Shanli Liu explains why small-business owners should hire marketing agencies not as permanent vendors but as teachers. Agencies excel at specific channels like email outbound or SEO. The goal is to learn their processes during the engagement, then build the capability in-house and move on.
If you're a small business owner, agencies have a use, but not as something that you rely on. So an agency usually has a mastery of some sort of platform or method. So they're either really good at like email outbound and they set appointments for you, or they're really good at SEO. They have some method of getting customers. My objective with an agency, if I have to do it, is that I want to get them to teach me how they do it. And I prefer this method because agency owners tend to know how to do this better than people who teach it because they're actually doing it every day. So I usually go into the intention with an agency owner to say, Hey, I will sign up with you, but I will do it with the intention of learning everything I can from you so I can eventually replace you.
