There are many important reasons why a company should hire a marketing agency. Here are just a few of those reasons.

• Marketing is not your only responsibility
• Your current marketing lacks structure and strategy
• The results are lackluster
• Sales are stagnant
• Presently not producing enough leads
• You lack passion for marketing
• Marketing is not your specialty
• It's challenging to keep up with all the changes related to marketing
• It is hard to say if your marketing is working or not.

A few of the many benefits to hiring an inbound marketing agency are listed below.

• You're not just hiring one person. You're hiring an entire team.
• Agencies can provide a much wider range of services.
• Agencies are more cost-effective than hiring internally.
• Agencies can scale with your business.
• Agencies provide the latest marketing tools to leverage for your benefit
• An agency allows you to focus on what you do best.
• Agencies will have a larger investment in your success.
• Agencies will be up to date on the latest marketing trends.
• Agencies can harness the knowledge and experience gained from other clients for your greater good. 

When hiring an inbound marketing agency, you should ensure the agency possesses the qualities listed below.

• Hire an Agency with a solid plan. Any agency deserving of your consideration should have the organizational skills to plan out a modern marketing campaign's details.
• The agency should base the marketing strategy around your specific challenges. 
• Only consider agencies that practice what they preach. Review their website and marketing practices to ensure they are doing the same things they tell you to do.
• Only consider marketing agencies that can provide case studies or proven results from other clients.
• Any agency worth its weight should be able to translate data so that it makes sense to you.
• Your agency should have a reliable and capable project manager. Inbound marketing is like building a complicated puzzle. To make sense of things, someone needs to orchestrate how the pieces will come together.  

When evaluating whether to hire an internal team or partner with a marketing agency, you must assess the internal team's skills and capabilities. 

If you're building an internal team, they should possess a variety of skills to be successful. A proficient inbound marketing team should include search engine optimization, social media management, content creation, paid search, Facebook advertising, Google advertising, conversion-driven web design, analytical marketing, and more. 

Suppose you want to be confident your inbound marketing strategy is producing the best results. In that case, it is critical to ensure the people working on it have the talent to manage every aspect. If there is any doubt that your internal team can handle the tasks at hand, it is time to partner with an agency. 

Modern inbound marketing agencies should be focused on driving business results to remain relevant. To drive these results, agencies should provide meaningful deliverables such as search engine rankings, increased website traffic and leads, and happier clients. 

Does the agency your considering do inbound marketing for themselves? Do they blog at the frequency they've suggested for you? Are they ranked in search for relevant terms in their industry? Are they running digital ads on Facebook and Google? Are they active on social media? The most successful inbound marketing agencies are their own best case studies.

Any agency deserving of your partnership should be eager to show you how they've produced results for other companies like yours. These case studies should show strategies and numbers that highlight the impact of their work. 

Your agency should have a reliable and capable project manager. Inbound marketing is like building a complicated puzzle. To make sense of things, someone needs to orchestrate how the pieces will come together.  

Agencies can earn marketing certifications for an array of skills. Since marketing and technology are changing quickly, these certifications are one way to ensure an agency team is staying on top of the latest trends. Most of these credentials require an annual renewal. 

Marketing analytics allows one to translate consumer behaviors into actionable business data. It also provides the analyzer with stories and pictures of what is working and sheds light on areas of improvement. Before a marketer shares these stories, they must study analytics to understand how to translate this data into an easy-to-understand language. By doing this, a marketer will then be able to draw the line between opinion and fact.