You could offer the best products or services in the world but still hit rock bottom and sink into bankruptcy without expert marketing.
Advertising expenditure now amounts to over $173 billion. This showcases how crucial of an investment it is to the success of any business, whether big or small.
Effective marketing spreads brand awareness and builds trust in your company. It alerts customers of new promos, new products or services, and helps bring new clients into the fold.
But should you do it in-house or outsource to a marketing agency?
Can you save money and still achieve great results running your own team or is it better to outsource? Which choice is worth precious resources?
This may seem surprising but hiring an agency is often the better choice.
If you’re still not sure, here are five major benefits of hiring a marketing agency:
Cost Efficient
One of the main reasons why companies, particularly small businesses, choose to do all the marketing on their own is because they believe it saves them money. It’s a little shocking for many to discover how expensive marketing gets and all the hidden costs that come with running an in-house team.
Expenses In-House
For starters, the cost of training new employees specifically for marketing amounts to over $308,000 per year or roughly $1,200 per new employee. You also have to consider medical insurance, transportation fees, and lunch meals. Then you have to add in costs for training materials, utility bills for the use of training facilities, and equipment.
That’s only for training your new marketing employees. The next step is to calculate the cost of buying marketing tools and online software. Your company also has to spend for computers, stable Internet connection, employee bonuses, and licenses to use marketing tools.
Expenses With a Marketing Agency
Comparing these expenses to the cost of hiring an agency sheds new light on the latter. Some agencies charge as little as $2,000 a month while others can cost up to $10,000 or more. Even at the most expensive rate, you’re still saving money compared to running an in-house marketing team.
There are no hidden fees and agencies provide detailed lists to inform you what you’re paying for. You don’t need to pay for a facility, training, tools, equipment, or training because they handle that for you.
Thinking about using blogs to market your brand and draw traffic to your business site? You can save money with evergreen content. Agencies know how to create these and ensure you can reuse the same blog post in the future.
It now boils down to hiring them for their expertise.
Hiring a Marketing Agency Requires No Training
As mentioned above, running your own marketing team requires training. After all, if your company focuses on something like plumbing repair, it’s unlikely you’ll have employees who know how to market the business.
Training In-House
This means you’ll have to train employees. You’ll have to spend time, money, and effort to get them up to speed. It also means you have to acquire new equipment for proper training, a facility to cater to the training sessions, and a professional who can teach your employees from beginning to end.
Having to train your own marketing employees has another downside: now you’re splitting resources. Instead of having 100 employees dedicated to fulfilling plumbing services, you’ll only have 70 while the other 30 focus on marketing.
You don’t have to go through these problems when you hire a marketing agency.
Training with an Agency
Every marketing agency has their own training facility, equipment, teachers, and funds. You don’t have to trouble yourself with any of this. From the moment you hire the agency, your only concern is working with them to help them achieve your company’s goals.
As a matter of fact, hiring an agency completely removes the need to train your own employees. This means you don’t need to waste resources. You get to employ all 100 workers in the field.
There’s also the fact that the agency’s team has years of experience in the field. There’s no time wasted for training – they can start working on your marketing goals from the moment you call them. They may have certifications to prove it too.
You can request the agency to train a few of your employees. This ensures your own employees can manage a small marketing group once the agency completes their job and move on to the next client. This is cheaper and more effective than trying to train workers yourself.
Access to High-End Tools
Going back to the example above, say for example your business focuses on plumbing services. This means you’ve spent the majority of your capital on plumbing tools. If you don’t hire an agency, you now have to scramble to acquire the necessary marketing tools.
Some of the essential tools include InfusionSoft for optimal email marketing, BuzzSumo to track shared content, and Buffer or Hootsuite to manage social media platforms. You also have to utilize Ahrefs and Yoast SEO for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
Tools to manage your business’ social media presence are among the most crucial. Facebook alone has over 2.2 billion users, showcasing how vast and powerful it is to boost your marketing capabilities.
But can you use these tools on your own or is it wiser to hire an agency?
Using Tools on Your Own
Where do you even begin? Which tools work best for the type of business you run? If your business is entirely online, which tools help track your progress, SEO results, and social media engagement?
Even if you spend time researching which tools to use, you have to then buy them and begin learning how to use these apps. Many online tools no longer offer one-time fees. Instead, you have to pay a monthly subscription to gain access and this again adds to the mountain of expenses you’re dealing with.
Tools Come with the Agency
One of the biggest benefits of hiring a marketing agency is that they already have the necessary tools.
Because these agencies work with clients on a regular basis, you can expect them to already have the best marketing tools. They likely bought the licenses to use these apps and already trained their employees to master them.
If you relied on free or cheap tools, agencies will push those aside because they utilize nothing but high-end software. This means their tools can accomplish much more than what a free app can.
Fresh and Analytical Perspective
How is your marketing strategy performing? Are you getting the number of leads and sparking social media conversations as you hoped? If not, it could be because you’re approaching things from the wrong direction.
Marketing requires an analytical eye. You have to be able to read the metrics from analytical tools and discern the message that these numbers tell. Here’s how difficult it gets when you do it and the benefit of letting expert marketing agencies do it for you:
Your Marketing Perspective
The main issue of running a marketing plan in-house is the fact that there’s only have one perspective – yours.
This means there’s a narrow view on what your marketing hurdles are and what kind of goals you should achieve. Not getting enough traffic to your site? If you’re the only looking at the metrics, you’ll only end up with one person’s understanding of the issue.
An Agency’s Perspective
A major benefit of hiring a marketing agency is that they bring a fresh pair of eyes. If you once thought your site isn’t getting traffic because of poor link-building efforts, they might discover the problem is more related to poor engagement on social media platforms.
They don’t carry the same biases as you do. Agencies can approach your marketing needs and problems from a purely analytical angle. The only information they use is the data from the tools they employ.
Timely Delivery
Marketing in today’s digital age is fast-paced and ever-changing. Trends that worked a week ago might no longer resonate with online users. Things that worked for offline, real-world marketing may no longer click with the target audience as they move on to online, mobile platforms.
Crunching a Schedule
Handling marketing duties on your own is going to waste a lot of time. As mentioned, you need to spend time training employees, conducting in-depth analysis, and master the tools of the trade.
This means you’ll have to reduce time spent on your company’s focus to prepare and conduct marketing plans. Because you won’t have a dedicated team, doing all this can take weeks or even months.
Quick Turnaround
Want a quick turnaround? Relying on an agency is the way to go. They have no other task at hand except your marketing needs, ensuring they can focus on it with no distractions.
As stated, they also have the tools and training, which makes the process even faster. They may already have a good marketing template they can tweak depending on your business’ specific needs, strengths, and weaknesses.
Rely on the Best Marketing Agency Today
Don’t waste time, money, and effort. If you want people to discover your site, spread good word-of-mouth, and increase conversions and profits then hire the best marketing agency today.
Got further questions? Are you in need of specific marketing advice? Don’t hesitate to give us a call and let us help you market your brand to its full potential!