I was asked a question by an agency non-believer recently, which was “why would I pay fees to an external marketing agency, when I can simply employ a marketing person and manage it all myself?”
The first thought, is to ponder if you have enough knowledge and experience of how to strategise, plan, execute, monitor & report on marketing activity yourself?
Here are 4 reasons why an agency is worth considering…
1. Generalist vs Specialists
Digital marketing agencies bring together a diverse set of specialists & skills, and usually provide wide ranging experience on all aspects of the marketing mix. In comparison, an in-house marketer will usually have a general range of knowledge, so either way you may need to employ strategists and creatives including designers, videographers, photographers, drone operators, socialisers (my word), and search experts anyway. At VM our team includes all of the above.
2. Return on Investment
It's simply about the value and efficiencies that expertise, diversity of capability and accountability provides. At VM Digital, we focus on generating leads for our clients, in-store, online, by phone. So we set goals for each campaign with our clients, create content and implement a variety of marketing tactics and are accountable for campaign results assuming our advice is taken on board. Therefore, we are motivated to make our recommendations work. With us the only fees you pay are for consulting if required, content creative, campaign management & reporting.
3. Flexibility & Focus
So we are flexible week to week and we pivot quickly, as the need arises. That’s a sensible approach. The benefit to our clients is that we manage all activity for them, so they can focus on what matters – business development.
4.Contingency Plans
Marketing is not an exact science so we monitor all activity daily to see what’s working well and where we can improve and often strategies have to be tweaked, as audience behaviour can change across different sectors.
In summary, if you run a medium-size company with revenues of 1m+, you should be investing €50k pa in marketing & lead gen. Better to spend that on content and execution rather than on a marketer who will still need creative providers and campaign executors to deliver the goals you set. Food for thought we hope.
