Should I Hire a Marketing Agency or an Employee?

Our answer here might not be as obvious as you would think. Keep scrolling to read our top three things you should consider when making this decision for your small business.

As your business starts to grow, you may be thinking it’s time to bring in some marketing help - and that’s great! But instead of hiring an employee, maybe you should think about hiring an agency. How will you know which one is right for you? What will actually help your business instead of stalling it out? Consider these factors.

Budget

Let’s get this part out of the way first. Your budget is going to greatly determine what you can do. The bottom line is - it’s typically more expensive to hire an employee than it is to hire a marketing agency. When you hire an in-house marketing expert, you will have to keep in mind that your expenses are far beyond their yearly salary. Keep in mind that you will need to pay payroll taxes, retirement/pensions, benefits, training, and for the equipment they’ll need to do their job. And don’t forget that there are costs associated with the recruitment process for hiring a new employee.

While you may think that you’ll still get a better bang for your book with a single new employee, you can usually get an entire marketing agency for the price of that employee’s base salary. In most cases, that can mean 3-15 people working on your business instead of one.

Timing

You’ve decided you want to dive into marketing, do you want to wait 6-12 weeks to get started?

If you’d rather have immediate action, a marketing agency is probably the route you should take. While any marketing agency worth their salt will have a discovery period, this is usually only 3-5 weeks and you can see results of your investment within the time it would take for a new candidate to be hired and have their start date.

One potential downside to hiring a marketing agency is that the discovery period may feel very invasive because they need to understand your industry and company just as well as you do. Reputable agencies will be asking you a lot of questions and will be relying on you to share your inside knowledge with them so they can best execute campaigns. The more detailed you’ll willing to go, the better your results will be.

Expertise

We hinted at this above, but finding an expert for every single facet of marketing is like finding a real unicorn. Do you want to find an employee who is an expert at your business but only has general marketing knowledge, or do you want to hire a team who has a vast knowledge of every marketing tactic but possibly are not experts in your given industry?

A good, dedicated agency will always be ahead of trends in marketing and usually have employees who are solely responsible for monitoring trends across multiple industries. Plus, agencies have the benefit of working with multiple businesses across a few industries, which means they have a unique insight into these trends and how they can be applied.

So, should you hire a marketing agency or marketing employee?

We’re biased but we obviously think an agency can help your brand go father, but we also understand that hiring an employee might be what you prefer. You know your business, your goals, and your industry better than anyone. As is the case with many of our clients, you might find that having a combination of both is the right blend for your business. It is not uncommon to have an internal marketing employee and also partner with an agency. Doing this makes sure your employees are not overloaded and that there are multiple people involved in helping to oversee the growth of your business.