This is probably a question every entrepreneur has faced. You have your own business, you want to grow it, but you do not have enough “hands,” knowledge or time to keep track of every process. After all, everything depends on you: logistics, advertising, hiring, legal problems, financial matters. Sooner or later you reach the point where you realize you need to scale and get more clients, and you are ready for it. You start looking into the subject, go to Google and begin searching for information. After just a few hours of browsing, you learn that online advertising is a very broad concept that splits into many separate areas. There is SEO, pay-per-click advertising, YouTube, social media, email marketing, chatbots and a lot of new words: cross-channel analytics, retargeting, remarketing, sales funnels and much more.
After a quick look at the subject, you conclude that you do not have time for it and need to hand it over to specialists. You go back to Google, type in “online advertising services,” and the search engine dumps thousands of websites on you. They all have different prices; some promise results, while others say that those who promise results are just making empty promises and that it is impossible. After a few more hours, you realize that there are two main groups of contractors: freelancers and advertising agencies.
Who should you work with?
This is a hard question, especially when you do not know what you want yourself. “I want to promote my business” is a very vague idea, and the lack of a clear brief is another problem for many new entrepreneurs. After all, if there is no clear brief, the result, as the saying goes, is anyone’s guess.
The first thing you might point to is probably price: an agency will always cost more, for obvious reasons (staff, brand, office and so on). A freelancer is a specialist sitting somewhere in an apartment who needs only a laptop and an internet connection to work. Now let us look at the details.
A freelancer is usually a jack-of-all-trades: they will promote your website, set up targeted ads, give you all kinds of recommendations and even build you a website.
An agency does all the same things, but for a lot more money. “Why pay more?” you may ask.
Marketing is a very changeable field: algorithm updates come out almost every day, services get new features and functionality, and the official blogs of social networks and search engines publish new changes to advertising tools every week. These constant changes have to be taken into account as work on your ad campaigns continues. A person who does everything physically cannot keep up with every area, and knowing is only half the job. Testing, implementing and evaluating is another matter. Meanwhile, such a specialist may have only 3–4 projects in total, and in one specific area at that, for example, only social media. So their competitiveness on the market as a “combat-ready” unit is questionable. To drive a tank, you need a loader, a driver, a gunner and, of course, a commander. You have to agree, it is hard to imagine a crew where one person does all of this while still posing a threat to the enemy and carrying out the mission.
In this respect, an agency clearly wins, and that is exactly why larger companies turn to agencies: from their own business experience they understand that a successful project needs specialists in specific fields. A copywriter writes quality text, a marketer sets up advertising, an SEO specialist promotes the website, a programmer writes code for new website functionality and a designer draws the graphic elements. In this case, the crew commander is the project manager, who serves as the link between the client’s requests and the agency’s work on tasks.
I hope I have made my point. But let us raise the stakes and imagine that you hired several freelancers, each of whom knows a specific niche.
First, the price will most likely already be close to that of an agency. But that is not the point. Say one of the contractors did not suit you and you replaced them. Then the question is: does the person who came in their place already have some kind of “road map” of all the stages you have gone through? How can you be sure that they will not take the same roundabout route and start testing and implementing tools that clearly do not work? The new freelancer does not know which audiences were already tested, what works worse and what works better, which means they will make the same mistakes.
Next. How much time will it take to onboard a new freelancer? You need to bring them up to speed and introduce them to the rest of the team. What if this person gets sick? Who will take over part of their work? Or they may simply leave the project (as often happens with freelancers). If you are a larger company, you will have to sign a new contract and a nondisclosure agreement, draw up strategy plans again, adjust them with each new specialist, bring them up to speed and so on. All of this takes time, and time … is money, your money at that.
When you work with an agency, such inconsistencies are kept to a minimum: situations where everyone points fingers at each other and blames others for the lack of results are common in projects where several people from different corners of the world work together. The lack of a united front and coordinated actions leads to chaos, and chaos, again, means lost time …
In an agency, the history of all work is most likely kept in a single document. For example, at our company each project is a group of tasks in a CRM system that stores the entire history of work on that project: reports, banner source files, specialist recommendations, test results, conclusions and other information. When we make decisions, we build on previous experience, and these decisions are made by specialists in the specific field, which of course has a positive effect on the overall progress of the project.
I will not write a conclusion; draw it yourself. Thank you for reading our blog.