How to Choose Between an Agency, Freelancer, or In-House Marketer

In this post:

• Working with a freelance digital marketing consultant
• Developing an in-house marketing team
• Should you hire a full-service digital marketing agency?
• Is there a complete solution to your marketing needs?

The startup you launched just a few short years ago is growing beyond your expectations. You find yourself feeling both exhilarated and overwhelmed at the same time. The fact that your business needs help with digital marketing is no longer in question, although one question does remain. Should you hire a growth marketing agency, a freelancer, or develop an in-house marketing team?

Understanding the benefits of each of these options is the first step towards making the right choice for your growing business.

Working with a freelance digital marketing consultant

A digital marketing consultant can be one person or a team of professionals dedicated to your organization’s marketing efforts. The job of the digital marketer is to assist small businesses with developing their brand voice and attract more paying customers.

Content creation and marketing are two of the biggest challenges startups and small businesses face. Specifically, they tend to struggle with the following:

• Maintaining enough bandwidth to store campaign collateral
• Lack of human capital and financial resources to get their message in front of millions of people
• Time to research the ideal customer to understand their purchasing behavior and motivations

How can you know that your business is falling behind in its marketing efforts? Consider the last time you published a blog post, updated your website, or interacted with customers across all social media channels. You may be thinking that no one has time to do all that, and you would be right. Your staff has other duties to attend to but helping small businesses grow are why digital marketing consultants exist. Keep in mind that publishing content goes beyond the internet.

As a small business owner, your thoughts center around what the business needs to succeed. Someone needs to be on top of things, and you launched the business because you excel at what you do. Freelance marketing consultants teach you how to think like your customers to obtain the revenue results you want to see. Your customers want to know if your company can solve their problem or meet their need. A skilled digital marketer has the expertise to know how to position your brand as a solution to what customers seek.

Businesses looking to expand their marketing efforts typically hire a freelancer on a project basis. For example, you might want to bring someone in to overhaul your company’s website. The benefit of starting on a per-project basis is that you have no obligation to continue with freelancers whose work does not meet your standards.

Once you find someone you can rely on for excellent work quality, you can consider putting them on retainer to ensure their availability for future projects.

Be sure to check their qualifications and experience and only hire a true professional. Your business cannot afford the damage to its reputation that can result from substandard marketing practices.

Developing an in-house marketing team

If you have the resources to pay salary and benefits to several marketing employees, you may want to build or expand an in-house team. The first thing to consider when developing a team of onsite marketing professionals is the volume of workload you expect them to handle. You will know it is too much when you hear frequent complaints from team members about long hours or the quality of their work starts to suffer.

Sometimes having an in-house marketing team while outsourcing some of the more time-consuming duties can be the best of both worlds. Striking the right balance before expanding your team is critical. You do not want to make the mistake of learning that your in-house team cannot handle the volume of work after you have already discontinued the services of freelance marketers or marketing agencies.

When interviewing people for your new marketing team, consider asking the question of whether they feel motivated by revenue goals and have the skills to target people in specific markets. Be sure to ask each candidate to give an example that demonstrates they know how revenue growth works and how to track it over time. You also want candidates experienced with monitoring email, ads, SEO, and social media accounts for your business.

While the entire marketing team should have a big-picture understanding of their purpose, you will likely find that hiring or training people for specialties such as SEO or market research to be the most efficient approach. You can also consider breaking the larger group down into smaller specialized groups with each group reporting to their own manager.

Should you hire a full-service digital marketing agency?

A digital marketing agency for startups offers many of the same services as an in-house team without the overhead of salaries, benefits, and paying for office space and equipment. Employees of digital marketing agencies are experts in their area of specialization.

Clients expect a high level of professional design from their digital market agency such as three-dimensional animation and motion graphics where appropriate, so agencies are often connected to the best resources.