Your company's website is just as important as any brick and mortar location, serving as the real estate with which a large percentage of your customers will be engaged. Like any other aspect of your business, someone needs to maintain it on an ongoing basis.
Unfortunately, many businesses that were once accustomed to managing simple sites have fallen behind the times, unable to keep up with the never-ending developments in SEO strategy, design focused on user experience, and marketing best practices that change without care for whether you have the time to invest in a website upgrade or not.
Ultimately, however, businesses must keep up to date or risk losing market share to industry newcomers or old competitors with a superior online presence. When it comes time for a sustainable solution, every organization is faced with a decision: hiring a digital agency versus hiring a new employee to deal with everything in-house.
While it’s true that hiring a new employee solely for site maintenance once offered advantages such as rapid communication due to their being right there in the office, this isn’t always a sustainable model. With a new employee comes not just the salary you pay them, but a laundry list of other requirements, including providing training and offering employee benefits you may not be able to afford.
Over time, digital agencies like the New Possibilities Group have risen as a cost-effective alternative to hiring a new employee. Not only are you getting a level of expertise that’s difficult to recruit for, but you’re essentially gaining a whole group of specialized team members rather than a single person burdened with multiple responsibilities.
Let’s explore the advantages of hiring a digital agency to build and maintain your website.
Instant Communication
Sure, communicating with someone face-to-face is the quickest way to convey your needs, but that old argument for having an in-house employee just doesn't stand up as well as it once did. Good digital agencies have support staff available to their customers, ready to answer questions and act to solve problems quickly, and of a size whereby multiple tasks can be accomplished for a client at the one time.
Aside from that, email communication has made the process of conveying needs a breeze. Here at NPG, we guarantee a 15-minute response time to emails in order to ensure our clients are being taken care of as soon as they need us. Plus, help is often a mere phone call away.
Less Work for the Same Cost
The average salary of a webmaster in New York City is $85,000, not including benefits. Hiring a single employee for that much money isn’t always sustainable for a business. Heck, for that amount of money, you could have your entire website rebuilt and then some.
A single webmaster can only manage one or two websites on a full-time basis; they will need to take sick days and vacations, which exposes your company to risk in the event of an emergency when they’re not around. And realistically, one person can only do so much in a single day.
Digital agencies bring their whole staff to handle any problems that arise, and they are able to do so without interruption. Not to mention, they have the ability to manage any number of sites without trouble. You’ll likely only communicate with your project manager most of the time, but you can be assured that behind him or her is a whole army of experts ready to get the job done.
Constant Skill Improvement
The ever-changing digital world requires that employees be constantly updating their skills, learning and researching to make sure the product they offer is at the market's cutting edge. When a company hires an in-house employee, the burden of that training is put squarely on its shoulders—both in terms of cost and time.
Digital agencies, on the other hand, come with a team of highly experienced individuals whose job it is to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies. The burden of training them is thus taken off of your shoulder, significantly reducing the potential drain on your time and finances.
More Brains For Better Results
Digital agencies are able to bring to bear a huge amount of brainpower on any problem or challenge. Their employees can not only share information and provide each other with advice, but they can also work collaboratively to be sure that the solutions and designs they are providing you with are as efficient and elegant as can be.
Websites that are managed by a single employee simply lack the cross-pollination of ideas that digital firms pride themselves on cultivating. For that level of collaboration, you would need to hire more than one person to handle things—and if your business could afford that, you wouldn’t be reading this post right now, would you?
In the end, while it may seem more traditional to hire a single employee to design and manage your business's online presence, having someone sitting down the hall from you is simply not as beneficial or cost effective as having a digital agency's fully trained staff just a few keystrokes away. The efficiency, knowledge base, and collaborative efforts they can provide will always outperform a new hire, giving you room in your budget for bigger and better improvements.