This article talks about the pros of hiring a marketing agency and what happens when you hire a marketing employee.
Do you want to:
- Attract new customers?
- Nurture the existing ones?
- Raise your profile?
- Make your brand stand out?
There is just one way of ensuring all this – by investing in marketing. Unless your marketing efforts are rock solid, you cannot clear this checklist.
Once you realize the importance of marketing your next concern is getting a team ready for the job. So, you ask yourself this – should I build my marketing team or hire a third-party agency?
This is a valid question especially when both have their pros and cons. However, there is no right answer to this question. Both can work excellently depending on your business requirements. Before you choose either of the options, you must understand your business goals. Can a full-service independent agency meet your requirements or should you build your in-house team from scratch?
In this article, we shall highlight the advantages of hiring an agency and look at some of the pitfalls of an in-house marketing team.
Why You Should Hire a Marketing Agency?
a marketing agency has been around for some time. This means that they know what they offer. With so much experience in the team, they are equipped to handle varying client requirements with ease. They have a system in place which makes it easy for you as a client to work seamlessly.
Not only do they bring more to the table but there are many other advantages too. Let’s take a look at some of them.
You Can’t Do it Alone
Small and medium-sized businesses usually have inspiring stories of how they started from nothing. How it was just an idea at the beginning and how they had to work hard to set the ball rolling. As their idea sells, the company grows. When you start your company from the ground up, you know how much effort it has taken. There would have been days when you managed everything single-handedly. You were the CEO and the IT admin at the same time. You posted on social media while meeting angel investors.
But as your company grows, it becomes imperative that you hand out responsibilities to others. That’s the only way to grow. But when you do not designate, you harm not just your mental and physical health (by working long hours) but also the company.
Do not look at marketing as just a few posts on social media or a well-designed website. There is search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads, content optimization, website development, social media marketing, and more. To ace these things, you must have a strategy that can only be devised by an experienced team.
Next time you hesitate to hire a marketing agency, ask yourself this? When you need to draft a contract, do you write the law yourself? Who files your tax returns? Who ensures that the technical back end is functioning smoothly? Undoubtedly, you hire people for these jobs. For some jobs, you will need an in-house team (think IT) but for other jobs (marketing) you should hire third-party agencies. When it comes to marketing your business, hiring an agency should be seen as a logical next step.
Remember, in the short term you may be able to manage your marketing goals, but as your company grows, it becomes imperative to branch out and seek help.
Special Knowledge Helps
When you are poised to take your business to the next level, you must hire the experts. Since it is not possible to know everything, hiring a group of experts is the best way to move forward.
When you hire an expert team for improving your marketing, you basically get the best PR agents, the sales guys, the tech team, SEO experts, content creators and so on to work for your brand. These ‘experts’ know their job. Once they study your goals and ethos, they chart out a plan that best suits your business.
So, instead of faking expertise, hire the experts. Your brand will gain from this investment.
It is a Cost Control Exercise
For a business to succeed, you must know when to pull the strings and when to spend. Cost control and expense management are crucial for the success of your business. So, if you want to manage your budget better you should know when to spend less to earn more. Hiring a third-party marketing agency is all about spending less to gain more.
Building your team means you pour in more resources. The recruitment process itself is not just time-consuming but also a long-term commitment. It’s not just the basic wage you must deal with but also employee payroll tax, pension, and other benefits. You must also invest in their training. Do you have the bandwidth for such a long-term commitment?
Once you hire them, there is no looking back. An experienced team of marketing experts may bring a lot to the table, but they will cost you too. If you are not able to invest in so much just yet but need the experts to launch your campaign, the agency guys are there for you.
They will work as freelancers for you which means you don’t invest in their training or employee benefits. They come to you as a team so that you can get started from the word go.
When Should You Call the Agency?
There are undoubtedly many advantages of working with a digital marketing agency. They offer you expertise at a lesser cost and are available for consultancy at any time.
However, hiring them too early may be unnecessary. Knowing when to call the agency is paramount for the success of your digital campaign. So, when should you call them? Below we list some indicators so that you know when it’s the right time to hire an agency.
#1 When The Job Isn’t Getting Done
There are so many things that need to be done on a day-to-day basis. Accomplishing tasks gets tougher when all hands are on the deck, yet jobs remain incomplete. In such a situation, it is natural to leave things for tomorrow, keep them incomplete or simply forget all about them. If you are in such a state currently and unable to manage the many requirements, it is time to call the experts.
#2 When Sales Figures Aren’t Encouraging
Ineffective marketing, mismanagement, and poor customer service are often the reasons for poor sales. If the numbers do not improve over time, it clearly means that your current strategy is not working. You need an outsider’s perspective to know what’s going wrong. An agency will help revitalize your campaign and will help improve the sales figures.
#3 When Capabilities and Ambitions Do Not Collude
Your inherent lack of knowledge of digital marketing will stop you from achieving your goals. When you have big dreams but not enough capable hands, it is time to hire an agency to do the job for you. An experienced team will understand your goals, will discuss and ideate and strategize according to your expectations. Over time you will see that your ambitions and capabilities have started colluding.
Why does In-House Marketing Have Its Pitfalls?
Let’s be frank though. When you hire marketing employee, you have more control over decision-making and their time. It may seem a good deal, but over time you would realize that managing an in-house team is much more complicated. Some of the common pitfalls of building your marketing team are –
- Marketing Isn’t a Part-Time Job – Oftentimes businesses assign the marketing task to one of their existing employees – say their sales manager. They do this thinking that marketing will only take a few hours of their time per week. The truth is far off from this, though. Marketing is a full-time job. Unless you build a marketing team from scratch, assigning the job to a salesperson will not be enough.
- Making it a Lonely Job – Marketing strategies are best decided in team meetings through debates and discussions. When a team brainstorms, the best ideas emerge. But when you assign the job to a single person, you make it a lonely job for them. This can limit their performance and thus your goals too. So, if you have a large sales team but only one marketing expert, you are simply digging a bigger hole to fall into.
- There is a lot of Writing Involved, but Less Skilled Writers – When you look at marketers as a jack-of-all-trade, you are limiting their expertise and skills. Hiring just one person to do the entire marketing for your company will mean that they must ideate, write, edit, create, post, and repeat continuously. This isn’t easy. Moreover, if you think that anyone (in your team) can write, you are wrong. There is a lot of copywriting involved in marketing. Even if someone in your team enjoys writing, they may not be equipped to write a copy. It’s a different ballgame. Often, companies cannot nurture their in-house writers and instead make do with what they have. Such a strategy will always hamper in the long run.
Agency or In-House – The Final Verdict
For a small or medium-sized company, outsourcing marketing requirements to an agency is always the better choice. You may think that for your limited requirement, hiring an employee is better but over time you’d realize that it isn’t a single player’s job. Digital marketing is continuously evolving which makes it much tougher than it looks.
At this point, we must make it clear that as a boutique digital marketing agency, we may have our biases. But this is not to say that we do not view things objectively. We have worked with many companies – both small and big and it is from experience we say that hiring an agency is a good investment. Until the time you can recruit and retain a team of marketers and have enough jobs for them round the clock, working with companies like ours makes more sense.
Since we work with multiple companies, our experience is diverse. We bring more to the table which always helps to ideate and strategize better. If you are launching your marketing campaign, talk to us today. We shall help you and guide you until you are ready to run your team (if and when that’s necessary).
At Cyrusson Inc, we offer a plethora of digital marketing services. From SEO to digital ads, web development, reputation management, social media marketing, business listings, content management to branding – we take care of all your requirements. We aim to help businesses develop and improve their marketing strategy. Our digital marketing solutions are for solopreneurs and national corporations alike. Reach out to us today for a free consultation!