The question behind the question
Owners rarely wake up wanting to hire a marketing agency. What they want is for a nagging list to go away. The website is old. The social account is quiet. A competitor seems to be everywhere. A friend says they should be doing video.
So they ask who can fix their marketing. A more useful question comes first: why has it not been done already?
There are only a few honest answers.
- Nobody in the firm knows how.
- Somebody knows how and has no time.
- There is time and skill, but no decision about what the firm wants to say.
- It was done once, by an outsider, and it stopped when they left.
Each answer points to a different kind of help. Most disappointment with marketing spending comes from buying the answer to a problem the firm did not have.
The four choices
A marketing agency
An agency is a team of specialists who sell a service: advertising, search, web design, public relations, social media or a bundle of them. A good agency brings depth. It has people who do one thing all day and tools a small firm would never buy for itself.
Agencies work best when the task is clear and large enough to justify the team. You have a product to advertise and a budget for it. You need a new website built properly. You are running a launch with a fixed date and many moving parts.
They work less well when what you need is somebody close to the business. An agency account manager has many clients. They know what you told them in the briefing. They do not know that you finished your best project last week unless you remember to say so, and remembering was the thing you had no time for.
A freelancer
A freelancer is one skilled person: a writer, a designer, a social media manager, a publicist. The cost is lower, the relationship is direct and the work is often excellent.
The limit is range and management. A freelance writer will not fix your listings or chase your web developer. If you hire three freelancers, you have become the manager of three people. For an owner who was short of time to begin with, that can make things worse.
Freelancers are a strong choice when you know exactly what you need, you can brief it clearly and you or someone on your staff has time to direct the work.
An in-house hire
An employee is in the building, hears what is going on and belongs to you. For a firm with enough steady marketing work to fill a week, every week, this is usually the best long-term answer.
Most small firms are not there yet. The work that needs doing calls for several skills, each for a few hours. One junior employee cannot be a strategist, writer, designer, publicist and analyst at once, and a senior one costs more than the firm can carry. There is also the question of who manages and develops that person. In a firm where the owner is already stretched, a lone marketer often drifts.
An outsourced business manager
A business manager from outside takes ongoing responsibility for the tasks around your core work, and treats marketing, PR and social media as part of that. They work to a written list in a weekly rhythm, as a member of your team. We describe the role fully in another article.
The strength is closeness and continuity. The same person who knows what the firm did this month writes about it, schedules it and follows up. Marketing stops depending on the owner’s memory.
The limit is depth at scale. A business manager is a generalist with good judgment. If you need a national advertising campaign or a complex piece of software, they should help you hire the specialist and then manage that relationship for you.
A side-by-side view
Here is the same comparison in short form.
Knows your business week to week. In-house hire: yes. Business manager: yes. Freelancer: only what you brief. Agency: only what you brief.
Depth in one specialty. Agency: strongest. Freelancer: strong in their field. Business manager: sound, not specialist. In-house hire: depends on the person.
Needs managing by you. Freelancer: yes. In-house hire: yes. Agency: somewhat. Business manager: least, since managing is the job.
Covers tasks outside marketing. Business manager: yes. In-house hire: sometimes. Agency and freelancer: no.
Keeps going when the project ends. In-house hire and business manager: yes. Agency: while the retainer runs. Freelancer: when rebooked.
Makes sense for a short, large push. Agency: yes. The others: less so.
Three situations, three answers
Three typical situations show how this plays out.
A studio of four has finished a run of strong projects. None is on the website. The principal knows what she wants to say and has no hours to say it. This firm does not need an agency’s strategy. It needs someone to gather the material, write it up, get it approved and publish it, month after month. That is a business manager’s work.
A retailer is launching an online store with two hundred products and wants paid advertising from day one. The task is specialized, measurable and large. This is an agency’s work. A business manager could help choose the agency and keep the relationship on track, and should not pretend to replace it.
A practice with a capable office manager wants a monthly newsletter. The office manager has time on Fridays and knows the clients. This firm should hire a freelance writer for a few hours a month and let the office manager direct them. Anything more would be paying for management it already has.
Most disappointment with marketing spending comes from buying the answer to a problem the firm did not have.
Why the business side and the marketing side keep colliding
There is a reason we work the way we do. Marketing in small firms tends to fail for reasons that have little to do with marketing.
A campaign brings in enquiries, and nobody follows them up for a week. A beautiful new website launches, and a year later the hours on it are wrong. A publicist lands an interview, and the owner is too busy to prepare. A social media schedule is agreed, and the photographs never arrive because nobody was asked to take them.
In each case the marketing was sound. The business around it was not ready to receive it. This is why we do not separate the two. Follow-up, approvals, vendor coordination and the calendar are what make marketing pay, and they are management tasks.
It also runs the other way. A firm that cannot say in plain words who it serves will struggle with more than its website. Pricing, hiring and focus all wobble for the same reason. Working out what to say about the firm tends to sort out a good deal else.
How to choose
Go back to the first question. Why has the marketing not been done?
- We do not know how, and the task is big and specific. Look at agencies. Ask to meet the people who will do the work, and ask what they need from you each week.
- We know what we need and can direct it. Hire a freelancer. Write a clear brief and name one person on your side to manage them.
- We have steady work to fill a full week, every week. Hire in-house, and decide who will manage and develop that person before you advertise the role.
- We know roughly what to do and it never gets done, along with a dozen other things. That is the case for an outsourced business manager.
Whichever you choose, insist on three things. A written list of what you will receive. Ownership of your accounts, content and contact list from the first day. And no promises about rankings, coverage or client numbers, because nobody controls those.
If it is us
We are a business management firm, so we are the fourth choice on this page. If the last description fit, a conversation costs nothing and we will tell you if we think one of the other three would serve you better. Our 90-Day Plan is a fixed fee for a defined list of work, which makes it a low-risk way to find out.