Thinking about creating a beast marketing team but not sure if you should hire a Marketing Manager or an agency? Keep reading to find out what is best for your business.
Marketing Agency VS In-house Marketing
In order to build your business and get the benefits of your digital marketing campaigns, you will need to make a decision on where to best allocate your marketing resources. Many businesses are cutting their marketing resources or re-allocating them towards another department because of the slowdown due to the events of the CO-VID19 virus. Most business owners and marketing directors who wear multiple hats in their business do not have the time for digital marketing, which is often overlooked. As a consequence, most businesses will have to do and make an important decision about their online presence.
Should you hire an employee (Marketing Manager) to manage your digital marketing presence internally or hire a digital marketing agency?
The straightforward answer is that it depends on your unique situation and budget! Obviously your employees will normally have more awareness of your company, while agencies will have more knowledge of how to use digital marketing strategies to accomplish your goals. Often internal staff gets caught up with the hustle within your business, having other parts of the business on their minds. When trying to make a decision, you should consider the following:
- Results-oriented: Who is more capable of producing the results you are looking for? Especially in the market that we’re in?
- Costs & budget: It is more cost-efficient to hire an employee or agency.
- Training & internal resources: How much training, equipment, time and resources will be required if you choose to hire a marketing director?
- Consistency & focus: Who will be the most consistent with digital marketing activity?
The answers to these questions will usually depend on your industry and the kind of customers you’re looking to attract with online marketing, but we have found the following points to be true in most instances.
Who has more knowledge of your company?
The main advantage of hiring an in-house employee to handle social media is that employees are usually more involved with daily procedures. They will be able to capture the images and content of your business on-site. They are normally more updated with company news. However, this can easily be outsourced internally as a creative task to someone else within your company.
On the other hand, hiring an agency ultimately comes down to having good communication and sharing a Dropbox folder with all of your creative assets. You can even get an agency that does most of the work for you and if they are a local agency they could even visit your business for photography and consulting.
It is far more expensive to hire an employee.
According to Glassdoor, full-time social media managers make an average salary of $50,000. An effective social media marketing program at an agency would cost $15,000 to $18,000 per year at the right company. With a salary that is 3x more expensive, you would also have to consider additional costs associated with social media training, software, applications, equipment, employee turnover, and payroll taxes. Not to mention sick days, vacation days, and raises.
Employee turnover and training is a headache.
As social media continues to evolve, ongoing digital marketing training is a necessity for digital marketing managers. But what happens when your digital marketing manager resigns?
All of the training you’ve spent developing your employees will go down the drain. Your brand will be at risk because digital marketing involves a lot of password keeping and content strategy. In addition, you will have to start from scratch and train a new employee about your company and how to use digital marketing.
By hiring a social media company, you do not have to worry about employee turnover or training. In fact, most agencies will use more advanced training platforms and techniques.
Employees are often overwhelmed with too many tasks for digital marketing
We have found that several employees who are given digital marketing tasks also have many other responsibilities. In cases like this, social media normally falls back to the end of their to-do list. This may cause inconsistency in your social media activity, decreased results, and ultimately missed opportunities to grow your brand on social media.
Digital marketing agencies are more results-focused.
In comparison to digital marketing managers, agencies are more results-focused. Why? Because the success of their agency will depend on the results that they are able to provide for you. You want to grow your business through social media marketing and agencies want to keep their clients by providing effective digital marketing solutions. This means if you aren’t successful, we aren’t either.
Digital marketing agencies have more experience on-line.
The benefit of hiring an agency that specializes in digital marketing is the ability to leverage their experience. Niche-specific agencies eat, sleep, and breathe the latest news and strategies in their niche. They work in team environments of multiple social media specialists, with decades of combined experience in the field. The amount of expertise, support, and knowledge available to agencies does not compare to what a single full-time employee can provide.
Digital marketing agencies have more resources and tools.
In addition to high-quality staff with direct experience in your industry (our CEO Shawn was a Loan Officer for over 8 years), digital marketing agencies will also have more advanced technology, resources, and tools available for social media marketing. You can expect a digital media agency to already have design software, content distribution software, access to data, and in-depth analytics to showcase return on investment.
That sums of many of the reasons why many companies are choosing to outsource their marketing efforts to an industry-specific marketing agency instead of second-guessing with an internal employee.
