There often comes a point in business when reaching that next level of growth becomes impossible without a significant investment in marketing.
When that time comes you may be faced with a choice – to try and recruit a marketing person/people, or consider employing the services of a marketing agency.
Your decision will be influenced by a variety of factors, such as the marketing skills and knowledge that already exist in your business, and the sort of activities you need carrying out.
If you run your own business, you’ll already appreciate the difficulties surrounding recruitment in general; identifying the job specification, advertising, potential recruitment agency fees, shortlisting, interviewing, onboarding, training and all the other things you have to go through to hopefully find the right person.
When it comes to marketing roles in particular, the challenge can be even greater. Because it’s such a broad field with so many disciplines involved, it’s quite likely you’ll need a bit of everything.
For example:
- Creating a strategy
- Branding
- Campaign execution
- Digital advertising
- Website development
- Copywriting
- SEO
- Video
- Social media management
- Public relations
- Customer relationship management
Unless you’re willing and able to recruit a team, it can be difficult to access all the skills you need, which of course is one of the big advantages of using an agency instead.
Let’s have a look at some of the other benefits of working with a full-service marketing agency.
A whole team of experts
Rather than agonising over job specifications and scouring the planet for a unicorn, employing an agency gives you instant access to a whole team of experts who will become an extension of your business. The agency can work with you to determine exactly what strategy is needed and where efforts should be focussed. They’ll have the people and skills needed to execute all parts of the strategy without you even having to think about it.
Flexibility
An agency can offer greater flexibility so you can access what you need, when you need it. You might only want help with a particular campaign, or for a particular service. With an agency, you can stand services up or down as required, without having to spend hours researching prices and providers for every individual task. For example, you might work with us on your digital advertising campaign, but need a stand and merchandise for an expo on ad-hoc basis. Maybe we manage your PR, but you then need a new website building – an agency is your one-stop shop for all marketing support.
Get better results, faster
A good agency should be able to hit the ground running. At EBY, for example, we already know what needs doing and what tools and processes to use, so we can focus on achieving your business goals straight away. We don’t need to spend hours researching what to do or which tools to use – our approach is tried, tested and proven. And everything is results-driven, so you can see exactly what return you are getting on your investment.
Knowing what you need
Depending on where your business is at and what knowledge and skills you already have in-house, it could be that you wouldn’t know where to start even if you were minded to recruit. Knowing what you need and defining the right job description from the outset can save a lot of time and money in the long run. You might want to employ an agency to help define the strategy and direction to set you off on the right path.
Transfer of knowledge
If you ultimately want to have an in-house marketing function, or expand an existing team, working with an agency can be a good stepping stone. By working with an agency for either some, or all, of your marketing activities, you’ll get to learn different processes and approaches from the experts. That way, if you decide to do it yourself, or recruit someone, you’ll have a much better understanding of what you need.
The cost conundrum
One of the biggest factors in deciding whether to recruit or work with a marketing agency will of course be cost.
The cost per hour will be greater with an agency, but that’s because you’re paying to have a whole wealth of skills and expertise at your fingertips, as and when you need it.
You’ll be saving hours of time, both in research and execution, and you’ll be able to access the various tools and software your agency uses, without having to buy them all yourself.
Hiring the right full-service marketing agency
There are many benefits to working with an agency, but it all relies on finding the right agency, making sure you ask the right questions and setting realistic goals and expectations together.
There’s also an element of trust involved – you need to be able to trust in the skills and knowledge of your appointed agency to get on with the task at hand. It means treating the agency as an extension of your team and sharing as much data and information as you can.
We’ve previously written about how to get the most out of your agency in a previous article, which might be useful if you’d still like more information.
Essentially, if you get the right agency with clear goals and expectations determined at the outset, the investment in marketing, and your business, will be worth it to get to that next level.
We’ve been delivering results for businesses for more than 20 years. If you’d like to find out more about working with EBY, please get in touch.