When you’re just starting on your entrepreneurship journey, it can be difficult to justify the expense of an external marketing team. In fact, data shows that most small businesses prefer to keep their online marketing in-house.
That’s definitely a respectable goal, but there are some situations where that’s just not good enough if you want to achieve more ambitious goals, faster. Sometimes you need the hired guns, the experts who drive success for businesses like yours every day, all day.
Here are six signs it’s time to hire a marketing agency.
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1. Sales Are Declining
If you know there’s a market for your product or service, if you’re sure your customer success and sales teams are working their hardest at providing quality service, and if your pricing is competitive, but you’re still finding that sales are stagnant (or worse, declining), then the problem could be ineffective marketing.
If you really want to know, consult with one of the many marketing agencies that offer a free brief consultation. They’ll learn more about what you’re doing now and be able to offer some suggestions for improvement.
2. Your Top Competitors Are Already Using Marketing Agencies
If the competition has a marketing agency working for them, they’ve already got a pretty big advantage over you. New people bring in new perspectives that are helpful in addressing immediate challenges you face in marketing and sales. T
he right agency can get your messaging, branding, and promotion on point, and it may be completely different from the direction you started in. If you hire a marketing agency that understands your needs and business environment, you’ll give yourself a strategic advantage.
3. The Strategy Advice You Receive Is Generic
Different marketing agencies have different realms of knowhow. You’ll find many of them are generalists, that is, willing to provide services to any niche regardless of their experience marketing those kinds of products or services. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but there are some instances where niche expertise can make or break your company.
Take ecommerce, for instance. Because the market is so saturated with options, one of the best things you can do for your company is to hire an ecommerce marketing agency. These teams focus solely on online shopping, and as such, they know all there is to know about what it will take to get you successfully competing in the space.
4. You Don’t Know What’s Working and What’s Not
To do well in your business, you must be able to analyze your strengths and weaknesses as a company. If you cannot determine which inbound marketing initiatives are working to bring leads into your business, what the best design is for you to get maximum response at trade shows, or why your social media marketing isn’t providing the ROI you expected, then you need an agency that can provide the answers for you.
This will save you a great deal of time and money, because you are no longer investing those resources into activities that aren’t cost effective. Instead of playing guessing games or constantly trying something new just to see what happens, allow the agency to handle it for you. Yes, you’ll have to pay the agency, but working with the right agency ensures you’ll earn enough of a profit to keep them on, doing their thing. They know if they don’t provide results, they’ll be out of a job.
5. You Don’t Enjoy Marketing
If you’ve been doing it all on your own because you can’t afford to hire an in-house team, and you don’t like doing it, then this probably shows. Basic blog posts, boring emails and landing pages, and a half-hearted attempt at social media won’t give you the results you’re looking for.
Agencies are not only made for this stuff – they love it. And when they do the work for you, their passion will shine through, making it easier for you to get the results you want.
6. Your In-House Team is Overworked
When you’ve got an in-house marketing team ready to work for you, it’s easy to think and dream big, then pass all the work over to them. But if you overwhelm the team, they have to stretch themselves thinner, which may manifest in underwhelming performance in terms of social prospecting, email outreach, co-marketing webinars and whatever other tactics are grinding them down. It may also mean they make half-hearted decisions.
Help your in-house team serve you better by allowing them to focus on their core competencies and hand the rest of the stuff off to an outside agency.
Marketing is a Must for Any Business
Whether you enjoy marketing or not, it’s a necessary part of operating a business. That’s especially the case for any new businesses that haven’t yet earned brand awareness and customer trust. Even major brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which have been around for more than 100 years, still engage in marketing to keep customers coming back for more.
Hiring an agency to take care of it for you is better than leaving it neglected under all the other business operations.
About Carson Derrow
