So you’ve decided to up your marketing game and take your business to the next level. Fantastic. What next? Chances are you might be considering hiring a marketing professional to work for you, either full-time or part-time, or you may also be considering hiring a top-tier marketing agency such as 21 Degrees Digital. What to do?
We may be a tad biased here, but there are a number of reasons why working with an agency has the advantage over hiring an in-house professional. Let’s dive into a few of them.
Cross-industry Knowledge
The whole point of an agency is that they work for many different clients, and because of that, the experts that work on your account have had contact with a wide variety of other businesses, spanning multiple industries, offering invaluable experience and learnings.
Fresh and new ideas are never far away for an agency professional, as they will have lots of different things happening on each one of their accounts.
If a certain design style isn’t resonating with a customer base, an agency designer can pull ideas from one of the countless other styles he has worked in for one of their countless other clients. If a PPC campaign strategy isn’t working, the executives can pull from a strategy that has worked on a different campaign in a different industry, trialling something new.
There is an argument that a specialist in one industry could provide a more advanced level of expertise, but the advantage of having a wide breadth of experience allows for greater creativity, less tunnel vision, and the ability to draw from a huge pool of already-working ideas and strategies.
Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None
Sometimes complete mastery isn’t what’s needed, and you can get a long way by being very good. But come on. Saying ‘I’m a red belt in karate’ isn’t quite as impressive as being able to say you’re a black belt.
With an agency, if you pay for a service, you are guaranteeing that you have a master at their craft working their magic on your business. They do that job, and that job alone, for at least 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years, meaning their experience and knowledge on that subject are unparalleled and much more in depth than could be offered by someone else.
Because these marketing black belts are so good and so experienced, they can work extremely efficiently, saving time and money, easily pull from previous experience and learnings, and bounce ideas off of other high-level professionals in the same or different fields.
The Ease
We’re sure you know what a hassle it is to hire someone new. Sifting through 1,473 rubbish CVs just to find one that might potentially possibly turn into the prospect of a slightly suitable candidate. Once you do choose them, you interview them, and they don’t do as well as you’d hope, so you sift through another 924 CVs, find another candidate, interview them, they decline because they received a better offer, and on and on it goes.
Then you finally hire someone. Hooray! Except, don’t forget, you now have to get them started, onboard them, get them up to speed on the business, the culture, your clients, your customers, and more. At the end of the month, you’ll have not only their salary to pay but also their pension contributions, holidays they’ve taken, sick days, and much more.
If you’re really unlucky, they end up not being quite right for the role, so you have to go through the unpleasant, time-consuming, and tricky process of dismal, and your reward for all of this… Back to square one. Yay.
With a marketing agency, you get a brochure, have a meeting, sign your 3-month contract that is cheaper than their salary, and we take it from there. Unhappy after two months? Give your notice, and onto the next one to try again. Simples.
Cross-Departmental Expertise
Even if you only pay for one service in a marketing agency, chances are (especially in a small agency), the expert working on your account is less than three metres away from an expert in a different field.
Take the view from my desk, for example. Observe the number of black belts within earshot of me. By osmosis alone, with no effort at all, we are all going to pick up skills and knowledge from each other without even knowing it. And because we are a curious and creative bunch here, we do put effort into learning about the other fields of work, so we pick up a hell of a lot more. These learnings we take from each other can apply directly to the work we do on your account.
We can also access each other’s wealth of knowledge and experience in our fields and leverage that to good use on your account. I can lean over and talk to our graphic designer about how to improve some image ads on Meta, for example. Or ask our web developer about creating a faster landing page experience for a user who has clicked from Google.
In summary, an agency provides you access to experts with unrivalled skills and experience who have worked across a multitude of different industries, has access to other unrivalled professionals with the same level of experience, and does so for a cheaper price and an easier package than an in-house hire. Personally, I know which I’d go for.
So, sold on an agency? Want these benefits and much, much more?
