If you are a business owner, you know that marketing is an essential part of your organisation. No matter how good your product or service is, if nobody knows about it, you won’t have many clients. Many entrepreneurs start out by taking care of their marketing themselves, but what if you want to level up your business?
There are multiple reasons why you could and should consider hiring a marketing agency. Perhaps doing your own marketing takes up too much of your time, your promotions are underperforming, you want to improve the quality of your marketing and communication, or you just don’t enjoy the creative process…
Like any other field of profession, you need continuous learning, practice and exposure to master marketing and understand demographics. Whether it is copywriting, SEO or social media coordinating, no videos, books or articles will make you an instant expert on the subject; this is where marketing agencies come in.
Still not sure if hiring a marketing agency is worth it or how exactly it will benefit you? These are the 5 main reasons a marketing agency can help you – and why you need to hire one.
5 reasons to hire a marketing agency
1. Nobody can do everything
Owners of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s) often feel the need to take matters into their own hands and do everything themselves. However, this is not necessarily realistic.
As your small business continues to grow, you will need to grow with it and continue adding resources. This can take the form of qualified personnel, equipment, software and technology, statutory payments etc. Without balancing and combining different functions of work, you may end up doing a little bit of everything and not excel at everything.
Outsourcing your marketing ensures that it gets due attention, providing you with time to focus on your core business.
2. Marketing agencies have specialist expertise
A marketing agency typically consists of a team of experienced specialists, with different fields of expertise like graphic design, SEO, website development, social media, copywriting and more.
If you had to hire these different profiles, it would come at a cost. There is a financial aspect to this, but you’d also need to offer motivation, guidance and further career perspectives. Additionally, you might not need all these skills on a daily basis. A marketing agency can therefore offer a good solution for this issue because you’d get what you want without the complexity of ‘people planning’.
Further to alleviating the complexity of people planning, marketing agencies often have a good understanding of industry trends. For that reason, agencies handle campaigns and projects in a more structured and strategic way offering a more streamlined approach with less trial and error.
3. Marketing agencies are cost-efficient in the long run
Do you sometimes consider hiring a marketing agency but you are scared of the expenses? Let’s have a closer look at it.
Because marketing is their core competence, agencies understand the various aspects of it: trends, behaviours, tech and more. Thanks to the knowledge they have built over time, they can work more efficiently and get you to your goals.
Agency fees don’t always have to be intimidating. They can be structured in different ways that allow you to easily manage your marketing budget eg. pricing based on specific deliverables, resource-based pricing models etc. It really depends on what you negotiate.
With a marketing agency in your corner, you stand to increase efficiency, both in terms of time and finances. Given their marketing experience, they will likely spend a lot less time testing concepts, interpreting outcomes and effecting necessary adjustments to your marketing plans.
4. Marketing agencies offer unbiased perspectives
Being a main or active player in a company, and at the heath of all the action, your opinions and decisions may be a little skewed or biased. Your marketing decisions may be influenced and or limited by inclinations to specific outcomes, your inherent abilities, your internal culture, your experiences as a company, the exposure of the team that surrounds you and many other factors. Whatever the factor, it may work for or against your marketing campaigns.
Introducing an unbiased third party that is an agency offers you an opportunity for a fresh perspective and external point of view. Whereas agencies will also get to know your brand identity in-depth and adapt to this, leveraging their experience, exposure, access to multidisciplinary data at scale, and reduced conflicting key performance indicators (KPIs) affords your brand an improved chance to stand out.
Since the agency’s success comes from showcasing your brands in the best way possible, it becomes a win-win for your business and theirs. Realising their objectives of client satisfaction drives them to stay hungry and constantly work to better understand your audience. For this reason, agencies will not shy away from providing suggestions and recommendations that they know and feel would elevate your brand experience.
5. Marketing agencies provide future-proof trends and technologies
Marketing agencies always ensure they are up-to-date. They have personnel who are dedicated to continuously studying market trends and changes.
Staying on top of the ever-changing trends in the world of Mar-tech (marketing and technology) can be a full-time role. If you are a business owner, or if marketing is not your core role, you likely will not have the time to find out the trends, let alone test them and learn them. Additionally, marketing technology can be very expensive if you don’t have a large enough team or process large quantities of data.
Agencies tend to benefit from the economies of scale in terms of marketing software and have vested interest when it comes to learning new marketing technologies. Because of this, marketing agency professionals know which ones your business should use and can offer you guidance on how to efficiently use them.
The world of marketing is very broad. However, there is always going to be room for internal marketing teams as well as marketing agencies. With a marketing agency behind you or your team, you stand to enjoy less complexity in your marketing processes with more efficiency. Once you begin to view marketing as a revenue centre and not a cost centre, you will start to reap the benefits of having a team of professionals driving you to your goals.