and hire expert vendors;
• oversee each contractor’s work and evaluate their effectiveness;
• have a clear goal: Know what you want to achieve, how, and by when. Make sure your goals are realistic;
• dedicate time to reviewing plans, reports, and documents and providing feedback;
• learn to interpret analytics and generate your own hypotheses for potential experiments.

Most business owners or C-level executives simply don’t have the time to operationally manage contractors. Even skilled managers often lack the marketing know-how to assess whether their contractors are performing effectively. When it comes to channels that directly impact revenue quickly, like PPC, evaluating ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is relatively easy. But, it gets trickier with complex user journeys in B2B segments or activities like link building that don’t generate immediate leads or sales.

So, having a marketer on your team will significantly ease your workload. They will take on the operational burden of communication and control and be accountable for the results of your contractors’ work.

However, if you still believe you can carve out time for marketing, let’s move on to the next point.

How many contractors do you need, and what do they do?

Here’s a common scenario our clients find themselves in: You have several teams, each working on its own thing. Thus, you have link-building experts, PPC specialists, copywriters, web developers—the list goes on. The problem starts when these teams aren’t synchronized. The teams are doing their part, but have no clue what their colleagues are up to.

Your marketing efforts end up divided into mini-clusters of people who aren’t aligned with the overall goal. They are just performing tasks to get their paycheck. As months go by and budgets get spent, you might get some leads, but the big-picture goal remains elusive.

If this hits close to home, let’s figure out what to do about it.

The Easiest Option: Don’t just chase the cheapest offer on the market. Find an agency that can handle your marketing as a cohesive unit.

At Livepage, we ensure a systematic approach to your marketing by assigning a marketer and a project manager to each client. This means we conduct brainstorming sessions, generate ideas and hypotheses that span multiple channels, and reallocate budgets to maximize your business’s revenue. We analyze your competitors, your market position, the growth potential in your niche, and the necessary budgets to achieve your goals. And yes, we might decline a project if we believe your goals aren’t achievable within the set time frame and budget (because we want you to be happy with our collaboration).

I asked the client if she noticed any positive dynamics compared to, for example, last year, and she said, “We used to have one manager handling all our requests, and now we’ve hired another one and are looking for two more, which is basically the answer to the question. There are definitely more requests and more targeted ones from different channels.”

Client feedback on comprehensive work with Livepage

If this sounds like what you need, leave a request on our website, and we will get in touch to create a custom proposal for you.

It can also be useful to use white label SEO audit services to ensure even better results in promotion.

The Optimal Option: Hire an in-house marketer. Sorry, there are no magic solutions here. Successful multichannel marketing requires a dedicated employee.

Even large agencies can’t cover every detail of your marketing efforts. Reliable partners might join your business, but they are still separate entities with their own processes and contact points that a marketer should manage.

So, what’s the main function of the marketer we recommend? Let’s move on to point three.

Idea

As mentioned above, your marketer needs to convey the idea for effective marketing.

Having a goal of getting 20 SQL leads per month is great, but it’s not an idea. Returning marketing investments is important, but it’s still not an idea. Making more and more money is crucial for business, but it’s not an idea either.

So, what’s this elusive idea?

We see the idea as a narrative that runs through all the actions taken to achieve your goals. It should define:

• what we write about in the blog and what topics we ignore; 
• how we communicate with leads or clients and who we fundamentally exclude;
• how we position the team and whether we showcase real people on the website;
• which steps and decisions are unacceptable;
• what we aim for globally as a business to grow;
• which services or products are priorities and worth investing in;
• what our KPIs are and which numbers we focus on;
• what business changes we want to share with our audience;
• what social responsibilities and achievements we want to highlight;
• etc.

Your marketing strategies and plans answer most of these questions. But do your contractors regularly check these documents? Are you sure everyone working on your site understands and follows these rules? How often do your employees ask themselves, “Why are we doing this?”

Marketing nightmares in practice

We occasionally encounter clients who are in dire straits due to various past actions.

For instance, much of the content on the site was created using AI tools because it was quick and cheap. Then, the site got hit by an update and lost organic traffic. Was the owner warned about the potential risks? Would they have opted for this cost-saving measure if they knew the possible consequences?

Or take content that doesn’t generate leads because it doesn’t align with the business’s goals. Imagine a company focused on HVAC repair posting DIY air conditioner repair tips, or a specialized lending site posting how-to guides on reloading bank cards.

Maybe a link-building agency should have been upfront and said that 400 links wouldn’t get a page to the top of search results without improving content, semantics, and internal linking.

Or consider an in-house team of copywriters who don’t have a content plan and are just required to write a certain number of articles each month “about something.”

Do you think the specialists’ work was monitored in these cases? Did they understand the business’s main goal? Did they consider whether the business needed such traffic, content, and links? Probably not, and even having a Google Doc with a marketing strategy wouldn’t have saved the situation.

The result is a business disillusioned with digital marketing. Owners who don’t understand why their competitors are getting sales through their site while they are not. Businesses that have invested tens of thousands of dollars in marketing without seeing a return.

But let’s not dwell on the negatives. By learning from other companies’ experiences, we can summarize the above and avoid becoming the heroes of this sad story.

Conclusion: How can digital marketing be done without wasting budgets?

From the three points we have discussed, here are our takeaways:

• You will eventually need a marketer. If you don’t have one yet, ensure there is someone responsible for the overall marketing efforts;
• Business management needs to create the idea. Without a main idea, your actions are likely to be tactical, and your teams will scatter their efforts;
• Minimize the number of marketing contractors. It’s better to work with a few marketing contractors and cover all aspects within one agency than to try coordinating multiple freelancers or teams.

If you are curious about selecting an outstanding agency, here are some green flags during initial interactions that indicate a quality approach.

They ask about:

• your long-term goals;
• people involved in marketing on your team and your resources;
• your current priorities and ways to make money on;
• your previous experience, your successes and failures;
• your typical buyer/lead;
• systems that your team works in and ways to build a comfortable communication ecosystem for everyone;
• decision-maker(s) and their roles;
• … and many other questions (we won’t reveal all our secrets 😉).

If you leave the call feeling that the team genuinely cares about your business and not just your budget (although let’s be real, marketing is still about money), and if they are transparent and share your values, give them a chance! Check out the client review section on Livepage to read impressions from some of the clients who haven’t been disappointed by digital marketing.