Hiring an Integrated Marketing Agency: Investing in Your Organization’s Success
There are a lot of options available to help you with your organization’s marketing efforts today—from hiring staff to outsourcing to an agency to taking your chances on ChatGPT writing your website copy. So how do you know where to turn? What are the benefits of working with an integrative marketing agency, and how can you outsource your marketing needs?
The Pros of the Pros
Let’s start with the biggest benefits of hiring a professional marketing agency—diverse talent pool, deep expertise in a variety of marketing matters, objective and unbiased recommendations, scalability, to name a few. Instead of hiring a jack-of-all-trades, you can bring on a team of subject matter experts.
Work with a Whole Team for the Cost of One Employee
Hiring a marketing director or manager who can think strategically for the brand, put a plan together, design all the marketing materials, build and maintain a website, write all the content, buy all of the media, and can optimize social media, well, it’s like trying to hire a unicorn—it’s an impossible find. An integrated marketing agency is able to offer multiple disciplines—strategy, creative, media, account management, content marketing, to name a few. Most marketing agency clients have about four to five team members working on their business on a monthly basis.
Only Pay for Talent Needed
Marketing agency teams have the ability to provide subject matter expertise when it’s needed. And, when it’s not required, you aren’t paying for it. And, because they have more than one person in each discipline, clients get the benefit of diversity in the talent pool. For example, if you need a new logo, you will get multiple creative designers providing concepts instead of seeing only one person’s ideas and style.
An agency also can provide continual support, unlike an employee who will have vacation and sick time. Also, hiring and retaining the right person in-house can be a daunting task. When working with an agency, that burden shifts to them. If there’s turnover on the team, clients don’t experience downtime as the rest of the team fills in.
Brand Shepherding and Project Management
An agency will assign a client an account manager, sometimes even a team, focused on developing a strategic plan and keeping the brand and the marketing plan on target to drive results. The account team is responsible for being proactive, providing ongoing KPIs that align with overall business goals, and continually optimizing marketing efforts. The agency becomes a natural extension of an organization’s internal team.
Objective Views and Insights
An agency can offer a fresh perspective from outside the walls of the organization. This objective view helps identify areas of improvement that in-house teams don’t recognize. Having a new pair of eyes on a brand can go a long way into forming effective marketing strategies and recognizing overlooked opportunities.
Advantages of an In-House Team
Sometimes it makes sense to hire in-house staff. Those needs can vary from having a CMO that works closely with the leadership team to a social media coordinator who can be onsite to capture content as it’s unfolding. In-house marketers tend to be subject matter experts in that industry with a strong focus on consistency and control. Certain organizations may benefit more from having an internal marketing department such as sales focused businesses as this could lead to better collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. Another advantage is employees may have more access to data and results that provide more insight compared to an agency who would need to rely on the client providing proprietary information.
Some believe that it is more cost efficient to hire within rather than hire an agency. Why should I pay an agency $5k/month when I could hire someone for $60k. As mentioned earlier, a single marketing employee that can do everything an agency can do is a unicorn—an impossible find—let alone one that can do all of these responsibilities at the quality level an agency can provide.
How to Decide What Is Best for You
The best place to start is creating that list of responsibilities you need handled and determining the level of experience and expertise you require to do so. This list may turn into a job description for an internal hire or it may be a scope of work to get a quote from an integrated marketing agency.
Lastly, before you explore your options, determine what your budget is. This is a critical factor in your decision so that you know what you have to work with to get the help you will need. In general, marketing requires an estimated 5% of projected sales however this varies greatly by industry, profit margin, competitive situation, and other factors. For a brand new business, or one looking for rapid growth, this percentage may be significantly higher to drive results faster. And this is all in—including personnel, agency fees, printing, production, paid media, subscriptions, web hosting, etc.
An integrated marketing agency provides a depth of talent to support your business objectives by developing and executing a strategic marketing plan, helping you stay on deadline and on budget. They are here to take care of your ongoing marketing needs so you can focus on running your business.
Established in 2012, Pyper, Inc. is a woman-owned, integrated marketing agency located in St. Petersburg, FL. They deliver strategy, branding, and 360° marketing solutions to accelerate clients’ growth and avow that every brand deserves the chance to be amazing regardless of the complexity of its market, industry, or budget.