Small businesses typically have two options when it comes to marketing and advertising. They can do marketing in-house or outsource their marketing needs to an experienced advertising agency.
While both have pros and cons, outsourcing to an experienced agency is often the wiser choice. Here are six benefits of using a marketing agency to manage your advertising campaigns.
1. Saves You From the Hassles of Hiring
Hiring in-house talent is quite a hassle. You must create job listings, review applications and resumes, and conduct interviews. All that takes a lot of time, and it can be hard to be sure you’re getting qualified professionals. Hiring a larger team of marketing experts, which might be necessary depending on the size of your business, is even more challenging.
Even after hiring someone, you have to train them, supervise them, and ensure they integrate with the company culture.
As you can see, handling your marketing needs in-house is anything but simple. It also typically costs a lot more than outsourcing to a marketing agency, which can reduce costs by handling many clients. So, if you’ve been thinking of managing your marketing in-house to save money, you might want to rethink that.
Besides, the learning curve involved in hiring new people can reduce your productivity, at least in the short run, preventing you from seeing the results you want.
2. Allows You to Focus on Your Business
Another benefit of outsourcing your marketing needs to an agency is that it allows you to focus on growing your business.
Every business and person has limited resources. Whether you hire someone to do your marketing in-house or decide to do it yourself, you’ll need to spend time and effort on either figuring out how to market the business or making sure your marketing team is doing a good job.
That’s time you could have spent helping your business grow and succeed. By outsourcing to an agency, you can “set it and forget it,” leaving the agency to handle the promotional aspect of your business while you focus on making your company as successful as possible.
Here are some things you can focus on when you don’t have to worry about getting new leads and customers:
- Launching new products and services
- Improving existing products and services
- Releasing product updates and new features
- Dealing with customers and increasing customer satisfaction
- Focusing on ways to increase customer retention and loyalty
- Tracking spending and discovering spending gaps that are holding you back
- Managing and supervising employees
- Improving the workplace environment and fostering a better company culture
- Offering better training opportunities to employees
- Researching the market and adapting to industry changes
- Spying on competitors and staying one step ahead of them at all times
- Increasing overall value and improving your business reputation
- Expanding your business by opening up new branches
- Making connections and networking
There are so many ways to grow your business. You can stay at the forefront of your industry by being creative and thinking out of the box. When you have an agency on your side, marketing is one less thing to worry about.
3. Gives You Outsider Perspectives
Using a marketing agency is a great way to get outsider perspectives. The excitement and passion you have for your business can sometimes blind you to the way others perceive your business.
A marketing agency can give you honest and blunt feedback about your business reputation, your position in the industry, and more. They can help you reassess your current marketing plans and goals. They can also help determine if you are targeting the right people.
It’s always helpful to get a second opinion; a marketing agency can help you get that. Advertising agencies have experience dealing with businesses of all kinds, including companies like yours. They will have unique insights into the industry that an in-house marketing expert might not have.
An agency typically has many employees specialized in different things. Some might be experts in business operations, while others might be experts in customer relations, PR, online marketing, SEO, digital communications, customer retention, or other aspects of business and marketing.
Others might be experts in mobile billboard advertising and offline marketing in general.
Those people can collaborate to share ideas and create the best plan to move your company forward. On the other hand, a smaller in-house marketing team might not be able to brainstorm in the same way. Even if you have an in-house marketing expert, you might want them to work with an agency for that reason.
4. Gives You Access to New and Unique Skills
With access to a greater talent pool, a marketing agency can connect you to people with unique skills. They might hire new people or rely on third parties for advanced market research.
One factor that can significantly limit you when hiring talent in-house is your location. If you live in a small area with few talented marketers, you will have difficulty finding the best employees.
An agency doesn’t have to be located in your area. Many agencies service entire regions, states, or countries, with different people in charge of specific cities or towns.
Scalability is another issue you may face when hiring in-house. It can be hard to scale your campaigns with a small team, whereas an agency can handle more extensive marketing campaigns that target broader audiences and cost more money.
You might also want to expand your marketing efforts to other channels.
For example, if you’ve been focusing on SEO, you might want to get into PPC. If you’ve been doing both, you might consider expanding into social media advertising. If you’ve been focusing on digital marketing, you might want to get into print and radio advertising.
Mobile billboard advertising, in particular, is one offline marketing method that can bring excellent results, although many small business owners overlook it. Strategic signage can help you bring in foot traffic and allow you to get seen by the right people.
Unfortunately, not everyone is experienced in everything. Perhaps you hired someone with expertise in only a few aspects of marketing. On the other hand, an agency typically has people who specialize in different types of marketing and can bring exposure to your business on multiple levels.
5. Lets You Ride the Latest Trends and Technology
Even if your marketing team has marketing degrees and extensive experience in advertising, it’s still not enough. The world of marketing is constantly changing, especially when it comes to digital marketing. What worked a year ago may no longer be the most cost-effective option to brand your business.
Furthermore, it’s essential to stay one step ahead of your competitors at all times. If your competitors discover new marketing opportunities, channels, or methods, they may establish themselves in that space, and it may be too late for you to catch up.
A small in-house marketing team will have a more challenging time keeping up with the latest trends, advertising platforms, marketing tools, and more. On the other hand, an agency is plugged into the advertising world and has access to more information and data.
An agency can also adjust quickly to changing market conditions. Expertise, flexibility, adaptability, and access to technology are all things you will have to compromise on when choosing an in-house team instead of a marketing agency.
Another thing to consider is the added costs of marketing tools, platforms, and software. Some tools you might want to pay for include:
- Social media scheduling tools
- Advanced analytics, such as heatmaps
- Social media research tools
- Keyword research tools
- Competition spying tools
- Backlink building tools
- Automation tools
All of those tools cost money. You will have to pay for everything if you keep your marketing in-house. If, on the other hand, you have an agency do everything for you, you can tap into whatever tools they use. A large agency might develop its own software, but any agency will have access to popular tools they use for their clients.
6. Makes You Achieve Better Results
You can achieve better results by using an agency. That applies both to the short and long term. In the short term, you’ll save time by avoiding the drawn-out process of setting up an in-house marketing team, training them, and ensuring everyone is on the same page and working together.
Remember, getting good at paid ads, in particular, takes time. You’ll probably spend at least a few weeks or months spending money on unsuccessful campaigns until you figure out what works. You can avoid all that by simply hiring an agency that has done this for businesses similar to yours many times.
Not only that, but you can even rank quicker in search engines and on social media with the help of an agency.
In the long run, you can save money on tools and costs and tap into a wider talent pool and better expertise.
Final Thoughts
It’s not always easy to choose between an in-house marketing team and an agency without knowing the pros and cons of each one.
While an in-house team gives you slightly more control over your marketing campaigns, the overall benefits of a marketing agency far outweigh that.