Building personalized digital marketing campaigns from the ground up requires manpower and expertise. A marketing agency can help you roll out sophisticated campaigns while protecting yourself from HR obstacles, such as turnover effects.
But what is a marketing agency? What types of organizations benefit from outsourcing their marketing functions? Read more to find out.
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Marketing Agency: Explained
A marketing agency is a firm dedicated to setting up and rolling out marketing campaigns for other organizations.
Generally speaking, there are three major categories of marketing agencies:
- Specialized Agencies: These firms only work with one subset of marketing, such as SEO, paid media, or influencer marketing.
- Rotating Specialists: These firms have a variety of marketers on-call to review a client’s incoming request and execute a deliverable. Once the asset is sent over, the marketer moves on to the next client’s task.
- Full-Service Marketing: These firms offer comprehensive marketing services for clients to plug and play. These services are designed to operate as a full outsourced marketing team, offering clients a seamless experience without coordinating with other marketing vendors.
EBQ functions as a full-service marketing team that can elevate other organizations’ copywriting, graphic design, web development, marketing automation, and paid media execution.
EBQ offers a full team of dedicated experts to master their clients’ unique systems and brand guidelines. Clients also benefit from EBQ’s built-in management layer, which includes a part-time Revenue Consultant and Marketing Manager to hold the EBQ team accountable to customer success.
Interested in learning more? Contact us for a free consultation.
In-house vs Outsourced Marketing
Some businesses opt to take on all their marketing in-house. However, building an in-house team requires significant investment and a leadership team with enough marketing knowledge to guide strategy and drive results. For many businesses, the costs of maintaining an in-house marketing strategy can outweigh the benefits and ultimately hinder overall goals.
When hiring an internal team could make sense:
Here are a few challenges that might benefit from an internal marketing team:
- You have a complex product: If you are selling to technical experts, you will most likely benefit from someone who deeply understands these technical components.
- You have a lot of restrictions: Some industries, such as the medical or financial industries, tend to have more regulatory processes to adhere to. An internal marketer will have to have time to master both your value proposition and such sophisticated roadblocks.
- You require real-time collaboration: Some workplaces highly value real-time in-person collaborative environments that only an internal marketer could offer.
Based on our experience, here are a few key indicators that it may be time to outsource your marketing functions:
You lack expertise
Robust marketing tools provide organizations with invaluable insights into their campaign performance — assuming everything was set up correctly. Many business leaders simply do not have the time to learn how to operate every necessary tool from the ground up to provide clear directions on their marketing expectations.
A marketing agency allows you to bypass such obstacles because their specialists are trained to adapt best practices to their clients’ unique workflows. They are also incentivized to provide successful campaigns that drive conversions to continue earning your business.
You lack the budget
Did you know that onboarding a full-time employee typically costs 1.3 times their salary? Once you factor in a full team of specialists’ and managers’ salaries, you will easily have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a team.
A few hidden costs of hiring internal marketing professionals include:
- Their relevant training
- Their health benefits
- Their tools (e.g., laptops, desk setup, etc.)
Marketing agencies are typically responsible for all upfront costs of hiring an expert. They are solely responsible for attracting, upskilling, and retaining talent who will work on your program, so you do not have to spend time recruiting.
By the numbers:
Here is a table that compares and contrasts the cost of hiring a full-time team compared to EBQ:
| Internal Marketing Team | EBQ | |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiting | $5000 | ✔️ |
| Manager Salary | $159,660 | ✔️ |
| 1 Marketer Salary | $75,000 | ✔️ |
| Company Benefits | $15,000 | ✔️ |
| Annual Total: | $254,660 | $120,000 |
You require a faster turnaround time
As mentioned earlier, you need to factor in onboarding and upskilling time when hiring an internal marketing expert. A new employee’s productivity is only 25% during the first month, and they will reach full productivity by the fifth month if they stay with the company.
Marketing agencies have a proven process to ramp on new projects in as little as 30 days, an 80% reduction in onboarding time.
Plus, they can pivot priorities quickly to align with your current business goals. This allows organizations to quickly deploy campaigns, gather relevant data, and reprioritize their goals.
You require scalability
From the moment a job is posted to the day a candidate is hired, the process can span nearly nine weeks. Of course, this is assuming you attracted the right person with the relevant subset of skills to execute your marketing vision.
A full-service marketing agency already has available specialists eager to get started on a project. Your Account Executive should be able to translate your big-picture vision to actionable tasks and recommend the right people for the job.
EBQ Tip: The majority of our clients work in a hybrid marketing team — meaning our EBQ team works directly with our clients’ internal marketing teams to drive success.
For example, Leadership Louisville Center partnered with our marketing team to bolster their continual marketing campaigns. They leveraged our ability to deploy more email messaging and Google Ads, as their internal team focused on upskilling on Salesforce.
“We had some knowledge gaps, and we also had some turnover within our internal marketing team. So, we entrusted EBQ with our marketing needs.” – Holly Prather, Chief Operations Officer at Leadership Louisville Center
How Outsourcing Your Marketing Helps You Grow
Outsourcing your marketing is an effective way to minimize hiring costs while maximizing results. By partnering with a marketing agency, you will benefit from:
- Leveraging the agency’s expertise
- Reducing onboarding costs
- Deploying campaigns faster
- Scaling your marketing efforts effectively
If you are looking to accelerate your marketing goals, find out how our B2B Marketing Agency can help you grow your revenue cycle. Whether you need strategic guidance, executional support, or a full-service marketing partner, we tailor our solutions to your goals so you can focus on what you do best.
About the Author:
Stuart is one of EBQ’s Revenue Consultants with over 20 years of experience in Sales. His tenure as the VP of Sales sharpened his expertise in translating business visions into lead-generation tactics.
