Tactical Thursday: The Case for Hiring a Marketing Agency [VIDEO]

Strategy

Executives often ask us why hiring an inbound marketing agency is better than just hiring an in-house marketer.In today’s Tactical Thursday video, I explain why it’s important for you to understand the impact of this decision on your organization.

 

Video Transcript

Tiffany Sauder: Many times, when I start working with a President or an Executive through the sales cycle and we get to the point where we start talking about money, sometimes they’ll ask me, “Well, if I’m going to be spending $10,000 a month with you, why don’t I just hire a full-time person? I’ll find somebody with a marketing MBA to be on staff and work with us full-time.”

And I always say, “You can certainly do that. That’s always an option, but make sure you understand what goes into that decision.” So let’s take a look at this because it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.

So if you hire a full-time MBA, that’s one person and they’re going to come with a static set of skill sets. If you spend that same amount of money at Element Three or with an agency, it looks very different because I can spend that $120,000 of hours across any slice of the pie that makes up my agency. So you might need copy one month, you might need to build a website, you might need help with SEO, you might need some strategy around a trade show.

The way that I can bring different resources to bear and really use that money in a lot of different ways is really different than having a static person that may have to begin outsourcing. Another piece of it is you’re not spending money on benefits with me. You’re not spending money on vacation time or holidays. All of those dollars are being employed directly to your business; they’re not being held up in overhead, internal meetings, et cetera. It’s going directly to making sure your marketing is getting executed.

And the last thing that I would say if you’re considering this is: think about how many hours a day inside an agency that we talk about marketing, right? It’s almost 100% of the time. It’s what we do. We talk about websites and email campaigns and looking at best practices. And we’re reading it, sending people to conferences and always staying on the cutting edge.

How many times is a full-time person on staff – let’s say you manufacture something – most of the conversations that they’re going to have every day is around your product and employing marketing against that. Which is really helpful because they’re going to have more context than perhaps we will if they’re internal. But will they always be on the bleeding edge and will they always have a breadth of other campaigns and context to pull from to make sure that you’re not the one spending the dollars on all of the testing.

We’ve figured a lot of that out and so we’re able to map that methodology and that process to our clients every day. So something to think about. It’s not apples-to-apples comparison. Certainly, both models work for different companies but just be sure you know what you’re deciding and the impact of that on your organization.

Tiffany Sauder is the CEO of Element Three, a full-service marketing consultancy in Indianapolis. After taking over in 2006, she’s transformed E3 from a small creative shop into one of the fastest-growing marketing consultancies in the Midwest. Outside the office, she spends time with her husband and three daughters, runs half marathons, and is practicing for the day The Food Network calls to cast her on Chopped.

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