The signs that you should be working with a marketing agency

For many small or medium sized businesses, when you start out it makes sense to ‘do it yourself’ for a while across a variety of roles. It cuts costs, and maybe you find it easier to work that way. But inevitably that will change with time. You might find yourself hiring a dedicated sales person, or someone to handle admin.

This is part of the natural life of business. Changes like this can be essential to promoting growth for your organisation.

And much as you wondered about hiring a sales team or support team, you may start to wonder if doing your marketing yourself isn’t the best approach.

Below are a few of the signs that it’s time for you to start looking at getting someone else to handle your marketing needs.

You aren’t doing it yourself

It’s easy to understand why this happens. You’re a busy person doing the things that busy people do. So every time you’re looking at your workload it’s easy to move marketing to the bottom of your ‘to do’ list.

If this happens more than a few times, your marketing may start to become a fixture on the ‘to do’ list. And one that’s never going to end up on the ‘done’ list.

Because Marketing is often a slow process that requires a certain amount of planning and strategy, it’s never going to be top of your priority list. You’ll find yourself making an excuse to bump it down the list while you put out fires elsewhere. And longterm this is damaging.

However, for a marketing agency – it’s the only thing we do. And is always top of the priority list.

You are doing it yourself (but not well)

Let’s say that you have taken all the responsibilities of the marketing department onto your shoulders. You’ve read (or at least thumbed through) a copy of ‘Marketing for Dummies’, you think you’ve got a good grasp on this whole SEO thingy, so you give it all a go.

Cut to several months down the line. The leads aren’t coming in. That big re-brand project you thought about took too long so you rushed and now half of your materials have the old logo on and half have the new one. You log in to Twitter for the first time in weeks, take to your keyboard like the ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey and get confused when #pleasebuymy[insertproduct]pleaseamidoingthisright doesn’t immediately trend worldwide.

This might seem a deliberately ridiculous scenario created for the purpose of blog articles. But it isn’t far from the truth. There’s a lot that can go wrong.

Marketing with poor results can be worse than not marketing at all. As well as wasting your time on fruitless campaigns, there’s a very real chance that you could be doing long-term damage to your brand.

And there’s nothing wrong with not being able to do it yourself. Nobody is expected to be an expert on everything, and knowing when you need to find outside help or delegate is a key.

In working with an agency, you have much more of a guarantee of quality. After all, if we did bad work – we wouldn’t exist anymore!

You don’t know how (or why) you’re doing well

This is somewhat related to the above points. Although it may not seem that bad – if, for example – you see a sudden boost in views to your website. In fact that might seem like a good thing. But how did they get there? Was it that eshot you sent out? Or a radio ad promotion?

If you aren’t able to monitor your own marketing efforts, it’s likely that you’re not being efficient in your output. And you might be getting the wrong idea. You might be sending out Facebook Updates at three am and when no-one sees them coming to the conclusion that Social Media doesn’t work.

An agency will look at your sector, your business and your goals. And the strategy we come up with will prevent you from squandering any potential opportunities, as well as monitoring your successes to show why they’re working.

This approach is, obviously, more effective that the shot in the dark approach to your marketing.

You wish you had a marketing department, but don’t have the budget

Perhaps you have looked into it. You realise that you need a dedicated marketing team. But then you’ve done the math. And you probably didn’t like what you found. Hiring a marketing department is expensive. Below are the average salaries for several marketing roles as based on the Hayes Salary Guide 2015 (based on a typical salary for a role in the South East).

Digital Marketing Manager – £50,000

Campaigns Manager – £32,000

Press Officer – £30,000

Marketing Executive – £28,000

Marketing Asssistant – £20,000

And that is a minimal marketing department. Adding in SEO specialists, Graphic designers, web developers and more means that a full service marketing department can be costly.

In addition to this is the upkeep of marketing tools. To increase efficiency, productivity, performance and keeping up with industry best practice – we use tools such as Hootsuite, Raven Tools and more. And all of these have monthly fees.

As you can see the benefit of working with a marketing agency isn’t just that we’ll do the job better than you can, it’s also a cost-effective measure. You can hire a complete marketing team from the cost of one employee.

If you’ve seen the signs that you should be working with a marketing agency, then Sans Frontiere are here to help. We bring 18 years of experience in marketing to your business. Offering you all the benefits of your own full-service marketing department, from design to digital, without the cost.

For a free consultation, our team can be reached at 01273 487 800 today.