No doubt about it, your business needs marketing. Small to mid-size businesses, and even large organizations want to stretch every dollar to make the most of marketing efforts. How to handle marketing is a frequently discussed topic, especially for small to mid-size businesses.
If you are a small to mid-size organization, there are often just two options for your marketing. Either you are going to do it yourself or hire professionals to do your marketing for you.
But are marketing ninjas for hire the best option for your business? Each route has its own advantages and disadvantages to cover.
Keeping your marketing in-house by tasking an employee or onboarding a new hire gives stakeholders a little more on-hand control than outsourcing to an agency. This option does allow you to stretch the dollar, but often your marketing efforts and collateral lack the impact and performance that an agency offers. Agencies have their finger on the pulse for industry trends and have a team of proven professionals to take care of the content, design, strategy, and other minor details that your in-house team may not have time to be bogged down with.
The issues at hand when comparing the two options are the cost effectiveness of onboarding vs outsourcing, the quality of work, and of course the cost. We’ll discuss all three in further detail below!
New Hire vs Outsourcing
Bringing on a new hire is a daunting task for most managers. Every new hire is a gamble that the company takes. Think about it. You gamble on who you think is ‘the right employee’, you gamble that the person’s skills are the right ones, and you gamble on how long the new employee is going to stay on board.
Today’s generation of young workers show less company loyalty than ever before. Top performers leave for better opportunities, and in a competitive job market there is hardly any space for low-performers.
The true cost of hiring an employee is hidden behind recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding. All of this time and employee energy not spent doing the main functions of their role. And for what? If the employee leaves or can’t hack it within 3 months you are back at it again!
What an agency can do for you is provide stability in the role that you need filled. Agencies are staffed with marketing ninjas of their own who are tasked with turning around a professional and effective product specific to your business. No onboarding costs or hassles to find ‘the right employee’. Not only that, but your quality of product won’t change as often happened when small businesses lose an employee.
WORK QUALITY
In the DIY model, your marketing is only as good as the quality of the employee you hire.
Depending on your budget and size of marketing department, your business is probably going to hire what we call a marketing generalist. This is a person with many skills but has mastered none.
The best marketers tend to have one or two specialties that they focus on. A marketing generalist as a new hire is a good idea for those do-it-yourselfers but doesn’t give you the specialization that hiring an agency can provide for your marketing department.
Now, you still have options to cover the weaknesses of your marketing team:
· Justify lower quality work
· Hire more employees
· Pressure other departments to make up for lacking marketing department
OR
You may be able to hire an agency that covers your weaknesses and costs less than a full-time hire! This option puts full-time marketing ninjas on your team. These ninjas specialize in areas like inbound, content creations, design, and more. Wow! That’s bang for your buck. But at what cost?
COST
“Bottom line, what’s it going to cost me?”
Ah, the line that strikes fear into marketers and salespeople alike. The subject we often hold off on until the last possible second.
The cost of hiring a marketing team, or marketing person (depending on the size of your business) is going to make a huge impact on your bottom line, no doubt.
Costs can vary for marketing agencies depending on your business size and services provided. Let’s say that, in this case, you are looking for one full-time marketing employee to do most of your marketing. You’ve tried Fiver and other types of contracted work and they aren’t providing exactly what you need.
You may want a solid manager to handle your marketing department. The national average of which, is priced by Glassdoor at $85k annually. Now add in cost of employer paid healthcare, paid time off, onboarding, and other expenses you’ll incur as an employer.
Compare these costs, which would come out to easily over $100k annually, based on the national average of employer costs, to what hiring an agency like Albany Digital would cost.
At the lowest priced tier, you’ll have a team behind you to strategize, and execute full multi-channel inbound marketing campaigns. You will even have a team to help setup your mar-tech stack to effectively manage inbound leads and close more business.
The annual cost of a package like that comes out to $44,000 per year, keeping even more cash in your pocket.
ACTUALLY, LESS THAN HALF OF WHAT IT COSTS TO GAMBLE ON YOUR NEXT MARKETING HIRE!
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