MBA1354 Should You Hire a Marketing Agency or Hire In-House?

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Hey O welcome to the 100 RMBA Show. Bite sized business insights every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and in today's episode you will learn should you hire a marketing agency or should you hire in house? There are a lot of advantages of hiring an agency to take care of all the marketing in your business. But many people, including myself, ask the question, why not hire somebody in house? Somebody full time or even part time. That'd be a part of your team to take care of your marketing. Is it more cost effective? Is it better for your business and brand? What's the investment look like in terms of time and effort? This is what we discuss in today's episode. Episode Many business builders think of marketing very late in the game. It's one of the last things they hire for and it's kind of hard to know how to hire for it because there are so many facets in marketing. There's content marketing and social media marketing and paid ads and email marketing and acquisition and conversions and landing pages and a whole bunch of other stuff. So in today's episode I'm going to share with you my Own experience. You know, I've worked with agencies over the years for our own businesses to market our businesses. But recently we have explored the option of hiring in house. I'll share with you what I've learned and the positives and negatives of both options and which one might be best for your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. One of the things that took me some time to understand or just to conceptualize in my head, when it comes to marketing, all marketing activities in your business actually have several different skills that come together. Now, I kind of didn't really break it down because I was doing all the marketing for a very long time and I possessed those skills and just thought they were normal. But in fact, it's not. There are three very defined skills you need to have on your team, whether it's several people or one person, which is a little bit rare in order for you to have effective marketing or marketing department in your business. This is like a gift to you to understand this and to have this in your head so you know when you go to market in your business, when you actually do some marketing, that you need these three skills. Number one, you need somebody who understands the science of marketing. We're talking about strategy, we're talking about defining your audience, we're talking about positioning in your market, competitive analysis. We're talking about how to actually do all the stuff, like run Facebook ads, like understand your analytics, track progress, conversion rates, the science of marketing. So you have like the technical aspects of marketing. This kind of consumes about 70% of the marketing effort. The plan, the execution of that plan, how all these parts of the plan work together, the tools that you need to understand to be able to do the marketing, whether it's FB Manager, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Hotjar, whatever, the tools you use to track your marketing efforts. So that's one skill. 70%, which is the science of marketing. The second seal is copywriting. Now, I was doing both at the same time, right? But really you need somebody who knows how to write great marketing copy, has good language skills, good communication skills, whether it's on your sales pages, your email marketing, your email drip campaigns, your actual ads that you put up on Facebook. You need somebody who's able to write good copy, you know, excellent copy for your business that understands your brand, your audience. Now, again, this could be the same person. It's hard to get somebody that can do both. It's doable, it's possible. They're out there, but they're highly coveted. So copywriting is about 15%. And the last 15% is design. Whether they're designing the actual graphics or ads, your sales pages, this is like a designer, a web designer. Now, for marketing purposes, often this is the skill that most marketers kind of can pick up, whether they're using a landing page building software or they're using canva to create simple ads for Facebook. But they have to have some sort of design aesthetic and know your brand. In established companies with a larger team, we're talking about more than a few employees. There's usually somebody who would take care of each of these three. So a design person, a copywriter, and a marketing specialist. Now, you know the three skills that make up your marketing efforts. Now, do you go with an agency or do you hire somebody in house? Now, the advantage of going to an agency, and this is why we've gone to agencies year after year, is that they have all these people in house in the agency. They have a copywriter, they have a design person, they have the digital marketing specialist, the person that does all the numbers and all the technical stuff. And you have access to all this talent by hiring this agency. And of course, you're sharing that talent with other companies that are hiring the agency. So far, sounds pretty good. Sounds like agency is a good win. And for a lot of companies, it is a good win because it's often cost effective. There's a lot of advertising agencies for small businesses that will charge as low as $2,500 a month for some basic services like running your social media ads. And of course, they can charge more as they do more. Now, the challenge with agencies is that they don't really take care of the whole picture. They usually specialize like in Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads or all social media ads, or they specialize in email marketing, or they specialize in SEO or they specialize in blogging, content marketing. Now, there are larger firms that do them all, but then it stops becoming cost effective. I've taken a look at some of those options, and we're talking about a $10,000 retainer. But again, you are getting access to people that can kind of do it all. Now, hiring in house is a different thing. Hiring somebody for marketing, even if you just hire them for that 70% chunk and then you do the other stuff, whether it's the design part or you get somebody for the design part time, because you're not going to lead a lot of time and you do the copywriting, or again, you get somebody on your team to do that may be a good option if you're looking for a holistic product led marketing strategy where you need the person to fully be invested in your business, in your company, in your product and understand what they're doing. They're totally focused on you and they're not kind of serving all these different customers by serving them up. Ads. I've worked with a lot of great agencies, but they have their playful and it's hard for them to really be entrenched in your company and understand the future you're building. Products are coming out, the updates are coming out with really understand your customers, be willing to speak to your customers and learn more and do research and see what your unique selling proposition is compared to your competitors. So hiring somebody that can really do all that stuff may not be a bad idea. Even if you get them to do 20 hours a week, that's a lot of time for them to really get some work done and make a difference in your business. You can hire a digital marketing strategist from 40 to 50 to 60 to 70 to a hundred dollars an hour. But even if you go in the range of about $50 an hour, that's $1,000 a week, about $4,000 a month. Not bad. Yes, more expensive than somebody you know running your ads in an agency for 2,500. But they're going to be doing more than just that. They're going to give you a strategy, they're going to implement the strategy, they're going to make sure that all your marketing bases are covered. Content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, your branding, your messaging, your positioning, all that stuff is holistic and delivered with your product and your customer in mind. Now this doesn't solve the whole puzzle. You still need a copywriter and you still need a designer, but you can hire out for that part time if you'd like. Now in the long run, having somebody in house can really pay dividends because they get invested in your company, they understand your product, they see the history, they know your, your customers and they're all in and able to really craft the right marketing message using your customer's voice. But it's gonna take them time to ramp up, it's gonna take them time to get to that point. It could take a couple of months, it could take a few months. While an agency, they just step in, they take over your ad campaigns and they are interested in getting your return on investment as soon as possible. And the way I see is that the agencies are great if you need results immediately. And it's sort of like a band aid solution until you figure out what, what you want to do with your marketing department. Now, there's a lot of companies that just rely on these agencies to do everything for them, and it's just works for them. But hiring in house will give you more of a holistic view of how to market to your customers. It may cost you a bit more time and money in the short term, but in the long term, you're really going to be investing in a strategy that actually is tailored to your business. A holistic strategy. Not just running ads to your customers or, or doing some email marketing or doing things in piecemeal. You want to make sure everything you do in your marketing is working with each other. Now, the challenge with hiring in house is finding really good talent. And it's going to take you some time. When we went down this road, it took us a lot more time to find great candidates. Marketing is one of those job descriptions or jobs that tend to kind of be blurry. You know, when you are hiring a designer or developer, they can give you examples of their work. You can see the product of their labor. A lot of marketers, they don't really understand. You need to see that. You need to see before and after of their work with a company, and that's your job to extract that. So sometimes it takes some time to get that information from people, to get that from the applicants to interview and ask questions like that. So keep that in mind. The other thing is that typically marketers, people that are in marketing, digital marketing specialists, they're freelancers and they have several clients. And if you need them for 20, 30, 40 hours a week, you need them to sacrifice their clients. You gotta say, hey, I want you with me at least half your time. That means they're gonna have to let go clients. So that's the other challenge you're gonna face. It's not impossible. You definitely can find people that want to be a part of your business, but it's on you to do that. You need to sell your business to them. You need to sell the opportunity, sell being a part of your team. And in those interviews, in those discussions, so they know, hey, you're getting more than just a job and a paycheck here. You're getting a future. You're getting a place where you're going to feel challenged, feel excited and have fun. We're excited to see how this goes. Our first time hiring somebody in house and building around that. I do want to mention something. When I broke down that you know, marketing is about 70% the technical stuff, 15 copywriting, 15% design. It doesn't mean that there's very little work to be done for the copywriting or the design. Those people have other responsibilities in your business outside of marketing. A copywriter needs to write your blog posts. This is just regular stuff. You're not even advertising or marketing your blog posts yet. You're just writing blog posts. And that's separate from actually marketing your business. Your designer is going to design your website anyway, design your products, design your brand and your presence online so they have their plate full in other areas as well. But having those people on your team already really helps to really get a specialized marketer that knows the science of marketing and can rely on these other teammates even if they're part time, to help them with their advertising campaigns and implementing their strategy. Their marketing strategy.

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Wrap up today's lesson. If you're in dire need for marketing now and you need an injection of new customers as fast as possible, then hiring an agency is a good option. I've done it for years. It's fantastic and it does exactly that. It's also cost effective. But if you have some time and you want a long term strategy, you want to be able to make some efforts in your marketing now. That's going to help you in six months, a year, three years from now, then hiring in house is something you may want to explore. Now the beauty of business is that you can experiment. You can try an agency for three, four months and you can try to hire in house for three, four months and you can compare your results. Now, I gotta remind you, the results are not apples to apples because the agency is going to focus on one kind of aspect of your marketing and pull it off. While an in house person is going to try to implement a strategy, a holistic strategy to your business. And you got to look at what they actually say they're going to do and how they pull it off. If I had to do all over again, I'd probably hire somebody in house to at least establish my business strategy, my comparative analysis, or I should say competitive analysis, my unique seller proposition, nail my positioning, my messaging and lay out a marketing plan for my business. After getting to know my customers. This could take about a month or two. And if everything's going well, they can implement that plan for any reason you want to switch gears. At least you have the plan. At least you know what to do and you know how to guide that agency to do the things you need to get done in your business to have solid marketing. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you love what you hear, leave us an iTunes rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Also, don't forget to hit subscribe. So you get all our episodes automatically and you have access to over 1300 episodes in our archive. Only way to have access to those is to hit subscribe and be part of the feed. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of my biggest regrets, and this is not easy to say, is I didn't think long term enough at the start of my business. In the beginning you're just eager to get, you know, some traction and get some sales. And I'm not talking about marketing alone. I'm talking about in general. You have to have a long term mentality. You have to understand what the impact is on your business long term, whatever you do. Because you have to have that because your business has to last if it's gonna be a good one. And if it's gonna last, you gotta make sure that things you do today won't affect it down the line. I should say won't affect it negatively down the line. So have a long term view as early as possible. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care of.

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