Every business needs marketing to grow — after all, no matter what you do, you need to bring in customers. And you’ll need someone to handle your marketing. So then the question is, who do you hire, yourself, an in-house person or staff, or an agency? Especially if you’re a small- to medium-sized business, you should consider hiring an agency — here’s why:
1) It will cost you a lot less
It may seem at first like it would be a lot cheaper to hire someone in-house — and after all, that’s how you’re used to solving a need for help. But in addition to having to pay the market’s top salary to bring talent in, not to mention advertising for the position, and potentially using a recruiter with the fees that entails, there are also payroll taxes, benefits, and healthcare to pay for, beyond salary. Then there’s the expensive marketing software you’ll have to pay for to keep in-house. The software alone can often run several hundred dollars a month. As you can see, even adding just one person adds up quickly.
2) You won’t have to on-board, train, and manage an agency
Once you hire your marketing manager, it’ll take time to ramp them up, and then ongoing time to manage them. The marketing sands shift weekly, and to stay current, that marketing manager will be doing their hours of reading or exploring new platforms and changes to their existing platform changes, as well as all other industry professional development on your dime. That is 10 hours a week, or more, that would be paying taxes on, that does not directly contribute to making your company money. You won’t have these needs with an agency.
3) You get access to a team of experts
Let’s say you only have the budget for one marketing person — after all, you would have to have a huge overhead budget in order to be able to hire for all the skillsets required to carry out an effective digital marketing strategy (e.g. event photography, product or service photography, video, copywriting, graphic design). That person would be responsible for doing everything by themselves, which usually translates into only being able to do a little in each area, and not as well as someone who is an expert in that field.
By hiring an agency, you get access to a team of experts in content strategy and creation, social media, email marketing, web development, video, and so on, for a lot, lot less. You don’t have to worry about your marketer who is a great writer, not being good at photos of the business, or of your great marketing strategist not being good at designing print materials or sales presentations.
4) This makes your marketing much easier to scale up
With an agency, it’s far easier to start where your budget is today, and then scale up over time as your business grows — without having to go through the hiring and training cycle each time you get to a point you’re able to grow your marketing operation. And at any point, you’re able to do bigger projects because of that access to a full team.
This team also has experience working on similar campaigns in the past, so they know what works, what doesn’t, and how to tweak and adjust.
5) Your marketing gets done — not shoved to the bottom of someone’s list
Maybe you’re the typical entrepreneur with the DIY-bug, or maybe, you’ve been recruiting existing staff to manage and grow your social media, content, email, and other marketing efforts. The problem is, you’re busy with your primary job and your staff is too. So week-after-week, those other fires get put out first, and once again, marketing gets punted. You may have also realized that you or your staff don’t have the knowledge or skillsets — or both — to take care of the variety of creative and analytical needs it takes to create effective marketing, and there’s no shame in that.
But a marketing agency only does marketing, so they can both take it off your plate and make it a priority. So by hiring out, you maintain efficiency among yourself and your staff, and your marketing actually gets done — well.
Which also applies to…
6) You’re already working to stay on top of your own industry
Marketing — and especially digital marketing — is a constantly-changing industry, one that’s hard enough for an in-house person to stay on top of, in addition to all their daily duties. But agencies live for that stuff, and you can trust them to keep your strategies and tactics relevant.
7) The Hit-by-a-Bus Theory
Let’s say you’re currently doing all your marketing, including representing your brand. Or you just hire one in-house person to do all of that. Then that one person gets hit by a bus, and all that knowledge goes with them. Or maybe they get another job, have a life event that takes them out of the workforce, get sick, or move.
Again, since you’re hiring a team at an agency, you’re protected from the hit-by-a-bus theory because if one person does get taken out of the equation, you still have the rest of the team to pick up where they left out. All of your marketing efforts do not sit in one, overworked and underpaid (if they’re good) person’s hands.
We at Lillian James Creative, enjoy offering a different perspective with ideas that companies might not have thought of on their own. Feel free to reach out to see what that can mean for making your business stand out, or for solving customer acquisition and marketplace branding issues that you may be facing.