Most successful businesses don’t need to be lectured about the importance of marketing. If you’re not spending money to stay top of mind as you roll out new products, services, or features, you’re shooting yourselves in the foot. If you don’t believe that a media presence designed to build awareness and call to action is important, why are your competitors doing it?
As companies grow or strategies change, many must make the tricky decision of hiring a full-time marketer or looking at an outside agency. Here are some key points to consider.
Marketing Takes a Team
Hiring a “marketing person” implies that in a normal workweek that person can strategize, write, shoot and produce video or print content, analyze media rates and place buys. Those are just the broad strokes, in fact. If you’re going to take marketing internal, you’ll need to hire a team to handle each of those tasks. At that point, wouldn’t a marketing agency be a cheaper option?
Agencies Can Hit the Ground Running
A marketing person, however talented, will have a learning curve about your company’s policies, procedures, strategy, and values. A marketing agency is set up for you to explain all that in an introductory meeting and then hit the ground running building creative ideas and strategical tactics around those goals.
Agencies Have Specialists
Speaking of strategies and tactics, most marketers specialize in one or the other. Rarely can a creative person who is great at strategic planning also execute technical tactics like media buys. A marketing agency will have all that covered by creatives, ad buyers, and producers who specialize in different mediums.
Agencies Have Connections
A marketing agency works with local and regional media outlets every day to place content for their clients. They negotiate pricing and placements, wheeling and dealing on their behalf. When you pay an agency, you’re not just buying their expertise and production, you’re also buying those relationships, and they can be priceless.
A Marketing Person Can Quit
Marketers get burnt out, especially when they work for business owners who don’t understand what it takes to accomplish what’s being asked of them. A lone marketing person is under staggering pressure, and if they decide it’s not worth it, your company is in deep trouble. A marketing agency is built to withstand turnover and attrition; an internal marketing department of one or two people is not.
The bottom line is that the return on investment on hiring an agency very quickly becomes worth the expense. Don’t try to cut corners by hiring a “marketing expert.” Contract a marketing team.