For small and large businesses alike, hiring a marketing agency can be an overwhelming process. You know you need to continuously invest in marketing, but the thought of signing a contract and committing to a sizable monthly expense lends itself to hesitation.
Besides, agencies charge exorbitant rates, don’t they? Maybe you’d be better off just hiring a recent grad for a modest salary.
Wrong. All wrong.
Hiring an agency is not only the best move to expand your marketing reach, but also the most cost-effective. Here’s why:
TOP TALENT ACROSS THE BOARD
When you hire an agency, you’re essentially hiring the best professionals in every facet of marketing. From design, copywriting and multimedia to analytics and business development, your agency is the all-star, ultra-experienced creative team you’ve always wanted.
Trying to staff a full-time individual for every creative position would easily run you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in salary alone. If your initial response to that realization is to hire freelancers, you’ll likely need to hire an experienced manager to coordinate the daily workflow, again bringing you to an annual total that far exceeds what you’ll pay an agency.
MINIMAL EXPENSES
When it comes to hiring an employee, salary is only the start of an employer’s costs. Between health insurance, sick leave, vacation time, payroll taxes and basic resources, you’re incurring a slew of expenses that can zap your marketing budget. Hiring an agency, on the other hand, allows you to forego all of those costs in addition to even more money that you would shell out for recruiting and training.
CONSISTENCY AND CONTINUITY
Let’s say you’ve decided to hire an in-house marketing person and have found a financial formula that supports your decision. So you hire a great candidate and invest the time to train, integrate and support them. All is well, except there are quite a few potential challenges looming:
- Who will take on their workload when they’re sick or on vacation?
- What will you do when a task falls outside of their skill set and expertise?
- Are you ready to double or triple your investment when the time comes to grow your marketing team?
- If they’re that good and the price is that right, how are you going to retain them down the road when other companies offer new, exciting (and perhaps even higher paying) opportunities?
- If you don’t know much about marketing, how can you measure their productivity and calculate ROI?
Making a marketing hire will indeed give you a quick, visible boost in your efforts. However, it’s an investment that doesn’t lend itself well to long-term growth.
Unlike employees, agencies don’t take vacations. They don’t have “off days,” and they don’t swirl in office politics. An agency is a long-term collaborator dedicated to supporting your marketing needs with proactive ideas and on-call availability.
A CREATIVE EXTENSION OF YOUR TEAM
For larger companies with dedicated marketing teams, it’s not necessarily about grappling with the financials of a new hire. Instead, the question becomes, “Can you spend that money more wisely and maximize your budget?” And for those that have not yet used an outside agency, the answer is almost always a resounding “yes.”
Is your designer bogged down with work? Your first thought might be to hire a second designer, but what if you took that $60,000 per year and invested in an agency? You might get the services of two or three more designers, a content strategist, a copywriter, an SEO manager and, most importantly, the consultancy of the agency’s leadership team.
Furthermore, when you enlist both an in-house marketing team and an agency, you can begin to separate your basic needs and bigger creative projects—that’s when you really begin to see extraordinary results, both internally and externally.
EVERY DECISION MAKER NEEDS A STRATEGIC PARTNER
Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketing manager or a corporate CMO, you can benefit from partnering with a firm that supports your initiatives while continuously challenging you to take your business to new heights. As we like to say here at Raindrop, “You can’t work in your business and on your business at the same time.”
We’re here to help you with the latter so you can spend more time on the former.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT AGENCY
It’s important to pick an agency that aligns with your current standing and future goals. You want a partner that’s going to provide honest insight and reliable benchmarks for years to come.
During your search, you will come across agencies that will make wild promises backed by black hat tactics. For example, if someone tells you that they will get your business a first page ranking on Google within three months, that should be somewhat of a red flag. That’s certainly a goal (one that we ourselves frequently set and achieve for clients), but there are too many other factors at play for it to be a concrete guarantee. The old mantra, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” rings especially true when hearing out pitches from agencies.
Are you looking for a reliable digital marketing agency that shows clear results and builds long-term growth plans? Raindrop Marketing might be your perfect match–click here to see the many reasons why our clients love us.