Know When to Dine Out vs. Cook at Home
As a marketing manager, you may sometimes feel like a busy parent trying to get the whole family fed before they head out the door, or a dinner party host prepping a feast for a large guest list—doing your best to meet everyone’s tastes, dietary restrictions, and preferences—and sometimes it’s tough enough to get it all on the table before the food gets cold or your people get hangry! Except in this instance, instead of a tasty, memorable, multicourse meal, you’re serving up marketing strategy, content, customer relationships, data analysis, team management, and so much more. All with limited capabilities and time. The constant demand for high performance can create stressful moments too, making it challenging to maintain efficiency and creativity.
One strategic move you could make to overcome these challenges is hiring an outside marketing agency. Like the nights when you opt to let a restaurant handle the cooking instead of creating a meal from scratch—both have their merits. Going out for dinner often provides the expertise, convenience, and quality that are hard to match when doing everything yourself. And that’s just a taste of the support you can garner from the right partner. Yes, we said partner, not vendor (or should we say waiter?). No order takers here.
While you may have guessed that we’d support this decision wholeheartedly, we are sincerely here to help. Let’s compare whether hiring a marketing agency or building onto your own team might be the right choice for your business.
The To-Do List is Never the Done List
Marketing managers face a number of challenges on the daily, from developing strategies and running campaigns to analyzing performance metrics and herding cats, umm, managing a team. Keeping up with the latest trends, tools, and technologies while juggling these responsibilities can be a bit much. According to a survey by Workfront, 54% of marketing professionals feel overloaded by their workloads. This constant pressure can hamper creativity and hinder overall productivity.
The Challenges of Building Your Internal Team
When considering expanding your existing team to handle the increasing demands, several considerations come into play:
Recruiting Talent
Finding the right talent takes time. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), it takes an average of 42 days to fill a position.
Onboarding New Hires
New team members need time to acclimate to your company’s processes, tools, and culture. This onboarding period can temporarily reduce overall team productivity as existing teammates take time to train newcomers.
Paying Salary and Benefits
Indeed.com says hiring a new employee in the U.S. can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $20,000, and that’s before they actually start working. Once you get into salary and benefits, it can add up, just like an a la carte menu.
The Benefits of Hiring a Marketing Agency
Engaging the right integrated agency can be a strategic move to overcome these hurdles. Here’s the pros of partnering with the pros who know marketing best:
Immediate Access to Expertise
Marketing agencies are staffed with seasoned professionals who bring a wealth of experience and a vast array of skill sets. And when you’ve worked with various clients across different industries like we have, it allows the implementation of best practices and innovative strategies right from the start.
No Onboarding Required
Unlike new hires, agencies don’t need an extensive ramp-up period. Once we get a clear picture of your business needs and goals, we can work quickly—as an extension of your own team—to start generating strategies and producing results.
Specialized Talent
Agencies employ experts to focus on fields such as SEO, content marketing, PR, data analytics, social media, and more. This ensures that all aspects of your integrated marketing strategy are handled, and the dots are connected for your customers.
Cost Efficiency
While hiring an agency might seem like a major upfront investment, it often proves to be more than worth it with the results you experience.
- Flexible Pricing
Agencies may offer different pricing, including project-based, retainer, or performance-based models. We partner on your business goals from the beginning so we can help you to choose the option that fits your needs and budget best. - No Overhead Costs
When you hire an agency, you avoid the additional costs associated with full-time employees, such as benefits, office space, and equipment. With our Element team, you reap the benefits of us coming fully equipped to jump in and work alongside you and your crew.
Enhanced Productivity and Efficiency
With Element agency handling your marketing efforts, you and your internal team can focus on the day to day and what you do best. And we’re here to help inform your strategic initiatives—setting you up to drive real, measurable results.
- Seamless Integration
With a 20-year reputation of success, our agency team will work as an extension of yours, respecting your company’s culture and processes. This collaboration is a two-way street, a true partnership, ensuring alignment and coherence in your go-to-market plans. - Relieving Pressure
By delegating time-consuming tasks to us, you and your team can focus on high-level strategy and creative thinking, leading to more innovative, effective, engagement-driving campaigns.
Advanced Tools and Technologies
Marketing agencies invest in the latest tools and technologies to stay competitive. When you hire an agency, you gain access to these resources without additional investments, and when you work with Element, you get so much more:
- Diverse Set of Software Access
With us as your agency partner, you get to tap into our results-boosting software without the additional cost limitations or the hurdles you’d have to clear for the spend approval. - AI-Enhanced SEO
Not only does Element’s innovative AI-powered SEO approach help you achieve better, smarter, faster results without significantly increasing your marketing budget, our unique combination of AI technology and human ingenuity gives you a competitive edge that ensures your online presence is always optimized and ahead of the curve. - Data-Driven Insights
Agencies use advanced analytics and reporting tools to track the performance of your campaigns and provide actionable insights. But we’re data obsessed. This helps us make better informed decisions while optimizing your marketing efforts for optimal results in real time.
Proven Results and Accountability
Element is a performance-driven, integrated marketing agency. Our reputation hinges on delivering measurable outcomes for our clients. You win, we win.
- Clear Metrics
As a true partner, we’re glad to provide detailed reports and performance metrics, giving you a transparent view of your ROI. This ensures you’re understanding the value you’re getting for your investment (aka the most bang for your marketing bucks). - Scalability
As your business grows, we can scale your services to meet your evolving needs. This flexibility is harder to achieve with an internal team, which may require additional hiring and training.
Why Choose? Have Your Cake and Eat it too
Think of managing your marketing efforts like making a meal. Creating everything from scratch isn’t always practical. So, sometimes you cook and sometimes you go out. Tapping into a marketing agency for help offers a balanced approach—expertise, convenience, and quality—without the hassle. The perks include:
- Professional Quality
Using the best ingredients, an agency can bring fresh flavor and professional results to your marketing with their vast expertise and advanced tools. - Time Back
Dining out saves you the time and effort, similar to how hiring an agency frees you from the tasks of recruitment, training, and execution, allowing you to focus on moving your business forward and realizing real results. - Variety and Specialization
Just as restaurants offer a diverse menu, agencies provide a range of marketing services, each managed by specialists in the field, ensuring comprehensive and effective marketing strategies.
In today’s competitive business landscape, marketing managers face immense pressure to deliver results with limited resources. Hiring a marketing agency offers a practical and strategic solution to alleviate some of the pressure from you and your crew. With instant expertise, cost-effective services, increased efficiency, and access to advanced tools, agencies provide a compelling alternative to hiring head count.
By partnering with an agency, you can focus on your daily business operations while they use their skills and experience to act as an extension of your team. It’s a win-win situation that can elevate your marketing efforts and drive sustainable success and growth. So, next time you’re craving some relief from your marketing workload, consider going out instead of cooking for yourself—let the experts handle it, and savor the results.
Ready to get in touch? Pass us an apron, we’re at your service.
