Most businesses - especially professional services - are making a mistake by hiring in-house marketing staff.
It’s my business to stay on top of trends in the marketing world. For a long time, it made sense for a lot of mid-sized companies to hire a marketing coordinator to handle all their advertising and communications needs. As long as the demands of that position were reasonably done by a recent graduate, that strategy worked fine.
Today, I can guarantee you that you’ll get far more value and much better results by putting an agency like ours on retainer to work on your behalf.
You will never find a junior communications person who knows how to run search engine marketing, social media, SEO, graphic design, web development, traditional advertising and whatever else it is you want the poor devils to do.
Even if you do find that person, it will take years for them to both learn all those skills AND learn your business. And by that time, in most cases, they’ll outgrow your organization. And then you’re back to square one.
You’ll need graphic designers and photographers and videographers. And you’ll probably need to outsource at least one or two of the more complex tasks such as search engine marketing, web development or automated email marketing.
When you hire a marketing coordinator, you need to give that person direction on what you want them to work on. In our experience, most small and mid-sized businesses don’t know what they need to do to improve their marketing. (See 1 above: it’s too complex.) The reality today is that marketing technology is changing so quickly that it’s impossible to manage it off the corner of your desk. It’s a full-time job just to keep up with Facebook and Google, let alone the thousands of other apps and opportunities out there.
By hiring an agency, you don’t have to worry about ongoing training and figuring out what you don’t know (and what it’s costing you).
The cost to hire someone to run your marketing, even at a basic level, is probably about the same that you could expect to pay an experienced agency to run your marketing as a starting point. The difference is that you get a team of experts working in a variety of specialized areas instead of a single person trying to figure it all out themselves. Agencies like ours can scale much faster and keep up with your growth as well.
Subcontracting to an agency gives you the added bonus of not having to pay benefits or severance.
We don’t like to contemplate it (and fortunately we have very low client churn from year to year), but it’s always a possibility that our clients will want to move in a different direction. If your agency just isn’t doing it for you, it’s far easier to fire them and get a new one than it is to overhaul your inhouse staff.
So, not only does an agency give you superior creative and operational knowledge for your marketing, it also gives you remarkable flexibility as your business grows and changes.
If you’re not convinced, and you still want to do-it-yourself, then we invite you to download one of our ebooks on improving your digital marketing for:
If you’d like to We’ve built a team of experts who come together to create effective online sales funnels for our clients. We have experts in:
And we also have strong relationships with professionals who we can call on to create:
If you’re tired of struggling with your marketing, give us a call. We know what you’re going through and would be happy to help. That’s what we do.
We run campaigns and marketing for our clients wherever they do business around the world. We serve as expert local counsel for national and international clients looking for marketing and communications services in the Canadian Prairies.
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