The ONLY REASON Why Should You Outsource To An Ecom Agency

If you're an e-commerce brand owner and you're making over $25,000 per month, you should probably be working with some sort of agency. I'm Zach. I'm the founder of a 7-figure e-commerce marketing agency. And today I want to address a popular question that I get from brands usually making less than $100,000 a month. And that question is, why should you work with an agency? What is the benefit or the gain of working with an agency in the first place? Why would I give someone else money to run a part of my business? That doesn't seem to make sense. And today I want to go over why it actually makes sense for most businesses, why the largest companies in the world use agencies, and how you can properly identify and use an agency for your own business. I'll be talking about the benefits of actually hiring and finding an agency versus things that you should look out for and avoid with agencies, which is a video that I'll be making shortly. The first point I want to talk about is cost. Now, when you hire an agency, you're actually saving yourself time and money. Let me explain. Let's say you're looking at hiring an agency just to run your advertising versus hiring a regular employee. Now, yes, you could likely do the advertising yourself. You could learn it, you could run ads, and you could be responsible for that. But if you're making at least $25,000 a month, the chances are you have other higher priorities within the business, or you just don't have the time to actually get everything done in the business. So you need to start hiring. Now, if you were to hire a regular employee, let's say they're a marketing professional, you might be paying them between $3,000 to $10,000 a month, potentially more depending on their skill level. Once you actually bring that employee on board, you're training them. You're spending a lot of your time actually teaching them how the brand operates, how your product works, who your customers are, and training them up to speed. Now, the more you pay, the better quality you'll get versus an agency, which is usually for our services around the same cost. The thing is, when you hire an agency, you are hiring multiple people and you're getting access to an entire team. So when you hire one person, you get their brain, you get their efforts, and that's it. Whereas an actual properly structured agency should give you access to multiple people with multiple high-level brains, essentially marketing brains that are experienced in the task that you're trying to complete. So you pay the same amount or even potentially less with an agency, but you get a full team of people actually working on your business and integrating within your business. An agency is actually probably one of the best offers that you can get as you get exposure to that full team and that full network. The last thing that I want to highlight is you don't have to pay for equipment, you don't have to pay for software, you don't have to pay employment insurance costs or any other taxes to the government for having employees. It's just one bill from an agency and that's it. And it's predictable and you know exactly what it is. But the other thing is time. Now, typically when you're bringing on an employee, you've got all of the legal stuff involved. B, you've got a ton of training and that's ongoing because you are their manager. With an agency, you set clear targets for them. and if they don't hit them, they're gone. You don't really need to manage an agency as much as somebody that's a full-time employee working for you. For instance, when you hire my agency, we do paid advertising, but we also do website development, finance and accounting, general business strategy, like planning for exits and hiring as well for our clients. Now it costs the same as a high-level employee, but we're able to do about 4 or 5 times the amount. And that's because we have systemized processes that allow us to replicate one task across multiple businesses, so we can do a lot more at once. And we've also got years of experience in systems that allow us to execute on it. The second thing is knowledge. Now, just like any other skilled team, we have a lot of knowledge, but an agency— and the right agency— will know what works and what doesn't. An agency has already worked with multiple people and is going to continue to work with new people going forward. An agency as a company versus an individual, companies typically focus on 1 to 4 key activities or services. A good agency should have experience working with well-known corporations and well-known brands. That means that the knowledge and the experience that the agency has is already superior to where your brand is. And I'm talking about brands doing less than $100,000 a month. So if an agency has experience growing a brand from $1 million a month to $10 million a month, then you can assume that they know exactly what to do to get you from $100,000 to $1 million a month or $10K to $100K, depending on what they specialize in. For instance, my team has spent tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars at this point on the exact same thing that you're trying to do with your business. So we're not spending our time trying to figure out what will work for one of our clients' brands. Instead, we work on just implementing what we know is already working. So it usually doesn't make sense to spend all this money and time on trialing something, essentially trialing a person when there is a solution that plugs directly into your business and solves your problem straight away. Now, this brings me to the third reason as to why working with an agency in most cases makes sense. This is very similar to the knowledge and experience segment I just spoke about. But the third reason is the overview, the holistic overview we get across the industry versus just you and your brand's data. As an agency that's working with multiple businesses and we work with about 40 companies actively, we see all of the trends that are rising across the board. We see all of the trends that are falling, all of the marketing strategies that are working versus not working. And we have a real-time pulse on exactly what's happening within the industry. We're able to see across 40 businesses 4 days before Black Friday, there is a consumer pullback in spend because they are anticipating Black Friday sales and saving their money for that. Whereas you as a brand operator and owner get a limited data set because it's only one business and you might look and go, oh no, sales are down. Whatever I launched in prep for Black Friday isn't working very well. As an agency, we have access to all of this tens of millions of dollars worth of data on a yearly basis. And we can see exactly what's going to work and what's not. I know that was really similar to the knowledge and experience part, but I just wanted to highlight that the knowledge and experience is backed by that holistic overview where we literally have a dashboard and I can see 40 businesses' results at once. The fourth and final reason that you should work with an agency, and this is the best reason, by the way, is because it's way, way easier to get rid of an agency. If an agency doesn't meet your expectations and all the target results that you set for them, you can cut them in a snap of your fingers. Even if you're locked into a multi-month contract or a multi-year contract, if you don't want to pay them anymore, you can break that contract if you need to, and you can get out straight away and go straight on to the next agency. When you bring an employee into your business, they typically get incredibly integrated with all of your your systems, you've done tons of training to get them up to speed, and if they're not exactly what you want, it usually isn't a same-day-fire type of situation which you can pull with an agency. Usually you're going to have a bit of politics involved. Maybe you have a longer contract with them with stricter rules being enforced by whatever governmental body in the region that you live in. But typically when you have an employee on your team, it's a lot harder to get rid of them versus sending a text to an agency. It's also usually a lot more damaging because again, they are very integrated within the business and now you have offboarding and it takes all of this time to essentially get all of the knowledge that they had and pass it on to the next person and all of the training that you have to do for the next person that you've hired that you don't know if it's going to be any good. With an agency, you could fire them and have a new agency hired by that night if you need it. Now, again, I'm assuming that the agencies that you're hiring are actually high quality and you've vetted them correctly, because thanks to the SMMA gurus, there is a swamp of horrible agencies that exist out there with a huge lack of experience, incorrect way of charging clients, and just a general lack of knowledge and competency. Anyway, I'm curious to hear what you think, especially from the brand owners out there that are already doing at least $25K a month. Again, most agencies aren't that great, so it can be difficult to find an agency. But I think it's personally a lot harder to find an individual employee that can do what an agency can. But I'm curious what you think. Do you think that you should hire an agency? Do you think that you should build the system in-house? Do you think you need a combination of both? And again, of course, it's going to vary based on the agency service. So let me know. Um, if you're interested in working with my agency and you have an e-commerce brand making at least $25,000 a month, you can book a 30-minute call with myself somewhere in the description or on this video somewhere, and enjoy your day.